Dead Mountain: The True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

by Eichar, Donnie

  The time-capsule nature of the building, and the absence of children and teachers, allowed me to easily project Igor and his friends into this space. I stepped away from my companions for a moment to stick my head into an empty classroom. I had no way of knowing which room the hikers had visited, but this one would do as well as any other. I imagined the ten hikers assembled at the head of the room, thirty pairs of eyes watching them with rapt attention. Sasha and Zina had been the stars that day—Sasha with his brief lecture about hiking, and later his playful song. Zina, of course, had won the children over with her general ease and magnetic personality. Yudin’s diary entry had even captured humorous scraps of their dialogue:

  Sasha: “Children, we’ll tell you about . . . Hiking is . . . provides opportunities . . .” (Kids are sitting silent in fear.)

  Zina: “Blah-blah-blah, you there, what’s your name, where did you go? Oh great, you even stayed in tents!” (and so on, and so forth).

  I was eager to ask the guard if he knew anything more about the group passing through here, but just as this thought occurred to me, a man came in from outside, and told us we had to leave—immediately. He then asked us for our “papers.” I didn’t stick around to find out who the man was, as I had unwisely left my passport and Russian invitation on the train. I managed to slip away from the others and out a side door before he noticed me.

  After reboarding the train, Kuntsevich told me we were very lucky to have found the school. The Dyatlov group, he said, were “with us in spirit.”

  WE PULLED INTO IVDEL JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT. AS I peered out the windows of the train, a sense of unease came over me: The buildings were dark and the clouds veiled any existing moonlight. My creeping sense of foreboding had likely little to do with the darkness and more to do with the town’s history, of which I had been able to learn a little before my trip. We were now in Gulag territory. In Stalin’s time, and for decades afterward, there had been nearly a hundred labor camps in Ivdel—most of them devoted to the incarceration and torture of political dissidents.

  In his 1973 “literary investigation,” The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: “If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”

  The Gulags of Solzhenitsyn’s description were gone, but Ivdel’s economy still revolved around the penal system. Because of the moratorium placed on the death penalty in 1996, convicts who would have otherwise been executed were now serving out life sentences in the country’s most remote prison camps. One maximum-security prison just outside of Ivdel is still home to some of Russia’s worst criminals—though today, their offenses are mostly of a violent nature instead of a political one.

  When I stepped onto the station platform, the darkness was startling, with the only light coming from the train and a few station lights. My companions and I walked down the street to await the arrival of what I was told would be our “military transport” to the village of Ushma. Kuntsevich warned that the road there would be quite rough, and that even if the weather cooperated, we wouldn’t get there until early morning. We would be taking a slightly different route than the hikers did fifty-three years ago, only passing near what had been the woodcutting settlement of Sector 41. The settlement had long since been demolished and there would be nothing to see, even if we were to stop there. As we waited for our transport, I realized that though we weren’t tracing the hikers’ steps precisely, this ride would be similar to the one Yudin had endured with his growing back and leg pain.

  Thirty minutes later, the headlights of our transport appeared, and a white van with a leather bra cover rolled up in front of the station. Other than a set of impressive tires and a high-beam spotlight on the roof that looked ready to blind every creature within a 50-yard radius, the vehicle looked more like a souped-up ’70s Volkswagen than anything out of the Russian military. The inside was outfitted with a metal bench and bucket seats bolted to a floral carpeted floor. Kuntsevich claimed shotgun to better help the driver, while the rest of us climbed in the back. With our gear piled on the carpet, Kuntsevich shut the side door and we were off.

  We once again found ourselves in darkness. The windows were blacked out from the inside with a kind of camouflage covering. It was unlikely we’d be passing any lighted streets, but I held out hope that a bit of light, moonlight even, would filter in to give me something to focus on. But as the vehicle pulled away, I quickly realized that my claustrophobia was here for the duration. As I tried to transfer my attention from myself to the goal ahead, memories of previous vertigo spells began to assert themselves. Just a few months before, one of my spells had landed me in the hospital for overnight observation. Vertigo can manifest itself as nausea, vomiting and loss of equilibrium. I tend to experience all three. With my last attack, I had been useless for forty-eight hours, either curled up in bed or positioned over a toilet bowl, completely unable to focus and barely able to walk. I had been so dehydrated from repeated vomiting that during my ambulance ride to the hospital, paramedics had been unable to locate a vein in which to pump fluids into my system.

  I hadn’t told Kuntsevich or Borzenkov of my preexisting condition. Either I hadn’t seen the need to or I didn’t want to give them a reason to dismiss me. I had planned to stay alert on this journey, but this dark rumbling box was starting to feel like a moving coffin. So without a word to my companions, I popped a pill and lay back on the bench. As I waited for a Valium-induced sleep to arrive, I wondered if the young Yuri Yudin would have continued with his friends to Otorten Mountain had he been in possession of such powerful drugs. Lucky for him, he only had aspirin.

  Funeral procession to Mikhaylovskoye Cemetery, March 9, 1959.

