Vasili Peskov

More than fifteen years after Soviet geologists found a family living on an extremely remote mountainside where their religious tradition led them, a journalist who became one of the family's trusted confidants puts their story into book form. The Lykov family had long been part of one side of a long-ago religious schism known as Old Believers. They were wary of the fast-modernizing world and enjoyed their rural community, but crackdowns on their lifestyles near the end of World War II led the family to flee into total isolation. This story picks up in 1978, when the family's 33 years without contact ended as the first people "from the world" visited, and how the family adapted to more frequent interactions throughout the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I found this to be an interesting take on building community. The youngest Lykov family member, born in the mountains and in her 30s before ever meeting another person outside her family, was expected to be suspicious of others and unable to adapt. But on the contrary, the author shows how she recognized the benefits of becoming integrated with society while choosing to continue living in the taiga. Her elderly father did the same, to a lesser extent, and acknowledged the serious consequences his family experienced by choosing total isolation for so many years. Also, the unselfish acts of hunters, geologists, doctors, helicopter pilots, and others that find their way into the extremely remote setting showed that people will frequently go out of their way to help others they don't know, even at risk to their own safety.

This is not an anthropology title, but I think the discipline could learn from the author's approach to getting to know and reporting on the Lykov family. They are centered as the topic but without fetishizing or exoticizing by the author.… (more)