Mountain of the Dead (2 page)

The events leading up to and the night of 1/2 February 1959 have been reconstructed, as far as possible, from what was found by the search parties and the last entry in the Dyatlov group’s diary for 31 January 1959, which was made by Igor Dyatlov. This chapter is also a reconstruction of what happened from the official point of view.

On 23 January 1959, the group of ten skiers spent the day in Room 531 at Ural Polytechnic Institute (UPI) in Sverdlovsk. They were all members of the UPI Sports Club and were frantically packing their rucksacks and getting their equipment ready as they had a train to catch. Assisted by the
zavchoz
, the university’s head of provision distribution, they packed items including oatmeal, 3kg of salt, knives, felt boots and all the other accessories necessary for the journey.
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The talk was on a very superficial level and, despite their anticipation of a journey they were all looking forward to, tempers were starting to fray. Zina Kolmogorova expressed her frustration at not being able to pack a spring balance. Rustem Slobodin asked whether or not he would be able to play his mandolin on the train – to which Zina sharply replied, ‘Of course!’ They considered the mandolin to be one of the most important pieces of equipment for the journey, as it would be their main source of entertainment. Luda Dubinina counted the money they had pooled together. Money was tight. They had been given 1,000 rubles by the Trade Union Committee at the university but they had to put in their own money as well. They were in high spirits and looking forward to their expedition, despite the last minute rush to ensure everything was packed and that they had not forgotten any food or equipment. That day, 23 January, was the first day on which an entry was made in the group’s diary and in which they took turns to make the entries for the period of the expedition. The first entry was made by Zina; she wrote that she wondered what awaited them on the trip – although at that time she could have had no inkling of what was to happen.
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Their planned route was by rail to the town of Ivdel, via Serov, and then a bus would take them directly north to a small settlement at Vizhay on the River Auspia. From Vizhay the group would proceed on a hired truck, then on foot and skis, to Mount Otorten. The whole route from Sverdlovsk to Mount Otorten, with the intermediate stops, was more or less directly north–south and approximately 340 miles (550km) as the crow flies. From departure to their arrival back in Sverdlovsk, the trip was expected to take twenty-two days.

At this stage another person was expected to join the group, Nicolai Popov, nicknamed ‘the morose fellow’,
who had agreed with the group leader Igor Dyatlov to provide his own supplies and equipment. Popov had already graduated from the university and was not a student. Fortunately for him he missed the train.

The group set out by rail from the main railway station in Sverdlovsk for the 201-mile (324km) journey north to the town of Serov. The young men in the group made a solemn promise to the two girls that they would not smoke for the entire trip. Zina doubted very much that they would have the willpower to keep their promise for so long. Once the train set off on the long journey north, they settled into their seats and Rustem Slobodin took out his mandolin. Together they sang songs they knew and composed new ones. Semyon Zolotarev was not well known to everyone in the group, but he fitted in quickly as he had a vast store of songs, many of which the students had never heard before. Because of his much greater experience of life, particularly as a front-line soldier in the Second Word War, as well as having been a Komsomol (Soviet youth organisation) leader, he was duly accorded respect by the others. Much has been speculated about Zolotarev who, like the story of what happened to the group, in many ways remains an enigma.

As they sang along to the the mandolin, darkness descended as the train continued its long journey north. They looked out of the window at the seemingly never-ending Taiga, which spread to the Ural Mountains on the left and on the other side to the vast empty spaces of Siberia. As well as the occasional appearance of a small severny (settlement), they passed several military bases (or areas related to the military) between Sverdlovsk and Serov. During the Nazi attack on the USSR in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) – as the Second World War was known to the Russians – much of the military production (e.g. tanks and aircraft) was pulled back to the east of the Urals, far away from the Nazi advance and out of the range of Nazi bombers. With the advent of the Cold War, most of these facilities remained where they were, with expansion taking place and the addition of facilities to take account of the new atomic age. There was a major plutonium-producing complex at Kyshtym between Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk, which lay in the opposite direction (south) to which the Dyatlov group were travelling.
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The Kyshtym plant was where George Krivonischenko had been involved in the clean-up after the 1958 nuclear accident. There were other facilities more or less on the route north on the group’s line of travel. These included a gaseous diffusion production plant for plutonium U-235 at Verkh Neyvinsk to the north of Sverdlovsk,
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and a large facility for the production and storage of nuclear warheads at Nizhnyaya Tura.
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Travel in these areas was severely restricted and the presence of so many nuclear, military and associated facilities has a bearing on some of the theories relating to what happened to the Dyatlov group.

