Forty Years in the Wilderness
02/07/2013
Here's a strange, amazing, and sad story of a Russian Old Believer family who fled from the Communists into not just any old wilderness but Siberia. And survived. Read about it at the Smithsonian's web site. I don't have a post category into which this fits very well. You can read about the Old Believers here.
Pretty amazing.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 02/08/2013 at 08:02 AM
Jackie Kennedy, in her role as an editor in the last years of her life, acquired the book, Lost in the Taiga, written by the Russian journalist quoted extensively in this article.
Posted by: Marianne | 02/08/2013 at 12:46 PM
Wow, that's a strange juxtaposition.
Posted by: Mac | 02/08/2013 at 12:55 PM
I read the book when it came out in the 1990s, and also about how she came upon it -- but I can't now remember any details of that. Maybe the writer had been holding onto it for years and it was the end of the Soviet Union that made the publication possible.
Posted by: Marianne | 02/08/2013 at 01:26 PM
Yes, the fact that people preferred a high possibility of freezing to death to life under the Soviets was sort of hard to work into their propaganda.
Posted by: Mac | 02/08/2013 at 04:34 PM
It kind of makes you wonder about how much we think we need.
And then, it really made me think about how hard it would be to cook without metal. It's not something I ever thought about before.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 02/08/2013 at 08:26 PM
It made me very grateful for civilisation.
Posted by: Louise | 02/08/2013 at 11:09 PM
Me, too. And likewise about metal. And salt--no salt for 40 years. It didn't make me think so much of "how much we think we need," in the sense of what we could do without, but "how much we actually do need," like salt and metal and cloth, that really require a division of labor, and therefore a society of some sort, to supply.
Posted by: Mac | 02/09/2013 at 12:22 AM
It didn't make me think so much of "how much we think we need," in the sense of what we could do without, but "how much we actually do need," like salt and metal and cloth, that really require a division of labor, and therefore a society of some sort, to supply.
Yes, I was overwhelmed by how "self-sufficient" we really can't be.
I'm in absolute wonderment that they didn't freeze to death. And that they didn't all starve to death.
Posted by: Louise | 02/09/2013 at 01:37 AM
The part about the salt is really interesting to me because you would think that after all that time, he wouldn't want it anymore, and yet he still craves it. Once I gave up salt for Lent. I thought that after a few weeks, I would quit wanting it and that I probably would just not ever use salt again. It just didn't happen. I don't think I enjoyed a meal the whole Lent and on Easter I greeted the saltshaker like a lost friend.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 02/09/2013 at 10:44 AM
That doesn't surprise me in the least.
I think it said that for a while salt was the only thing the family would accept from the outsiders who had discovered them. Seems like the 40 years only made the old man's craving worse. What's the deal? Why is this so important to us? Surely it's some chemical need.
We buy some of our food from a local community-supported-agriculture outfit, and one of the things they supply is bread. A couple of weeks ago they accidentally (well, I assume) left the salt out of a batch of bread. It hardly tasted like bread at all.
Posted by: Mac | 02/09/2013 at 01:48 PM