Mountain of the Dead (15 page)

There were also clumsy attempts at obscuring a number of details and the group diary shows alterations and amendments as well as items rubbed out. An investigator, Vladimir Korotayev, worked with Investigator Tempalov on the case. Korotayev stated in an interview years later (on 1 February 2008) that he had found a number of inconsistencies in the case but was instructed by his superiors to keep his opinions to himself. Korotayev died on 11 July 2012.

Two physical inconsistencies concerned the tent itself. Some theorists believe that the Dyatlov tent was re-erected wrongly with skis providing support for rope at the ends of the tent instead of at the sides. They have also said that the outlet for the stove was built towards the prevailing wind whereas the tent should have been erected the other way around so that the smoke and any cinders would have been carried away from the tent.

The line of thinking of an alternative location where the deaths occurred has a few sub-theories as to how the group died, but it is all built on the same premise that the authorities were either directly or indirectly involved in the deaths. The thinking goes that once the authorities had either caused the deaths or discovered the deaths, an immediate attempt was made to cover the tracks (literally and figuratively) due to embarrassment. It may be wondered why the authorities would go to so much trouble to falsify the scene and the events relating to the deaths, but once again it must be remembered that the USSR in 1959 was a place where bad news was never welcome. The price for making serious mistakes was much higher than it was in the West. Guilt by association would be enough to earn the wrath of the authorities and could involve imprisonment and loss of privileges such as the flat or house you and your family lived in, with the worst scenario being possible imprisonment or banished to a town in the middle of nowhere. Even as late as the 1970s, crashes of commercial passenger aircraft were rarely publicly reported in Russia; a story was reported in the West of the parents of a young woman who had reported their daughter as missing, only to find on investigation that she had died some time before in a commercial airliner crash belonging to the state airline Aeroflot while on a scheduled flight to Moscow. People in the USSR would generally learn of serious crashes by listening to the BBC or the
Voice of America
radio broadcasts (both of which were officially forbidden).

The ‘orderly’ descent from the tent does not tie up with the panic stricken attempt to flee from inside it. If this scenario is to be believed, it stretches credulity. The group slashed their way out of the tent in a great hurry then formed an orderly file to walk down the mountain with virtually nothing on their feet and hardly wearing enough clothes to keep themselves warm inside the tent, let alone outside in the deep snow with winds and temperatures of -26ºC, before then splitting into what appears to be two different groups.

Before considering the alternative location theory, there is one important item that lends some support to this line of thought, which is that a number of enquirers wondered what the group was doing on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl as it was off the route they were taking to their intended destination of Mount Otorten, which lay 9 miles (15km) to the north of where the tent was found. Following on from the theories concerning possible military involvement (in Chapter 6), one of the main lines of enquiry is that of a military accident and subsequent cover-up by the authorities. There are a number of pieces of evidence to support this view. The files relating to the Dyatlov incident were held by the Russian State Prosecutor’s Office for twenty-five years before being transferred to the State Archive and were not available for public viewing (although it must be said that right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall anyone, especially a member of the public, who expressed a desire to go digging through any files held in the Russian State Prosecutor’s Office would not only have not got very far, but could well have ended up arrested and imprisoned). One website regarding the Dyatlov tragedy states that the files were not closed and gives the impression that there was no problem for anyone to view them. This appears to have been written by someone who has no knowledge of what was involved in gaining access to potentially contentious files held by either the police or military during the Soviet era.

Once the files became available after the fall of communism, one of the most glaring inconsistencies was on the front of the case file itself. The criminal investigation had been opened on 6 February 1959, which was less than a week after the deaths had taken place but also almost a full week before the time that Igor Dyatlov or another member of the group had intended to send a message from Vizhay to Ural Polytechnic Institute to say they had completed their journey and were returning. To reiterate this very important point: the opening date of the criminal investigation was almost a full week before the group was meant to let everyone know they were okay and on their way home to Sverdlovsk – the telegram was not due to be received at UPI until 12 February 1959. So, in other words, the authorities had started to investigate their deaths before anyone (that is, anyone outside the state authorities, i.e. relatives and the public) knew or had been informed that they were missing or that something was wrong. The file itself basically follows the standard line that the group had slashed their way out of the tent and made their way down to the tree line where they perished.

Notwithstanding the difficulties of gaining access to the files in Soviet times and the numerous anomalies within them, and in view of the apparent attempt to try and obscure the facts, an alternative theory has been developed to explain this. This theory follows the line that the group did not die at the pass at Kholat Syakhl but died elsewhere, and their bodies, along with the tent and their equipment, were brought to Kholat Syakhl in order to give the impression that whatever had happened had taken place at the pass on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl. It should be mentioned here that the tent was wrongly assumed by many to have a standard zipper (as tents do today), but it was actually closed with buttons that were fairly stiff in the stitched canvas; once the front of the tent was buttoned up, there was an inner curtain hung over it for insulation. Under this alternative theory, the slashes were made by a third party to make it look as if the group had tried to get away from the tent in a hurry on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl.

