The Old Believers
When reading ‘Red Snow, Gold Clouds‘ thriller, you will find that some characters seek refuge in places full of hidden mysteries and ancient traditions. One of the most important being a lost temple of Old Believers—a religious sect who, despite the odds, still live in places that are completely isolated from any external contact or technological innovation. There are some families who never heard about the war except for a few distant explosions and sporadic aircraft flights.
This is the case of Agafia Lykova, an Old Believer who survived isolation for more than 70 years after her father took her, along with her mother and siblings, to the cold Siberian Taiga fleeing from war and persecution. After her mother starved to death to feed the family and after her brothers and father were killed by viruses that an unexpected scouting party brought, Agafia was completely alone. And she survived. The tools she had and the strong work habits she learned from her father were enough to feed herself along with the company of just a few pets. Besides that: she had her faith.
So who are the Old Believers? Their history dates back to the mid-seventeenth century. In the year 1666, the Moscow Patriarch Nikon introduced a series of reforms to the dogma of the Orthodox Church in order to reduce the differences with the Greek tradition, seeking to unify faith with the old times. We now know that Nikon’s ideas were not that correct and actually contrary to what he wanted because it increased the differences and created new gaps within his own people. Old Believers are those who kept the original faith from before the reforms took place.
The differences between one tradition and the other would seem trivial today, but for people like Agafia, they mean everything. Using two fingers instead of three for the sign of the cross, or seven proshpora instead of five for the liturgy, constitute the essence of one ritual or another and in everyday religious details make a difference. God’s help is achieved with honesty and integrity. The Old Believers had been persecuted and killed for centuries for not adhering to official dogma and for not having the power to do something about it.
If you want to learn more about the Old Believers, you can visit these sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
http://library.uoregon.edu/ec/oldbelievers/index.html
You can also watch this great documentary about Agafia:
The Treasure Train
The missing gold is a permanent mystery. That is what it has been during the last century, ever since its disappearance in August 1919. It could be in a monastery, hidden in caves, buried in a forest on the outskirts of a town, in the cellars of a bank or buried in containers in the bottom of a lake. Or all at once. In the fictional reconstruction of Red Snow, Gold Clouds, Marianna Baker explores the diverse theories on the gold`s fate. It should be noted that one of the antagonistic characters in the story, Zharkov, works for the Bank of Kazan, in which part of the official story occurs. Though also, the protagonist`s grandmother sought refuge with the gold in an Old Believer monestary in the Taiga, Siberia. And Zharkov`s wife died in Lake Baikal. Which clue will lead us to the gold?
After the Admiral Kolchak was commissioned by the White Army to hide the gold, he engaged the services of the Czechoslovak Legion to help him in this mission. The particular objective of the legion was to protect the Trans Siberian Train from possible Bolshevik attacks on its journey between Kazan and Irkutsk. However, the Legionnaires` lack of interest of in a foreign war led to an attempt to get some of the treasure for themselves. Thus, in one of the stops at the Kutin station, the Czechs signed an agreement with the Bolshevik army to deliver Kolchak in exchange for a share of the gold (representing in fact, more than half), resulting in his execution.
Plus, on a previous stop in Omsk, one of the wagons had already been robbed by unknown hands, who broke the seals of the train, emptied the containers and killed some of the officers. Through the discovery of an unsent telegram, it was learned that Lenin gave the order to stop the Czech’s treachery and keep all the gold inside the Russian borders. In the end, the Czechs got away with it, returning to Czechoslovakia where they founded a nationally recognized bank. There are numerous records of these dark deals and their results, which still have impact today. But with time, there have been other findings that suggest the treasure has multiple destinations.
For example, a number of medals belonging to the KGB were found in a private building in the city of Tyumen, with irrefutable records that they belong to the treasure. In addition, they have found the remains of tools connected to the train and its protectors in both caves and under Siberian monasteries. And in 2009 a large batch of containers and train parts were found at the bottom of Lake Baikal. Clearly, the gold found its way into many hands leaving a large collection of treasue maps to be discovered.
The elaboration of this post was based on the following documentary: