Dead Mountain: The True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

by Eichar, Donnie

  When the buildings began to shift from grand neoclassical to boxy and austere, we were nearing Kuntsevich’s working-class neighborhood. Everything was orderly, though there were hints of neglect and flourishes of graffiti. Once we entered Kuntsevich’s complex, the smell of natural gas hit us like a wave. Intermittent fluorescents offered the only light, leaving slices of the hallway in shadow.

  The two-bedroom apartment Kuntsevich shared with his wife was cozy—the modest space of a couple making do—and they were generous to accommodate us during our stay. We put on rubber slippers at the door and, as the sun rose, Kuntsevich’s petite wife, Olga, set to work fixing an early breakfast. I watched her with an immediate fondness. Beneath her halo of dark hair, she had kind brown eyes and a sweet smile that reminded me of my late grandmother. The likeness made me feel close to this woman with whom I could barely communicate.

  Olga led us to the kitchen where, on a table the size of a car tire, she served us piles of dark meat and root vegetables. Afterward, our host walked us down the street to the Military History Museum, where we took a brief tour of emasculated tanks, cannons and other artillery. We then got in the car and drove to the Mikhaylovskoye Cemetery at the center of town, where all but one of the hikers were buried. Kuntsevich, Jason and I crunched through dead leaves and undergrowth to the edge of the yard where eight marble headstones sat in a row along the border fence. Artificial lilies had been placed at each grave some time ago, and were now half-buried in leaves or weeds. Except for the names and years of birth, the stones were identical, and they all bore the same end: 1959. The Krivonishchenko family had chosen to bury Georgy in a separate cemetery a few miles to the west, but Georgy was represented on a commemorative column nearby, on which nine black-and-white portraits had been preserved in marble. After a shared moment of silence, I took a few pictures and we made our way back over the neglected grounds to the car.

  By midmorning, we were back in the car driving hours outside of town to the dense forest abutting the Ural Mountains. At this point, Jason and I had been awake for more than thirty hours and we couldn’t figure out why, having just arrived in this country for the first time, Kuntsevich was taking us on what appeared to be an impromptu camping trip. Though we were on the verge of sleep-deprived delirium, Jason and I went along with the rest of the day’s activities. We cut wood with a crosscut saw I thought only lumberjacks used. Over a campfire, we cooked a small bony fish that Kuntsevich had brought, and drank a batch of spiked fruit juice. I wondered if we would be pitching a tent next, but as night fell, Kuntsevich drove us back to the city. Perhaps this spontaneous excursion had been a kind of Russian endurance test, and our host had been assessing our stamina as outdoorsmen, and possibly as friends.

  ON THE MORNING OF OUR SECOND DAY IN YEKATERINBURG, Kuntsevich summoned Jason and me into the downstairs apartment that he and his wife also owned. As we entered, he sat down at a small desk in the main room, surrounded by a giant heap of artifacts and documents on the Dyatlov case. Kuntsevich was wearing the same outfit as the previous day: a pinstriped jacket, mismatched pants, black socks and Russian sandals resembling Crocs. His cell phone, as ever, hung from his neck. After strapping a pair of jeweler’s glasses to his head, he began to tinker with a small steel-framed device that sat on the desk.

  Our host seemed to be in no hurry to fill us in on what he was doing—or perhaps he was being willfully obscure—so Jason and I took a seat on the couch and watched him. Finally, Kuntsevich aimed the desktop lamp in such a way that allowed us to get a somewhat better look at the device. It was an olive-green metal box embossed with an alligator pattern, and when I craned my neck I could see a metal device inside that resembled the head of a faucet. There was also some metal twine, and what appeared to be a large baize coaster. With surgical precision, using miniature tools, Kuntsevich toiled away for what must have been forty-five minutes, double-checking each part as if he were conducting a quality check on an assembly line. We were lacking a translator that day, so Jason and I had no choice but to sit there, watching our host work in the lengthening silence. We stole glances at each other, registering our growing discomfort and both wondering at what point we could just stand up and leave.

  Then Kuntsevich began to hum, softly at first, then louder, as if he too were aware of the unbearable silence and was attempting to fill it. I didn’t recognize the tune, though the melody sounded folksy. He then snuck a peak at us, a mischievous look telling us that he was enjoying every minute of his suspenseful stunt. He pulled open a drawer and produced what looked like a vinyl record. He placed the disc on the device, wound a crank on the side, and suddenly the music Kuntsevich had been humming was replaced by the real thing, issuing from the machine. The device was a phonograph.

  Later, after our translator had arrived, Kuntsevich told us that this was the music that Igor and his friends had listened to and played for one another. “They were composing poems and stories and songs, and they would perform them for one another each night.” When the song ended, Kuntsevich let the record skip and hiss for a full minute. He then replaced the record and set the needle on a new song. The wind-up nature of the player seemed to lend the mandolin, piano and folk guitar an additional layer of sadness and longing. It was a layer that I imagined only the three of us, sitting there fifty years after the hikers had listened to similar music, could detect.

  OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS, KUNTSEVICH ARRANGED FOR me to talk with various writers, armchair experts and other characters connected to the Dyatlov case, such as search volunteers and friends of the hikers. Though there was a translator present at each of these interviews, and I had arrived with lists of questions, I often left these meetings more confused than I’d gone in. I was learning that everyone had his or her own ideas as to what happened to the hikers, and none seemed to match the others. I was told tales of runaway murderous prison guards, top-secret military tests gone awry and a tale about mythic arctic dwarves. One man even alleged that the survivor Yuri Yudin had something to do with his friends’ deaths—after all, wasn’t it convenient that Yudin had gotten sick in the middle of the trip and had been forced to turn back? Might he have been complicit in a larger plot? Arctic dwarves aside, nearly all of these theories involved a deep distrust of the Soviet government and a belief that the euphemistic conclusion that the hikers had died of an “unknown compelling force” had been used to paper over a darker truth. Though I wasn’t yet ruling anything out, by the end of these meetings, I knew that I needed to get to people who could give me facts, not more stories out of the Fortean Times.

  DURING OUR DOWNTIME FROM INTERVIEWS ONE DAY, Kuntsevich, Jason and I explored the city in which the hikers had lived. I learned that Yekaterinburg—Sverdlovsk, to the Soviets—had been founded in 1723 as part of Peter the Great’s effort to tap the riches of the Ural region. After the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the late nineteenth century, the city had become a regional hub for mining, metallurgy and machine production. During the next century, the surrounding area became home to some of the largest and most brutal labor camps. Later known as Gulags—an acronym taken from the Russian name for the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps—these camps were expanded by Stalin in the 1930s to house political prisoners, dissenters and other enemies of the State.

  After making the historical rounds of the city by car, Kuntsevich pointed out the Ural State Technical University—or, as it was called until 1992, the Ural Polytechnic Institute. Westerners might know the university as the alma mater of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin; Igor Dyatlov and most of his friends would have been arriving just as Yeltsin was leaving in 1955. The proud columns and sculptured pediment of the campus’s main building were already familiar to me from pictures I’d seen, and I was keen to explore the campus beyond the quad. After some purposeful wandering, we found the hikers’ dormitory, which was closed to outsiders, but because Kuntsevich occasionally taught classes at the university, he was able to persuade a guard to let us into th
e building. We strolled the hallways, paying particular attention to the top-floor corridor, down which Igor and his friends had walked on the evening of their departure. I stuck my head into one of the open rooms. Quarters that might have been generously referred to as utilitarian in 1959, had slid into further neglect. I snapped a few photographs of peeling green paint and chipped stone tiles and we left.

  As much as I was enjoying our city tour, by the end of the day, I was getting slightly anxious. When I asked Kuntsevich about contacting Yuri Yudin, he only shook his head or said, “I don’t know.” “You don’t know where he is?” I pressed him. “I don’t know,” he would say again, and that would be that.

  But on the morning of our fourth day, our host roused us from our foldout beds with news. In his now familiar patchwork of English, Russian and hand gestures, he explained that he had scheduled a meeting with Tatiana Dyatlov Dyatlova, Igor’s little sister. I was thrilled. At last my quest was starting to seem real.

  That afternoon, we took a train 30 miles west of the city to Pervouralsk, where Igor and his siblings had grown up and where Tatiana still lived. As we drew closer to her neighborhood, telephone wires multiplied over our heads, and red and white smokestacks coughed up a spectrum of grays and browns on the horizon. The sun had disappeared, but whether behind smoke or clouds, I couldn’t make out. Whereas the graffiti had only flirted with Kuntsevich’s neighborhood, it positively bloomed here, standing out as the main source of color amid cement and stone. Jason and I noted a passing rainbow of Cyrillic vandalism, speculating on what profanities it might contain.

  Tatiana’s building was a midcentury relic, with an exterior coat of paint that seemed to be in the middle of a decades-long process of detaching itself from the wall. We crunched through the moat of autumn leaves surrounding the complex and past a series of mangled mailboxes in order to reach the door. We passed more graffiti on our walk to a two-toned elevator. The right elevator door appeared to have been recently replaced, leaving the left door—painted an institutional green—stranded in the Soviet era. Across both doors was a splash of vandalism in the universal language of Fuck You.

  After an unsteady ride to the third floor, we proceeded to an apartment at the end of the hall. We knocked and, after some rustling and barks, the door opened and I found myself face to face with the features that had become branded into my memory these past few months. She must have been in her early sixties, but Tatiana’s resemblance to her brother was startling. Besides the shared eyes and sharp, Slavic cheekbones, there was the gap in her front teeth when she smiled. She promptly ushered us through the door, as if she were worried that someone in the hallway might be transcribing our conversation.