To start with, the alternative theory of the deaths taking place elsewhere suggests that the route taken by the group was actually to the north of the River Auspia along the River Lozva, which not only makes more sense as it is easier, but this was confirmed by the remaining survivor of the group, Yury Yudin. It will be remembered that Yury Yudin had been taken ill and returned to Sverdlovsk from the second severny, and although he had not gone as far as either the River Auspia or River Lozva with the rest of the group, he nevertheless stated that it was their intention to approach Mount Otorten along the Lozva to the north of the Auspia. While the change in the description of the route may not seem overly significant, slightly to the north of the Lozva was a military testing area. While the Dyatlov group may not have gone into the military test area, they would have been close enough to it in the event of any testing going wrong. Independent testimony was given to a third party from a member of one of the crews of a Soviet bomber. On 1 February 1959, two Tu-95M ‘Bear’ long-range bombers took off from their base at Uzin, south of Kiev, and headed 1,380 miles (2,220km) north-west to the testing area in the northern Urals. The Tupolev Tu-95M (‘Bear’
is the NATO codename for the aircraft) first flew in November 1952 and started entering service in 1956 as a long-range strategic nuclear bomber intended to be able to attack the USA. It played a very important role prior to the development of ICBMs and the establishment of submarine-launched ICBMs. The Tu-95M was also intended to be used in a conventional bombing role as well as the nuclear attack role. In 1959 Uzin Airbase was the site for the 106th Heavy Bomber Division (106 TBAD), which comprised two heavy bomber regiments of Tu-95Ms. These were the 409th and 1006th Heavy Bomber Regiments (409 TBAP and 1006 TBAP). The two aircraft that took off from Uzin Airbase on 1 February 1959 were testing air mines, which were dropped by parachute and set to explode above the ground at various heights. During the Second World War, these air mines had been used by both the Luftwaffe and the RAF to devastating effect. The Luftwaffe had notably used them to cause substantial damage and casualties during the Clydeside Blitz from 13–15 March 1941. The blast damage when these mines exploded was far greater than if a normal bomb had hit the ground, as much of the blast is directed upwards. The effect on anyone within a radius of up to hundreds of metres (depending on the size of the air mine) was deadly as the damage was caused not so much by debris from the bomb or its fragments but by the shock wave that was created by the blast, which caused lungs to explode and eardrums to burst, as well as causing massive internal injuries of the type found in some members of the Dyatlov group. There is a strong possibility that the two Tu-95M ‘Bears’ had dropped the air mines and that they were either dropped in the wrong location or the parachutes were blown off course due to the strong winds known to have been present during that period.

The worst of the injuries caused to three of the group would have been explained by a military accident of this nature. Although it does not explain Luda Dubinina’s missing tongue, it is quite possible that she could have bitten it off and her body may have been cleaned before it was moved, as her mouth and face would most likely have shown traces of a great deal of blood. There was no mention in the autopsy report of any traces of blood, despite her tongue being missing, although the autopsy did record the coagulated blood in her stomach. The car-crash type injuries without external marks, which were recorded for three of the group, could have been caused by a blast from an air mine. Explosive blasts of this nature can cause internal damage, including broken ribs, without leaving any external marks. For example, a number of the victims of the 2005 London tube and bus bombings had died of internal injuries caused by the blasts, without any external markings or even scratches.

Tied in with the above theory of the Tu-95M ‘Bear’
air mines is the suggestion that the worst internal injuries to Luda Dubinina, Semyon Zolotarev and Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolle were caused by a ‘vacuum bomb’.

A ‘vacuum bomb’ is one of a group of names of these types of bombs (others are: HITs – high impulse thermobaric weapons; fuel air explosives; heat and pressure weapons), which applies to what are known as thermobaric weapons. These include fuel–air bombs and are distinguished from other types of bombs by producing a blast wave that lasts considerably longer than condensed explosives used in other weaponry. The longer blast wave from a thermobaric bomb causes significantly more damage and casualties. A thermobaric explosion relies on oxygen from the surrounding air, compared with normal explosives that are made up of a fuel–oxidiser premix. What happens on ignition is that a flame accelerates to a large volume, which produces pressure fronts within the mixture of fuel and oxidant in the surrounding air. A thermobaric bomb would normally be a container packed with a fuel substance, in the middle of which is a small conventional explosive ‘scatter charge’. A strong container would allow the fuel to be contained long enough for it to be heated to well above its automatic ignition temperature, so that even the cooling of it during its expansion from the container results in rapid ignition once the mixture is within conventional flammability limits. The description of the ‘vacuum bomb’ comes from when the gases cool and the pressure rapidly drops, leading to a vacuum that can be powerful enough to damage buildings and people.

Research into this group of weapons was initially started by the Germans during the Second World War, using coal dust as fuel; development was continued by both the USA and the USSR. The weapons were used by the Americans in the Vietnam War and more recently in Afghanistan. The Soviet military also used these weapons in the Sino-Soviet conflict, Afghanistan and in post-Communist Russia in the Chechen conflict. An interesting point about thermobaric explosives is that they can be used in a hand grenade with a lethal radius of only 10m, up to massive bombs with a lethal radius of 2km.

The casualties of these weapons are either obliterated by the fireball at the centre of ignition or by the shock wave coming out of it. The injuries sustained include ruptures to the lungs and internal organs, shattered eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, and severe concussion. Many of these injuries are described as ‘invisible injuries’, which fits into the descriptions of the worst injuries to Luda Dubinina, Semyon Zolotarev and Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolle – with possible internal damage also to the others but these not being mentioned in the autopsy in order to try and cover up what had happened.

The problem with this theory, as with the infrasound theory, is that an explanation for the injuries has been found but without a link to say exactly when and how the injuries came to be caused by a weapon of this nature. Again, similar to the suggestion that the group was close to or had gone into the northern military testing area, a thermobaric weapon may have been used that accidentally killed some or all of the members of the group, possibly causing concussions that left the remaining members of the group so disabled that they froze to death. One point against the thermobaric weapon theory is that as these explosives rely on atmospheric oxygen, they do not work underwater, at high altitudes or in bad weather. The last two items both apply to the Dyatlov group scenario.

Whilst this theory does not involve a different location for the actual deaths, it is included in this chapter as a major part of the events involves another location on the Dyatlov route.