this is daily survival..many things to see...
Winter Life in Russian North. Usual life of Village family in North of Russia
- Thread starter elkhound
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Looks like the Appalachia mountains to me, right down to the three generation old equipment.
In my opinion, that is what "SERIOUS" preppers should strive towards creating. Isolated, self-sufficient "VERY SMALL" communities.
This would be fairly easy in coastal areas with abundant fishing resources.
This would be fairly easy in coastal areas with abundant fishing resources.
Lewis and Clark almost starved to death during the winter on the Oregon coast.
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I like the way he "sledded" his wood, seems like the boys had fun with that. I use a wagon, but do the same sort of thing every day. Ha. Can't imagine that much snow, though.
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That video is from a community in the NW of Russia. I haven't been there but I have spent several months of the last decade in communities further North in the East of Russia (Magadan Oblast). Those places make the people in the video look affluent.
In just about every scene in the video, there is both hardware and consumables that come from at least a thousand miles away. Those places are quite far from independent and/or self sufficient. It could be argued they are among the least self sufficient places on Earth.
The NE coast gets frozen every winter and the coast landform is very rugged (ie rocky cliffs mostly) - it is hard to land boats even when the water is not frozen. The town of Magadan is located where it is because it has a natural harbor - which is rare along that coastline. Most of the fishing boats operating in that region land at Magadan.
When they first started building gulags North of there (in the 1920s), about the only resource was timber - so the gulags were built by the prisoners from local lumber and then became factories for cheap furniture.
They would send a column of prisoners and a few guards out to build a new camp in spring. The prisoners were usually starving - so the road they sent them North on is called the "Road of the Bones" because of all the skeletal remains not far off the highway (for hundreds of miles). Later during the construction of the highway into something suitable for trucks an additional 250,000-1,000,000 prisoners died building it - and their bodies were reportedly interred into the foundations of the road.
A few hundred miles North of Magadan town - where the gulags were built - on at least one occasion, they sent out a column of prisoners too late in summer, and they failed to get their camp built in time for the cold - and they all died - the prisoners - the guards - everyone - not a single survivor. They found them all frozen (but starting to thaw out and being eaten by bears and wolves) among half finished buildings the next spring.
People there joke about the summer lasting a week.
It is very cold - much colder than in the video. If you are not wearing much thicker boots and clothes than in the video - you die. Minus 40 is a common winter daytime temp and overnight it usually gets down to -65 to -70
It is rare to see people smile in places like that. The place and the people are mostly pretty grim.
I was using fishing (commercial fishing) as an example of a marketable product on a village basis for trade. In Alaska we have wealthy fishing villages, where there is no sales or real estate tax.
In this video we meet Ivan, Nadezhda and their family of seven daughters. How do they spend their day and survive in the coldest city in the world? Nadezhda makes reindeer boots, which are some of the warmest boots in the world. We explore preparing ice, how they do heating, how much it costs, and also playing outside with their dog. The girls also visit their grandma to help her chop wood and put on the fire. The family also prepares a lovely local meal with fish, and local delicacies (my favourite). You might think that that it is very cold in Yakutia, but I'm happy to share with you the warmth of the family life of our culture.
