Now I Know More by Dan Lewis Page B

geologists’ discovery rather unexpected. While flying above the taiga, they saw, below them, a house.
    An inhabited house.
    During the reign of Peter the Great, a group of fundamentalist members of the Russian Orthodox Church known as Old Believers were oppressed by the tsarist government. Many fled eastward to the edges of Siberia, hoping that isolation would buy them a respite from persecution. For two centuries, this worked well, but when the Bolsheviks took power, the few remaining Old Believers scattered, many going to Bolivia.
    However, one family pressed further into Siberia. They were the people discovered by the helicopter pilot scanning the landscape below. Living in a ramshackle, hand-built wooden house was a family of five—a father and four children—and they had been there a long, long time. In 1936, Karp Lykov, his wife, Akulina, and their two children, Savin and Natalia, fled after Karp’s brother was killed by Communists. They began a new life for themselves in the middle of nowhere. Akulina gave birth to two more children, son Dmitri and daughter Agafia, in the 1940s (yes, while alone in the taiga).
    The family survived on a diet mostly consisting of pine nuts, wild berries, and some rye and potatoes harvested from what they brought with them, but those were meager even during good times. In the 1950s and into the early 1960s, weather and wildlife seemed to conspire against the Lykovs, and they endured a famine. Akulina died from starvation in 1961. Incredibly, all four children were literate and relatively knowledgeable about the outside world. They even knew how to write; as Smithsonian magazine reported, their mother taught them the skill “using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink.”
    The Lykovs lasted four decades in the wilderness before encountering another human being. While most of the world was struggling with war in Europe, the Lykovs were entirely unaware of the deaths of millions of their countrymen and others. They knew nothing of the Cold War, the Space Race, or of the other scientific, cultural, or political changes throughout the Soviet Union. Karp did, however, show a surprisingly strong appreciation for how technology had advanced. He noticed in the heavens something he attributed to people sending star-like fires into space. What he actually saw were satellites moving across the evening sky.
    After being discovered by the geologists in 1978, the Lykovs decided to accept some assistance from the outside world but otherwise chose to remain in their log cabin more than 100 miles away from another human home. In 1981, three of the children—Dmitri, Savin, and Natalia—died from unrelated causes, leaving Karp and his daughter Agafila. Karp passed in 1988, then in his late eighties. Agafila, as of 2013, lives alone, still at the only home she’s ever known.
    BONUS FACT
    Peter the Great really hated beards, seeing them as a throwback to Russia’s antiquated history. His solution: a beard tax. Pay it, and you got to keep your beard; otherwise, you had to shave. To help enforce the tax, bearded men (who paid up) were issued a coin as a receipt, which unshaven men had to produce to avoid further fines and harassments. But the tax was short-lived—it proved unpopular and resulted in riots as many refused to either pay or shave.

THE HOLLOW NICKEL
THE SPY WHO CAUGHT HIMSELF
    In May 1957, a Finnish man named Reino Häyhänen walked into the United States embassy in Paris. He was there to surrender himself and, ultimately, request amnesty. He was on his way to Moscow but did not want to go there. He claimed he was a Soviet spy and that he was being recalled to the Soviet Union—but he wanted to go back to America, where he had worked as a KGB agent for the previous five years. After U.S. authorities spent a few days checking into his story, he was sent back to the United States. On May 10, 1957, he arrived in New York