  21

  MARCH 1959

  IN THE SECOND WEEK OF MARCH, TEN DAYS AFTER THE first bodies were discovered in the snow, five of the hikers were buried in Sverdlovsk. The parents had won the right to bury their children in their hometown, but in a final sleight of hand, local party officials controlled how the funerals would be observed. The services were ordered to be split over two days, and when the mourners asked that the procession for the first funeral be allowed to proceed past the UPI campus, located just south of the cemetery, the police refused permission and instead had the caskets directed from the morgue to the Mikhaylovskoye Cemetery via the shortest, least conspicuous route. The message from the police and city officials was clear: Large crowds of mourners and any resulting publicity were unwelcome.

  As Yuri Yudin was still in Ivdel helping investigators identify his friends’ belongings, he did not attend the funerals. But twelve-year-old Yuri Kuntsevich, the future founder and president of the Dyatlov Foundation, had a front-row seat for the entire event. He lived with his parents and two older brothers in an apartment directly across from the Mikhaylovskoye Cemetery, and had only to look out the window to see the open caskets on flatbed trucks and the sea of mourners trailing behind. There was no fence enclosing the cemetery, and the crowd descending on Mikhaylovskoye that morning made the line between road and burial ground indistinguishable. “There were more than a thousand people flooding our neighborhood,” Kuntsevich recalls. The boy had never seen such a gathering in his life, and his curiosity compelled him to leave the apartment and join the grieving mas
ses below. The experience proved to be a life-altering one for Kuntsevich. He hadn’t known any of the hikers, but he had been well aware of their disappearance and the subsequent search. His older brothers, Georgy and Eduard, were both UPI students at the time and were themselves outdoor enthusiasts. The tragedy seemed very close to the twelve-year-old boy, and not just because his family lived across the street from the cemetery.

  Funeral for four of the Dyatlov hikers. (The fifth body, that of Georgy Krivonishchenko, was buried separately.) Sverdlovsk, March 9, 1959.

  Mourners at the funeral for four of the Dyatlov hikers, Sverdlovsk, March 9, 1959.

  Though Kuntsevich was young, he says he could recognize Soviet police when he saw them. He remembers seeing that day several men in civilian clothing paying close attention to the funeral crowd, but not to the service itself. “I am positive they were KGB, put there to monitor the events of the day.” It wasn’t long after Kuntsevich made his way across the street to the cemetery that the caskets were covered, lowered into the ground and buried. Afterward, someone stepped forward to recite a poem by Andrey Vostryakov:

  Stand here shoulder to shoulder,

  Touch the guitar strings gently,

  Let the song be echoed

  By mountains, wind and snow.

  May the sorrowful ode

  Remind us of young comrades,

  Those who ran but couldn’t

  Escape a cruel fate.

  Ripped was a side of the canvas,

  Flapping in raging blizzards,

  Letting frost and misfortune

  Commit their deadly deed;

  In their final struggle—

  Hardy though they were,

  Bravely though they battled—

  Surrender to death they did.

  Sleep, our dear souls,

  Sleep, dear Igor and Zina,

  Sleep, their fellow tourists,

  Final shall be your sleep.

  That gloomy mountain won’t

  Disturb your sleep any longer,

  But under its fateful shadow

  Your songs alive we’ll keep.

  Georgy Krivonishchenko was buried the following day, three miles west from where his friends lay, in a cemetery behind an Orthodox church on Repin Street. The Ivanovskoye Cemetery sat directly opposite the Central Stadium, a newly-built sports arena. A week earlier, the stadium had been teeming with fans attending the World All-Round Speed Skating Championships for Women, a first for the stadium and the city. But on March 10, the streets were quiet. Even with the gathering for Georgy’s funeral, only a fraction of the previous day’s mourners were in attendance.

  After the funerals, many friends and relatives of the deceased began to explore alternate explanations for both the hikers’ deaths and the authorities’ odd behavior. The day after Georgy’s burial, those who had attended the service gathered at the family’s Sverdlovsk apartment. Georgy’s father, Aleksey Krivonishchenko, later testified that the gathering included two hikers, who told him of their excursion into the northern Urals earlier that year, around the same time as the Dyatlov group’s trip. These hikers told Krivonishchenko that on February 1, the same night his son died, they were one of two hiking groups who had witnessed a strange occurrence in the sky over the Ural Mountains, in the area around Otorten. “They saw a strange phenomenon in the evening to the north from their locations: the extremely bright light of some rocket,” Krivonishchenko remembered. “The light was so bright that even those hikers who were preparing to sleep in tents went out to look at it. For some time, the sound of strong thunder came from afar.”