By 3 a.m. on the morning of 24 January, having exhausted their stock of songs and being exhausted themselves, Zina recorded in the diary that the rest of them had all fallen asleep as she surveyed the darkness outside the train window.

After leaving Sverdlovsk well behind them, the train pulled into the town of Serov at 7 a.m. on 24 January. Both Zina and Luda mention that they had travelled with another group of hikers from the university, led by Yury Blinov, who had left at the same time as them. Luda had suspected that Zina was keen on a male member of the Blinov group, as she (Zina) appeared upset when the two groups later split up. The two groups were well known to each other and Igor Dyatlov had given his radio set to the other group. However, upon their arrival at Serov, the reception the station staff gave them caused all feelings of empathy and friendship to disappear. As, despite the eary hour, they were not allowed in to the station building. In the diary, Zina described somewhat sarcastically the response from the staff as ‘Hospitality’. A policeman had stared suspiciously at the group and they must have felt intimidated, as Zina further noted in the diary that they had not broken or violated any law under communism. The atmosphere of intimidation must have begun to annoy George Krivonischenko as he started singing, which was enough for the policeman to grab him and haul him away. The police told the group that Section 3 (of local railway regulations) forbade all activity that would ‘disturb the peace of passengers’. Again Zina made a diary entry, which stated that Serov must be the only station where songs were forbidden. Eventually George Krivonischenko was released and the matter was settled amicably. Whilst it is possible to read something into the behaviour of the police towards the group, it is more likely that the group were boisterous and in good spirits in the early stages of their journey, which attracted the attention of provincial officers with too much time on their hands. Furthermore, the group had passed through an area containing sensitive military establishments and were starting to approach another area (around Ivdel) that contained numerous prison camps. In these circumstances, and at that time in a state obsessed by security, strangers automatically brought suspicion on themselves by their very presence.

Serov was more or less halfway from Sverdlovsk to Ivdel. The group had more than eleven hours to kill before they could take the next train to Ivdel, which left Serov at 6.30 p.m. They were warmly welcomed at a school close to Serov railway station. A janitor (
zavchoz
) heated water for them and made arrangements so that they could store their equipment. It was a free day for the group and the diary entry for that day was made by Yury Yudin. Yudin had wanted to visit a natural history museum or a local factory. Visiting a local factory may seem an odd choice as a way to pass the time but it was very much in keeping with the ideal of the young communist Yudin, who, although studying at a higher institute of learning, would still wish to express his solidarity with the factory workers and would have been welcomed by them.

However, much to Yudin’s disappointment, the first part of their day was spent in checking their equipment and going through their drills and training. At 12 p.m. when the first part of the school day was over, the group organised a meeting with the schoolchildren. The meeting was held in a small cramped room where the children listened silently as Zolotarev explained what sports tourism was, and what they were doing on their trip. The children were possibly a little apprehensive of Zolotarev, but when Zina started talking they became more animated. She spoke to them individually, asking their names and where they were from, and was a firm favourite with the children as they asked her endless questions in return. After two hours, the children did not want the group to leave. They wanted to know each minute detail about the trip, from how the torches worked to how the tent was set up. Eventually the time came for the group to gather their equipment and make their way to the station for the train to Ivdel. The whole school went to the station to see them off. The children were upset at the group’s departure, with some of them in tears and many of them asking Zina not to leave and to stay with them. Zina asked the children to make sure that they behaved well and studied hard. However, despite the emotional farewell, the group’s problems with railway stations and the police had not ended. A young alcoholic accused someone in the group of stealing his wallet, with the result that the police were called. Luckily nothing came of it and the group were allowed to proceed without any further restrictions, much to their relief.

