This story starts with a helicopter.

It's hovering over a remote area of the Siberian Taiga near the border with Mongolia.

The year is 1978.

So the helicopter is loaded with geologists. During this period in the Soviet Union, there were a lot of geologists

exploring various parts of Siberia, looking for diamonds, gold, and other treasures, which were

needed for industrial reasons.

This is a really, really remote area, like an area where, you know, it's hard to even get there except by boat or helicopter.

And they were above some steep hills and forested canyons.

They're not expecting to see any sign of human settlement at all,

but to their great surprise, as they were sort of hovering,

looking for a landing site, they saw a house.

And they couldn't see any people,

but it was clear from the way the garden looked that someone was taking care of it.

It wasn't an abandoned settlement. This was not necessarily good news. Coming across another human being out here

could be even more dangerous than coming across a wild animal. This was a period when the

gulag system was winding down, and you never really knew who you were going to run into.

They had a mass amnesty in the 1950s.

They gave amnesty only to the criminals, not to the political prisoners.

And so there was a period when the taiga was populated in large part by criminals who were trying to kind of make

it back from the Gulag. And not everyone in the Gulag was imprisoned there unjustly, right? Some

people were actual murderers. So the geologists took every precaution.

They set up their camp around 10 miles away from where they had spotted the settlement,

...