Mountain of the Dead (18 page)

Despite any errors that Lev Gordo had made, he was considered by the students to be a very decent man. When the inevitable retribution came, he was dismissed from his post along with the university rector. Many people, including students at the university, considered the punishments to be harsh and unfair.

At the Ivdel airfield on the afternoon of 23 February, the Slobtsov search team comprising nine students was divided into two groups. They left at the same time and were then flown in two Mi-8 helicopters to two different start points. The search group of four students (including Slobtsov) and two guides (a total of six people) were brought to the eastern part of the Mount Otorten ridge. The other search group of five students were landed on the bank of the lower course of the River Auspia.

Almost nothing is known of the activities of the first search group in the period from 23–25 February, before the groups came together on the River Auspia. The second search group had seen a fire with people gathered around it on the lower side of the slope of Kholat Syakhl. The search group stopped there for the night; probably they had met with what they described as ‘outsiders’ (believed to be KGB officers on the search).

The second search party then started making their way upstream along the River Auspia. They had found and were following what they described as ‘hardly visible narrow ski tracks’. On 25 February both groups came together again; now the team numbered eleven people in total, including the guides.

On the River Auspia, Slobtsov’s group had allegedly discovered an ‘earlier’ Dyatlov camp. Soon, not far from the first one, some Mansi searchers found another ‘earlier’ Dyatlov camp. It remains unknown when exactly the camps were discovered. In Kisilov’s opinion, the ‘hardly visible’ narrow ski tracks and both of the ‘earlier’ Dyatlov camps were the result of what he described as ‘outsider’ activities.

At a meeting at the headquarters in Ivdel, Ortyukov and Maslennikov both mentioned a southern group team that was supposed to start from the second severny and then move up the River Lozva to meet up with Slobtsov’s search group. It is believed that this mysterious southern search team was composed of KGB officers, as there is no other reference to them and they were not students or Mansi.

Kisilov goes on to describe the ‘contrived’ discovery of the Dyatlov tent.

On 26 February, the guides led part of Slobtsov’s group to ‘discover’ the Dyatlov group’s tent. The group of ‘discoverers’ consisted of five people: Slobtsov, Brusnitsyn, Sharavin, and two guides, Cheglakov and Pashin. The tent was ‘discovered’, but here the official investigation rather bizarrely describes the behaviour of the three students as the Russian equivalent of ‘went off their trollies’: they were described as complaining of serious stress, fatigue and incapacitation.

Early in March, the storage shed was at last found. A correct protocol or procedure of discovery was established and compiled by the lead prosecutor on the case, Lev Ivanov, on 2 March, while the actual discovery proper took place late in the evening on 3 March, in dark and blizzard conditions. Kisilov believes this discovery to be almost certainly a fake, with the mix-up in dates pointing to it.

There were a couple of smaller points made by Kisilov that he felt to be worthy of note. The first involved the man appointed as leader of the overall search campaign, Yevgeny Maslennikov. He had arrived in Ivdel burning with enthusiasm to search for the Dyatlov group and find out what had happened to them. Within one week of his arrival, he asked if he could be released and allowed to go home. In other words, once the tent was found, he appeared to lose all interest. It could be said that once the tent had been found along with the first bodies, his job was done, but considering the condition of the tent and where the bodies were found, the job was really only just beginning.

The other point was something mentioned by Moses Akselrod at his interrogation. Akselrod was a student at UPI and knew the members of the Dyatlov group well. He was involved in the search and had helped to sort out the belongings and equipment found in the tent. He saw the handwritten original of the group’s
Evening Otorten
paper and Zolotarev’s diary, because he compared Zolotarev’s handwriting with the paper and found they were both the same. This does not seem particularly relevant on its own but it has relevance in another theory, which involves Zolotarev being part of a conspiracy that was unknown to the others in the group, with Zolotarev writing about a snowman – implying a creature was in the vicinity (see Chapter 6).

