In my opinion this is a story about how a manic delusion led a family into decades of isolation and deprivation. Sad.
How true that is.
A manic delusion called 'Communism' caused the death by shooting of Lykov's brother. He and his family escaped into the Siberian wilderness to avoid becoming some more of Stalin's statistics in the Great Terror.
I would have used the words 'evil' and 'tyrannical', but yes; Communism is also sad in its grinding destruction of human lives.
yeah sure they guy was “delusional..” Try rereading the story. The guy saw his brother shot by the Communists for simply being a believer in God. Communism has killed more innocent people than all other ideologies combined who refused to comply with Communist tyranny.
Nice try at taking a shot at religion, but those who have actually studied history know full well their fears were very real. It’s more tragic that people had to resort to such measures because their government refused to treat them as human beings.
The soviet purges touched every family in the USSR. Many families ceased to exist, shot by the authorities, many others died in the cold snows of Siberia cutting and hauling logs to build their camps as they were simply dropped off in the middle of the Taiga in high winter with little in the way of tools or food.
The latest number of the people who were killed by Communism (from Chinese studies oddly enough, very recently)is 147,000,000 souls and most of them were Russian. Socialism is the worst scourge to ever be visited upon humanity.
This is what a real state-sponsored SHTF scenario looks like.
I am struck by the father’s inability to make a bow and arrow or a spear. In our information laden society nearly everyone has a pretty good idea how to begin to build weapons and trial and error would eventually lead you to success.
Put your sons and grandsons in the Boy Scouts. Many of the the techniques needed to survive a SHTF are taught in that organization.
Read Solzhinitson’s books on the purges. It was hell on earth.
You may call it extreme but they survived. How many others didn't? Such was the Red Terror.