  Krivonishchenko didn’t give the names of the hikers in his testimony of April 14, but it is possible he was speaking of a group led by a teacher named Shumkov, who claimed to have witnessed rockets over Chistop Mountain in early February, 25 miles south of the hikers’ location. There were similar stories told by other hiking groups who were in the area from early- to mid- February. One of the most detailed accounts came from local hikers and search volunteers Georgy Atmanaki and Vladimir Shavkunov, who spoke of seeing “orbs” in the sky over the northern Urals on February 17. In Atmanaki’s testimony to investigators, he stated that he and Shavkunov had woken at six in the morning to make breakfast for the group. As they were preparing the meal over a fire, he saw a strange white spot in the sky that he supposed at first to be the moon. But when he pointed it out to Shavkunov, his companion said that it couldn’t be the moon because there was no moon that morning, and that if there had been, it would have been on the other side of the sky. “At that moment, a spark lit in the center of the spot,” Atmanaki remembered. “It burned for several seconds steadily, then grew in size and flew swiftly west.” Atmanaki said the sighting, which initially seemed a curiosity, grew more terrifying as it played out over the next minute and a half. “My personal feeling was that some celestial body was falling our way, but when it grew so large, I thought that some planet was coming in contact with Earth and that they would collide and Earth would perish.”

  Atmanaki’s group wasn’t alone. The Ivdel prosecutor’s office brought in several witnesses who reported similar sightings the morning of February 17. Prison guards posted in the area described a slow-moving orb that “pulsed” in the sky, moving from south to north, and lasting anywhere from eight to fifteen minutes.

  But how did strange phenomena in the February sky relate to the hikers’ fates? The sister of Alexander Kolevatov suggested in her testimony that the answer might be found in the bodies themselves. “I was present at the funeral of all hikers,” Rimma Kolevatova said. “Why did they have such brown skin on their faces and hands?” She went on to draw a connection between the hikers fleeing the tent in panic and the recent unexplained incidents in the sky over the Urals. “A group of hikers from the geographical faculty was at Chistop Mountain and (according to the witnesses) they saw some fire orbs on the same days, in the first days of February in the direction of Otorten Mountain. The same fire orbs were noticed later as well. Why is that? Could they have caused the death of the group?”

  By the time the first hikers had been buried, the “orb” accounts and their attendant theories had infiltrated Lev Ivanov’s investigation. The overwhelming number of witnesses who came forth to describe bizarre lights seen in the vicinity of Otorten Mountain—and to link the phenomenon back to the hikers’ demise—made it difficult for the prosecutor’s office to ignore this angle. It also made it more difficult for Ivanov and his crew to arrive at acceptable answers for the hikers’ families. At some point in mid-March, a new piece of evidence emerged that would only bolster the theories of those who felt the orbs had something to do with the fate of the Dyatlov group. That evidence was in the final photographs taken by the hikers before they died.

  22

  2012

  AROUND 4:30 AM, I WAS GENTLY SHAKEN AWAKE BY Kuntsevich. Our transport had arrived in the Mansi village of Ushma, the closest we could come to spending the night as the hikers had at Sector 41. As I stumbled from the van into twenty-below-zero weather, Kuntsevich motioned me toward a structure about 100 feet away, instructing me to wait there until the van was unpacked.

  The headlights from our vehicle illuminated my way to a log cabin, and I opened a flapping door and entered a dim anteroom of sorts. There was another hanging curtain of heavy fabric in front of me, evidently to block the draft. I pushed through it into a still darker room. I had no flashlight on me and my cell phone had long since died, so there was nothing I could do but wait until my pupils adjusted. Suddenly a deep growl issued from the darkness in front of me. I froze. The animal growled again, closer this time. But before I could casually back myself toward the door, I heard a man’s voice shout commands at the animal; and the growling stopped. He spoke again, clearly in my direction. I flipped through my mental phrase book, and came up with “Priviet Da?” or “Hello, yes?”

  There was a silence as the man evidently gathered that I was a foreigner. The dog growled again, louder this time
. Finally the man asked, “Amerikanski”?

  “Da,” I managed to blurt out.

  Finally, another few minutes passed in dark silence until I heard the footsteps of my team approaching from outside. Flashes from their headlamps illuminated parts of the room. I caught sight of a figure sitting on a cot, and a medium-sized dog at his side. With another flash of the headlamps, I noted the butt end of a shotgun sticking out from beneath the cot. Kuntsevich entered the room, followed by the others. The dog eventually stopped growling, but watched the intruders nervously. Kuntsevich said something to in Russian the strange man before ushering me over to a second cot. I noticed that it was the only other bed in the room and that the others were starting to spread their sleeping bags out on the floor. When I insisted on taking the floor, my three companions flatly refused. Too tired to argue, I unrolled my sleeping bag onto the metal cot and removed my boots. Then I curled up in my sleeping bag and drifted to sleep.

  A DEEP, SPLITTING CRACK! FORCED ME AWAKE. I HAD TO switch on my headlamp in order to see anything. Borzenkov was on the floor asleep, still snug in his Technicolor snowsuit, with Voroshchuk sleeping beside him. The noise had come from the direction of Kuntsevich, who was standing near a rudimentary cement-brick stove and was bringing an ax down on a wedge of wood. I was happy to see someone preparing a fire, as I had never experienced a morning so miserably cold.

  The structure was a one-room cabin in the style of nearly every home I’d seen pictured in this part of Russia. There was no running water, and therefore no bathroom, kitchen or basin. The walls were exposed logs and, from what I’d seen of the hikers’ photos, similar to those of the Sector 41 cabins. The hikers must have awoken to a very similar view on their final morning in civilization.