As an aside, Kisilov mentions that on 5 March 1959, after the first bodies had been found, an ‘Extraordinary Commission for Rescue Operations’ was formed under the auspices of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Communist Party Committee by I.S. Prodanov, the Secretary General of the Ivdel Communist Party Committee. This ‘Extraordinary Commission’ included two other senior officials (Pavlov and Philip Yermash) and Investigator Vladimir Korotayev said that this Extraordinary Commission for Rescue Operations ‘drank hard’
5
in the village of Pershino on the River Lozva. It was said that this was probably their ‘Special Mission’.
6

Kisilov felt that there are still many questions left unanswered and made the observation that there are actually only two people living today who may have information: the former investigator of the Ivdel prosecutor’s office, Vladimir Korotayev, and the former leader of the search party that found the tent, Boris Slobtsov. (NB: this was at the time of Kisilov’s writing – Korotayev died on 11 July 2012.)

  
1.
  Based on a theory entitled ‘A Fight in the Higher Echelons of Power’, Alexander Gulikov (unpublished).

  
2.
  Comment taken from the official investigation notes and strogly disputed by Gennady Kisilov.

  
3.
  Term used by Gennady Kisilov in his study of the official investigation papers to describe his scepticism at the official portryal of the Group rushing away from the mountain to their deaths.

  
4.
  Term used by Gennady Kisilov in his study of the official investigation papers to describe pieces of twisted cloth used to move the bodies.

  
5.
  Ivdel investigator Vladimir Korotayev’s derogatory description of the behaviour of the members of the ‘Exraordinary Commision for Rescue Operations’.

  
6.
  Ivdel investigator Vladimir Korotayev’s derogatory description of the purpose of the member of the ‘Extraordinary Commission for Rescue Operations’, which had been set up to bring a focus to the search, but in Korotayev’s view was little more than a talk shop with planty of drinking in the village of Pershino near Ivdel.

Yury Yakimov was a shift foreman from Severouralsk (a city in the north Urals, 178km (110 miles) from the Dyatlov Pass). His theory attempts to explain the nature of the injuries, the strange behaviour and many other inconsistencies in the story of the Dyatlov group and is based on the author’s personal encounter with an unexplained phenomenon, which took place during a night shift in an open-pit mine in 2002. The following – the remainder of this chapter – is a translated and condensed account in his own words.

On 11 September 2002 I was working as a night-shift foreman at the Ivdelsky unit of the Bauxite mine. The night shifts generally lasted 12 hours, from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. At the time, we conducted operations at several sites located quite far away from each other (up to 12km between the sites). The mining equipment in No. 15 pit was at a standstill from the beginning of the shift because our trucks were all busy carrying ore from the No. 3 ore dump to the ore stockpile near Ivdel railway station. These distant sites were quite far away from the pit, and the No. 15 pit with the installed equipment was located beside the main road over which the trucks transported ore. There were no people in the pit from the beginning of the shift, and the equipment was unguarded.

Shortly after I started on this particular shift, it was getting dark. I went to switch on the electric lights in the pit to illuminate the southern part of the No. 15 pit and examine the equipment. There had been numerous thefts in the pits during that period, when thieves cut and carried away power cables, took wires off the power transmission lines and stole ferrous metal items to sell them to scrap collectors. As I mentioned, equipment in the pits was unguarded and so shift foremen had to keep an eye on the equipment as well as get on with their work.

It was 11 p.m. and dark and I was walking down the road leading to No. 15 pit. I was already near the transformer from which I could turn on the floodlights to illuminate the pit, when approximately 200m away from me I saw a strange shaking white light moving up and down the side of a rock dump. It was as if someone was sitting in a car with halogen headlights and was moving it around wildly. The light bounced up and down the side of the dump. The distance from the source of the light to the side of the dump that it was illuminating was about 100m. There was not a single sound, only leaves rustling in a slight breeze, and a little drizzling rain started falling.