The journey by train to Ivdel was five and a half hours long. They settled down to talk (Zina proposed a discussion on the nature of love) and again to sing songs, accompanied by Rustem Slobodin’s mandolin. Some members of the group used the time to revise for their exams. Their sustenance on this part of the journey consisted of garlic bread without water. The town of Ivdel was the last major point of contact with civilisation before they set out on the journey north into the more remote Siberian Taiga and the mountains of the northern Urals. The town itself was the centre of the Gulag camp system for the area. At one point there were almost 100 camps and associated subcamps of varying sizes in the vicinity of Ivdel. The town is situated on the Ivdel River near the confluence of the Lozva River, 332 miles (535km) north of Sverdlovsk. It had been the first wooden fortress east of the Urals, built in 1589, and became a gold-mining settlement in 1831. The first Gulag was established there in 1937 and eventually the population grew to between 15,000 and 20,000 inhabitants, a figure which has remained fairly constant.
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Many prisoners who were released from the nearby camps decided to stay in the town as they had nowhere else to go. The same applied to the prison staff. A number of former staff who had finished working at the camps also decided to settle in Ivdel for the same reason – that they were familiar with the area and had nowhere else to go. The result was that, by 1959, a large segment of Ivdel’s population was a strange mixture of former guards and the formerly guarded.

On arrival just after midnight on the night of 24/25 January the group alighted at Ivdel railway station. They found a large waiting room where they stored all their equipment and took turns to keep watch while they awaited the bus for Vizhay early the following morning: Sunday 25 January 1959. A comment made in the group diary by Yury Yudin is noteworthy: that they had ‘total freedom of action’ at the station at Ivdel. This was no doubt a reference to their two unfortunate previous encounters with the police at Serov station.

On their arrival at Ivdel, the group were 90 miles (145km) from Mount Otorten. After the short wait they took a bus to Vizhay where they arrived at 2 p.m. They decided to spend the night of 25/26 January in Vizhay before proceeding to the next point. Their accommodation was described by George Krivonischenko as a ‘so-called’ hotel, which must have been very basic even by the standards of the austere Soviet Union in the 1950s. There were not enough beds for the ten members of the group so they slept two to a bed, with both Sasha (Alexander Kolevatov) and Krivoy (George Krivonischenko) gallantly sleeping on the floor. Despite the inadequate accommodation, they slept well and rose at 9 a.m. on 26 January, only to find that the outside temperature was -17ºC and a small window had been left open during the night, forcing them to get out of bed in freezing conditions. They relied on the hotel for breakfast and were given goulash and tea. Igor Dyatlov made a comment about the lack of heating in the ‘so-called hotel’, joking that if their tea was cold they could always go outside the hotel and it would soon warm up enough for them to drink it! They then arranged to get to the next point on their journey, the 41st Kvartal (this was a camp for geologists and workers in the area), by road in an open flat-bed type GAZ-63 truck that was organised to take them. A photograph of eight of the group shows them all sitting on the back of the open truck with wooden slatted sides exposed to the elements. Yet they were all well wrapped up against the wind and cold and again seemed in good spirits. The truck eventually left Vizhay at 1.10 p.m. on 26 January. Despite their layers of clothing the group were freezing on the three-hour journey and tried to occupy themselves by singing and animatedly discussing various topics, which ranged from love (a favourite topic of Zina’s) to the nature of friendship and the problems of finding a cure for cancer. The bitter cold on the truck affected Yury Yudin badly and despite trying to hide under a makeshift tent they had made to keep off the wind, he developed a chill with lumbago and an acute pain in the leg.