In 1936 Karp Lykov fled with his wife and two children into the wilderness to escape the Communists. As is recounted in this news paper article about his only surviving daughter….

Her father had taken the decision to flee civilization in 1936 after a communist patrol arrived on the fields where he was working and shot dead his brother. Gathering a few meager possessions and some seeds, he took his wife, Akulina, their nine-year-old son, Savin, and two-year-old daughter Natalia, and headed off into the forest.

They had no firearms, no salt and did not know how to make bread.

Mr. Lykov was not prepared to live in the wilderness. As a poor deeply religious Old Believer Russian peasant he had more of the necessary skills than your average American. Even still, he was not ready for the challenge he took on regardless of whether you judge him by the standards of his time or the standards of a modern day “survivalist.” And yet, he and his wife managed to have two more children and he lived for more than forty years out in wilderness. At his death in 1988 he was well beyond the average life span for a Russian male (he died at around 86 years old of age if the dates in his Wikipedia article are correct).

All this did not come without cost. He lost his wife to starvation in the 1960s. All his children except one would die at a younger age then he did. It could be questioned whether he really gained anything by fleeing to the wilderness. But if you judge him purely by the metric of survival; he did pretty well for not being prepared and trying to live in one of the harshest climates in the world. And he lived free to practice his religion as he saw fit all the while that the communists ruled his land.

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