A True Survival Story: “Taking Their Possessions and Some Seeds, They Had Retreated Ever Deeper Into the Forest”

When Josef Stalin instituted a campaign of purging dissidents in the 1930′s, some 17 million people were left dead or missing by the time it was all said and done.

Had you been targeted for extermination during this Great Purge, your chances of survival very rapidly approached zero.

Most became victims when their government classified them as enemies of the state.

Some, however, and against all odds, found a way to survive.

This forest [Russian Taiga] is the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia’s arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.

Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors’ downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down.

But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitation—a garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time. Read more....