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.
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