Suddenly a beam of light from the unknown source started turning in my direction and shone on me across the forest. I rushed off the road and ran to the transformer (it stood at the roadside), opened the transformer box door and turned on the lighting in the pit. Lamps then illuminated the southern part of the pit, but the broad beam of light from the unknown source continued shining on me. It flooded the whole of the forest around me with a bright white light. The light itself was as bright as day and it seemed as if the trees had no shadows.

I stood behind the electrical box, near the transformer, with my face turned away. There were two or three minutes of agonising suspense, then the broad beam of bright white light slowly moved away from me. Everything was still quiet.

I looked again in the direction of the source of the strange light and saw how the beam of light from the source again started moving towards me. I noticed a couple of flashlights had separated from the source and were moving in my direction. At first there were two of them and they seemed to be swinging. They moved fairly quickly across the forest towards me. I turned away then looked up again. Now there were four or five of them, maybe more. They struggled through the forest as if enveloping tree trunks. It was as if several people with strong torches were moving through the thick forest trying to spot me. Unintentionally, I looked away again and froze. Immediately the torches left me alone. There was something very strange going on.

These were certainly not thieves. It was something different, very strange and unusual. I realised that I had witnessed an amazing and unusual phenomenon. Clearly, this source of light seemed to react to my glance, it dazzled me with its light and sent the swinging torches in my direction. When I turned or looked away to where the source of light could not be seen, the torches did not react to me. Nor did they react to the lamps (two of them) that illuminated the southern part of the pit.

I went down the temporary exit road in the western part of the pit and examined the shovel and the feeder cable. Everything was intact. There were no tracks of a vehicle either in the pit or on the road near the pit. The road was wet after the rain and any track would have been visible. There were no other roads leading to this pit.

While down in the pit I kept thinking of the unusual dancing lights. What were they? Where did they come from? Why did they react to my glance?

As I was leaving the pit I again saw the continuing dancing of light on the side of the rock dump. I looked to the right, in the direction of its source, and again a beam of light immediately came in my direction. The same thing was happening again. There was no doubt. The source of light appeared to react to a human glance.

It was something I could not explain. I felt weird from the strangeness of what I had seen and I felt anxious and uneasy. To put on a show of bravado, I shouted as loud as I could, ‘Hey! Hello! What’s up?’ Then I whistled and cursed. But the inexplicable light phenomenon did not react either to my curses, or to the whistling.

And then, from far away, the wind brought the roar of an approaching heavy loaded truck. There was no reaction from the source of unusual light to this sound.

I looked again at the light dancing on the side of the dump. Once again, a beam of light from the source came in my direction. I did not want to tempt fate any longer and left the place. I walked to the fork of the main road and soon the truck with a load of ore appeared. I climbed into the cabin and told the driver what I had just seen. I felt he was wary of what I was saying, but I didn’t try to convince him or prove anything. I felt extremely tired, sluggish and jaded. Probably it was because I couldn’t get rid of the feeling of anxiety and danger that I felt as a result of the strange light.

As usual, after midnight at 1 a.m., the shift workers gathered in the canteen. I told them about what I saw in the No. 15 pit. Their reaction was of the sort, ‘We would be happy to believe you, but what you are saying is just too incredible. Perhaps it was your imagination?’

Who knows? I personally would not have believed it if someone else had told me such a story.

But I had seen it and I could not just get it out of my head. For a brief moment I even had a crazy idea to go back there, to the pit, to break through to that source of light and see what there was behind it all. But the feeling of anxiety and danger from what I had seen did not leave me, and I gave up the idea.

For the rest of the night the trucks continued carrying ore from the No. 3 intermediate ore dump to the railway station stockpile and did not stop off near the No. 15 pit where I had seen the unusual light.

In the morning at about 7 a.m., when dawn had already broken, the trucks started carrying ore from the No. 15 pit to the ore dump. No tracks of other cars or vehicles could be seen after the night rain on the wet road leading to the No. 15 pit. There was not a trace near the place where I had watched the unusual light source either.