Cryptids — Russia
Cryptids — Russia. 9 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
The Kyshtym dwarf, Alyoshenka
In May 1996 Tamara Prosvirina, a resident of the village of Kaolinovy near Kyshtym in the Urals, brought home a creature about twenty-five centimetres long with an elongated skull and large eyes. She called it Alyoshenka, fed it, and told neighbours a son had come to live with her. She was taken to a psychiatric hospital; the body was filmed and photographed in the meantime, and that autumn it vanished without trace. What makes the case unusual is the sheer volume of material: video, photographs, dozens of interviews. Later genetic work points to human remains — most likely a premature infant with severe developmental defects.
The Chuchunya of Verkhoyansk
In the coldest inhabited place on earth, the Yakuts and Evens tell of the chuchunya — a tall man in skins who lives alone, steals reindeer and runs off at improbable speed. In the 1920s enough reports accumulated that the Academy of Sciences sent an expedition under Pyotr Dravert. Ethnographers suggest the figure stands on something real: outcasts and the remnants of vanished clans who took to living away from people.
The Azass Cave and the Kuzbass Yeti
Azasskaya Cave is a karst cavern formation located at the headwaters of the Azas stream within Shorsky National Park in the Tashtagolsky District of Kemerovo Oblast (Mountain Shoria), southern Siberia. Featuring an impressive arched entryway grotto measuring up to 12 meters in height and a freezing subterranean stream flowing from its mouth, the site gained international renown in the late 2000s as the alleged primary lair of a surviving relict hominid population: the "Kuzbass Yeti."
The Almasty of Kabardino-Balkaria
The Caucasus is the heartland of the Almasty, the Caucasian wild man: a creature some two metres tall covered in reddish hair which, by the accounts of mountain villagers, comes down to the sheepfolds and takes livestock. In the 1960s Professor Boris Porshnev collected testimony here for the Academy of Sciences and examined the case of Zana, a woman who lived in an Abkhaz village in the nineteenth century and whom locals held to be a captured Almasty. Her descendants were traced into the twentieth century; genetic analysis in 2015 found ordinary African ancestry.
Lake Khaiyr
A lake at the mouth of the Yana, famous since 1964, when a biological station worker, Nikolai Gladkikh, reported a creature on the shore with a small head on a long neck, black skin and a ridge along its back, eating grass. Komsomolskaya Pravda printed it and expeditions followed. The station's director later admitted the story had been invented. The retraction travelled far less well than the report, and Khaiyr is still listed among lake monsters.
Lake Brosno and Its Dragon
Lake Brosno in the Tver Region is one of the deepest freshwater lakes in Central Russia, widely dubbed the "Russian Loch Ness." Surrounded by dense Valdai taiga and reaching depths of over 40 meters, the lake is famous for the cryptozoological legend of the "Brosno Dragon"—a mysterious giant aquatic beast said to dwell in its subterranean karst caverns.
Lake Seydozero and the Kuiva
A sacred Sámi lake in the Lovozero massif, on whose sheer cliff a dark human figure nearly seventy metres tall stands out — the Kuiva. The Sámi took it for the shadow of a giant killed for attacking their land, and avoided fishing within sight of the rock. Geologists speak of lichen staining and wet stone in the fissures. Barchenko's expedition came here in 1922 looking for traces of Hyperborea and, by rumour, found something; the material was classified and the man himself shot in 1938.
Mount Pidan
A mountain in Primorye carrying what is probably the most durable legend of the Russian Far East — the flying man, a winged figure hikers describe on the boulder fields near the summit. The account was first recorded in the 1930s. The mountain is known for more than that: the stone runs on its slopes look in places like masonry, and some local historians insist they are the remains of a Jurchen fortress.
Lake Labynkyr and Its Devil
A lake in the Oymyakon district of Yakutia, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth. The local Even people have spoken of a devil since the nineteenth century: a dark creature with an enormous mouth that drags off reindeer and dogs. The lake behaves oddly in winter, keeping open water at fifty below. Sonar expeditions have recorded large objects near the bottom, and none has brought anything up.