He tried to get away from it all — and it nearly killed him.

A Brooklyn man hoping to recreate an idyllic childhood on his grandparents’ farm ended up getting lost in an Alaskan nightmare when his busted satellite phone left him completely cut off from the outside world.

After nine years in New York City, St. John’s University grad Vladimir Yakushin, 32, decided to take his life “in a different direction.”

“I just woke up one day and decided to change it,” the Russian immigrant told The Post. “I was looking for a place with millions of acres of free space . . . just solitude and peaceful and beautiful and fresh food.”

He set his sights on The Last Frontier.

“Alaska came up, I started researching. I figured out this was pretty much the only place in the United States that you can be as free as you want to be.”

It was no fly-by-night venture for Yakushin, who came from St. Petersburg about 12 years ago and later became a US citizen.

He spent 18 months buying supplies and educating himself, boning up on survival strategies and watching videos from other people who had moved to Alaska. Yakushin also researched what he would need in an emergency, buying a chain saw and a rifle to survive in the bear- and moose-filled woods.

He plunked down $10,000 at a government auction for a 5-acre plot in Chleca Lakes, a tiny spot about 400 miles north of Anchorage that is accessible only by float plane. The land was originally put up for auction in a sale open only to Alaskan residents, but no one bought it.

Yakushin found the listing — which had nothing but a few pictures and a short blurb describing the land as “remote” with heavy trees but no organized community nearby — on a second online sale open to everyone.

He called the people who would be his closest neighbors, in Lake Minchumina, a town of just 13 people about 30 miles to the northeast.

“I was thinking, this is my closest civilization, it would be nice if I could establish contact,” said Yakushin, who rang up the postmaster. “They were very nice and helpful . . . so I was feeling more motivated.”

Before he took the plunge, Yakushin shelled out another $10,000 for supplies and travel arrangements, including a $500 satellite phone with a more than $100 monthly service charge from a company called Globalstar.

“I know the satellite phone is built for places like this,” he said. “I did my research on the companies. The one I chose sounded pretty good. I checked the reviews, contacted the salesperson. He told me, ‘This is great. This is what we’re here for. We’ve got you covered.’ ”

In June 2016, he flew from JFK Airport to Anchorage, then paid about $2,000 for a pilot to bring him to his new, solitary home.

The pilot, eager to make the return trip before an impending thunderstorm rolled in, stayed for just 20 minutes, long enough to help unload Yakushin’s supplies. The pair hung the aspiring Robinson Crusoe’s food up on a tree branch “so the bears would not smell it.”

Before the pilot left, Alaska’s newest would-be resident was able to check out a half-built cabin on a nearby plot that one of his new Lake Minchumina friends had given him permission to use.

But then Yakushin was all alone. And that’s when things went wrong.

The property was junky, a moss-filled wetland. Yakushin wouldn’t be able to build anything on it, let alone farm.

“Every step you take, you’re sinking,” he said.

Frustrated and alone in the woods, Yakushin knew he had to leave. So within an hour of landing at his new property, he fired up his GSP 1700 phone.

“It was like, ‘OK, what do I have to do next? Let me use my phone and call for the airplane to come back.’ Or I was thinking if the airplane will not come, maybe I will call to the village.”

But there was no signal.

He hopped in his 8-foot-long, 3-foot-wide inflatable rubber raft and paddled to the middle of the mile-wide lake — but still, no signal.

“I was relying on the phone,” he said.

Yakushin spent a night at his encampment, knowing he couldn’t paddle upriver or walk the impassable terrain to Lake Minchumina. In the morning, he decided to raft his way to a larger town, McGrath, population 346, which is 90 miles down river.

“Ninety miles is a long journey. Anything could happen to me,” he recalled.

Gathering what he could, he trekked through the spongy muck to the zigzagging northern fork of the Kuskokwim River, one of the biggest rivers in the United States. The walk alone took two days.

“I was panicking. My mom was all the time in my head. She knows I’m in the middle of the woods, and she needs to know how I’m doing, and I cannot contact her.”

Despite a soaking rain, he hopped into the water and began paddling.

At first, the current was calm and the river was small enough for Yakushin to spy the wildlife grazing in the nearby willows.

At one point, an aggressive mother moose “the size of a horse” charged into the water at him to protect her calf.

After that close call, the river widened, the current sped up, and Yakushin was forced to navigate his raft around fallen trees.

The Alaskan summer meant the sun never set, and when he camped overnight, the rain made starting a fire nearly impossible. Exhausted, Yakushin kept trying the satellite phone, even climbing a hill that had a peak above the tree line to get a better signal.

It didn’t work.

“I was angry that the phone was not working. I was just so frustrated, thinking, ‘I have to get out of here, I have to keep going, and the only way is this river.’ ”

Constant paddling led his hands to swell to twice their normal size, he said.

“My mom was in my head all the time,” he said.

A separate GPS unit he had purchased for the Alaskan adventure told him he had already traveled 30 miles. But it couldn’t tell him where he was.

“Me, the quietness and the birds, and that was it,” he recalled.

Suddenly, on the third day of paddling, a float plane appeared. Relief flooded through Yakushin.

“I started going crazy on this river,” he said, crying at the memory. “It just brings me back to tears, how . . . relieved I was and how happy I was that it’s hopefully going to come to an end.”

Furiously screaming and waving his yellow paddles, Yakushin watched as the pilot circled a few times — but was unable to land and left.

“I did not stop waving, to let him know I need help; I’m not just saying hello,” he said.

Convinced help was on the way, Yakushin paddled a few more hours until he found a clearing and could stop and rest.

Three to four hours later, “I heard another plane,” he said. “Lucky for me, I was at a spot where the river was wide enough and long enough so the guy could land.”

It was a state trooper sent to rescue him, after the pilot who spotted him alerted authorities.

“You’re the guy,” the officer told him.

Yakushin sobbed and pointed to his rifle and knife.

“There’s a rifle; please unload it. There’s a knife; please take it away,” he told the trooper. “Please take me away from this.”

Careful not to overload the trooper’s plane, Yakushin had to abandon his grandfather’s book bag and most of his other belongings.

Paddling to McGrath would have taken Yakushin another two weeks, the trooper told him on the 40-minute flight to town.

McGrath residents took care of the weary adventurer, gathering at the local bar to feed him and offer their phones so he could call his mother, who doesn’t speak English and didn’t know whom to call to bring attention to her son’s plight.

“I even had a beer,” Yakushin said.

“My mom, when I heard her voice, I said, ‘I’m here,’ she said, ‘Thank God you’re alive.’ ”

He quickly flew back to New York, where he was treated for a painful cyst in his rear from days of paddling, which made it tough to walk or sit.

He returned the land to the Alaskan government — which didn’t give him a refund.

“I just didn’t want to deal with it at all,” he said.

Looking back, Yakushin is angry.

“I was not stupid, like I’m sitting in Brooklyn on my couch watching TV and tomorrow I’m going there in my T-shirt and book bag,” he said.

“I put so much time and effort and research [in],” he said. “If the phone would work, we would not be having this conversation. I would be a happy guy living in Alaska.”

Instead, “I got so scared, I got so doomed over there, it pretty much broke my dream.”

He’s suing Globalstar in Manhattan Supreme Court for unspecified damages. The company didn’t return a request for comment.

Yakushin hopes others learn from his story.

“Think twice, do your research,” he said. “I spent a year, but it looks like it wasn’t enough.”