Modern-Day Hermits: Nikolai in Siberia
After spending 24 years in hiding — and losing a leg to gangrene — it turned out he’d been fleeing from a crime he never committed.
By Jessie Schiewe
“Modern-Day Hermits” is an ongoing series about the rare and fascinating people who’ve chosen solitude over everything else. Read more profiles here.
Survival in the Siberian taiga is no easy task.
A large swathe of coniferous forest, steep mountains, and white-water rivers, it’s one of the last — and greatest — untouched wildernesses on Earth. Extending beyond Russia and Siberia, the taiga spills into Mongolia and Kazakhstan, spanning about 5 million square miles in all. There, you’ll find extreme weather, harsh climates, copious predators, and, unsurprisingly, very few people.
In the Siberian taiga, snow lasts until May with average annual temperatures regularly dipping below freezing and permafrost covering the ground year round. It’s also brimming with animals: cute and cuddly ones (like weasels, sables, lynx, moose, and deer), but also a number of rip-your-throat-out, kill-you-for-dinner types (such as wolves, Asiatic black bears, East Siberian brown bears, and Siberian tigers).
It’s such a harsh and unforgiving environment that humans have even penned guides on how not to die there, if, for instance, your snowmobile runs out of gas or your path to safety gets covered by freshly fallen snow. Get lost in the Siberian taiga and it might take a month for rescuers to find you — that is, if you don’t perish of starvation or hypothermia, get eaten by a tiger, or commit suicide before you are saved.
Filled with plenty of threats and a whole lot of nothingness, the Siberian taiga is not a place most people would want to call home — which is precisely why Nikolai Gromov chose to live there.
For almost a quarter of a century, the solitary Russian eked out a humble and discreet existence in the Siberian wilderness. There, he lived as a modern-day hermit sans help, communication, or anything at all from the outside world. His desire to avoid human interaction was so extreme that it ultimately led him to lose his right leg, becoming an amputee. It’s also why he escaped to the wilderness in the first place.
Nikolai spent 24 isolated years living as a modern-day hermit in the taiga not necessarily because he wanted to, but because he thought his alternative was prison.
He was fleeing a crime he believed he committed in the mid-1990s: a double murder of his wife and 6-year-old daughter. And, after having already spent the entirety of the 1980s in prison, he decided he’d rather live in-hiding, as a recluse, then go back behind bars.
With deep-set, dark eyes and large, protruding ears, most of Nikolai’s life troubles have been on account of women.
Born in the late 1940s, he entered the workforce as a logger and later joined the Russian army for a brief stint. According to Newsweek, he married a woman named Lyubov Petrovna around the age of 23, with whom he fathered two children.
Sometime toward the end of the 1970s, he was sent to a Russian penal colony for unknown charges, where he fell in love with a fellow prisoner. In May of 1980, the lovers broke out of the colony, shacking up in an abandoned cabin they found roughly 25 miles away in the forest, the Russian news site, A1, reports. When the authorities tracked them down, Nikolai was sentenced to an additional 12 years in prison.
Upon his release in the early 1990s, the newly-freed man quickly found love again, this time with a woman living in Tayshet, a southern town that had been home to a number of Lenin and Stalin’s forced labor camps between the 1930s to 1950s.
They had a child — a baby girl named Elena — before Nikolai’s lover disappeared altogether, leaving him to care for the girl alone.
Deciding that the single-father life wasn’t for him, Nikolai returned to his first wife, Petrovna, begging her to take him and the child in. She did.
Life for the new family was relatively happy, until a few years in when Nikolai began drinking heavily. His drunken antics became aggressive and then turned violent, climaxing during one evening in 1995 when he physically attacked Petrovna and Elena, who was then only 6 years old.
He then left the house, ostensibly to buy more liquor. After sobering up, he returned but found the building empty. Neither his wife nor his daughter were anywhere to be found — which, for reasons unknown, led Nikolai to believe he had killed them both. (In actuality, they had gone to the hospital and then moved into a different home.)
Fearing he’d be locked up again, Nikolai fled into the taiga where he believed the police would never find him. He built a crude house of wood and procured his food through hunting and foraging tactics. For 24 years he lived there, braving the region’s treacherous climate and outsmarting its hungry beasts, until one day, in 2019, he injured his right leg.
Even though he was 72-years-old and not in peak health, Nikolai’s fear of being found out by the authorities trumped any concern he had for his wound. He decided to ignore it, hoping it would heal itself. But it did not.
His leg turned gangrenous; plagued with swelling, numbness, blistering, discoloration, and severe pain.
According to A1, when Nikolai eventually went to the hospital to seek help, it still wasn’t by choice. That summer, the Irkutsk region of Russia, where Nikolai had been hiding, was hit with record rains and two torrential floods that led to the evacuation of more than 42,000 people, including Nikolai.
At the hospital, he was told his leg could not be saved. It was amputated from the middle of his thigh down. Believing him to be homeless, the medical staff then contacted social services only to be informed of an outstanding warrant for his arrest over the assault of his wife and daughter in the 1990s.
It was exactly what Nikolai had feared would happen if he sought medical help, but it also came with a silver lining: the knowledge that he actually wasn’t a killer. His family had survived.
Now a grizzled, old man with a handicap that required him to walk with crutches, Nikolai found himself back within prison walls, but only for a short time. Once the authorities realized the statute of limitations for his crime had already passed, he was set free.
If Nikolai had wanted to apologize to Petrovna, the wife whom he had cheated on, abandoned, and later beat up, he never had the chance. She died earlier in 2019 in a bathtub accident.
But his daughter Elena was still alive. She was now around 30 years old, married, and living in Novokuznetsk — a city in south-western Siberia.
And, as Nikolai would soon found out, she still had major beef with him, too.
Upon learning of her father’s sudden reappearance, Elena was quick to tell news outlets that she wanted nothing to do with the man.
“I don’t want to see him,” she told A1. “Why would I need him? I haven’t heard a word from him all these years. I thought he wasn’t alive.”
But after repeated pestering from police, who wanted Elena’s help in identifying the Siberian hermit, she relented.
And so the estranged father and daughter met briefly in front of the police station, laying eyes on each other for the first time since 1995.
Even in handcuffs, and with only one leg, Elena recognized Nikolai and confirmed his identity to the police.
And Nikolai, in turn, seems to have remembered a bit of his old self, too. Before she left the station, he gave his daughter a final piece of advice — an apology even, some might say.
“He told me, ‘Do not hold evil thoughts about me,’ ” Elena said. “‘A father is a father, albeit a stupid one.’ ”
JESSIE SCHIEWE IS THE EDITOR OF OK WHATEVER. SHE BELIEVES IN MERMAIDS AND THRIFT SHOPS FOR EXERCISE.
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