  Her dog, a Jack Russell terrier, wouldn’t stop barking, so Tatiana lifted the animal by its tail and pulled him into the next room. In contrast to what we’d seen of the building, her apartment was warm and pleasant. As we settled onto her pillowy couch, and I admired a painting above of a tranquil mountain lake, Tatiana hurried to set up tea. The table quickly disappeared under a spread of china, brass serving ware, cheese, fruit, pickles, jams, pastries and various sweets. I don’t usually notice teapots, but the one she brought out was so striking that I wondered if it was a pre-Revolution antique. Kuntsevich casually plucked four sweets off a tray while we were waiting.

  Our translator arrived, a shy girl in her early twenties. Tatiana began by expressing how happy she was that we had come, and how she considered us new friends. Yet I sensed a cautious diplomacy behind her warm welcome. I didn’t want to overwhelm her, so I withheld my questions about her brother and instead made small talk about her country and our trip.

  At last, between sips of heavily sugared tea, Tatiana broached the topic of her family and how their life had been before the tragedy. Besides Tatiana and Igor, there were two more siblings: their eldest brother, Slava, and, two years younger than Igor, their sister Rufina. But both had died years ago, leaving Tatiana the sole survivor.

  All four Dyatlov children had been raised to be upstanding Communists, yet each had an independent spirit and inquiring mind, which they had parlayed into their respective fields of study. All four had attended UPI—Igor, Slava and Rufina for radio engineering, and Tatiana for chemical engineering. Tatiana told me that Igor had always been the most scientifically inclined of the siblings, as well as the most artistic. “He had an excellent knowledge of art,” she said. “He was a great photographer. He used to love to play the guitar, as well—he’d write songs and poems, just for himself.”

  Igor Dyatlov using one of his handmade radios to communicate with another hiking group, 1957.

  Through his love of photography, her brother had been able to combine his creative and technical appetites. He caught the photo bug early, and by the time he hit high school he was publishing his images in newspapers and magazines. He had also by this time turned his attention to technical invention. He built radio receivers, recording devices and even a makeshift telescope. “Igor made it possible for us to see the first Sputnik in 1957,” Tatiana remembered. “We all went to the roof to witness this historic leap of scientific wonder.”

  Regarding her brother’s enthusiasm for radios, she said, “One wall of Igor’s room was completely covered with radio panels of active handmade radio receivers. He maintained shortwave communications with many radio fans, and, at the time, you couldn’t buy a shortwave radio receiver—you had to build one.”

  As she told me this, I thought of how Igor’s talent with radios had left followers of the Dyatlov case puzzled. Many couldn’t understand why he had neglected to take a radio with him into the mountains, one he might have used to communicate with rescuers. But shortwave radios of the time were typically over a hundred pounds, and bringing one on a trip wasn’t simply a matter of slipping it into a backpack. In his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Soviet scholar Alexei Yurchak explains that Soviet policy toward shortwave radios at the time was “ambiguous,” which may explain why young people like Igor were willing to take the risk. The radios may have been officially illegal, but their use wasn’t entirely frowned upon. “Listening to foreign broadcasts was acceptable and even encouraged,” Yurchak writes, “as long as these qualified as good cultural information and not bourgeois or anti-Soviet propaganda.”

  Tatiana told me that her brother had been an upstanding Communist and student. When he graduated from high school, he was honored with a silver medal that allowed him to enroll at any university in the country without taking an entrance exam. Part of being a star student, she explained, was adhering to communism like everyone else and believing that education and Party allegiance could elevate the entire country. “One has to remember, a new period of excitement was upon us. Young people wanted to get a higher education, to work in industry; they wanted to find themselves as well as something meaningful to do. The world was opening up around us in 1958, 1959. This was the first time—especially after such a brutal World War and subsequent sanctions and rationing—when people could buy a television or transistor radio.”

  But Igor’s greatest passion was not school or even radios—it was the outdoors. He had developed a deep love of hiking over the years, having followed the example of his brother, Slava. “Slava was two years ahead of Igor, and his mentor,” said Tatiana. “But Igor was a real leader and a true sportsman in his own right.”

  When I asked Tatiana what her last memory of Igor was, she said abruptly, “He didn’t die from the snow.” She then described seeing the open caskets at the funerals, and how darkly colored and aged their skin had been. “It’s impossible. When people are just freezing and cold, the color of their face is not so dark.” Of her brother’s body, she said, “Igor was twenty-three years old and his hair looked like an old man’s. It was white.” Her family would not have believed it was Igor if not for one distinguishing mark on the corpse, one that brother and sister shared. “We knew it was Igor from the gap in his teeth . . . only the gap.”

  She stoppe
d short of speculating what the aged appearance of her brother’s body meant. “It’s too difficult to find the truth. There are too many conflicting stories; so no one, in my opinion, will ever know.”

  I asked again what her final memory of her brother was. She told me how they had worked in tandem to develop a photograph he had taken of a mountain, one in the vein of Ansel Adams. “His photos were amazing,” she said softly. She paused again before telling me that their mother had tried to talk Igor out of going on the trip. “My mother said to him, ‘You must not go, you have exams and you need to graduate.’ Igor replied, ‘Mom, this is my last trip.’ . . . For forty years, our mother lived with the fact that her son had died, and that the circumstances of his death were still unsolved, that we might never know the truth.”