In 1978, a family of Russian ‘Old Believers’ living in a supposedly uninhabited part of the Siberian taiga were discovered by a team of geologists. They had fled Stalinist persecution, and for half a century had lived in isolation in a ‘low, soot-blackened log kennel’ with a floor made of potato peelings and crushed nutshells, one tiny window, a fire, a single rushlight, and one item of furniture — an axe-hewn table.
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'The Making of Home' is available from the Spectator Bookshop, £18 Tel: 08430 600033 & 'Common people' is available from the Spectator Bookshop, £16.50 Tel: 08430 600033. Charlotte Moore is the author of Hancox: A House and a Family.
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