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BOOK: Mountain of the Dead

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There was a rail-based Mobile Rocket Division based at Bershet but it was not formed until 1970. The Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces itself was not formed until 17 December 1959, over eight months after the deaths took place. Although the rocket forces were being developed prior to the formation of the Strategic Rocket Forces as a separate military arm, the possibility that strategic or even tactical rockets would be fired at a group of escaped prisoners in the mountains 335 miles (540km) away is fanciful to say the least.

Visiting the Dyatlov Pass

A visitor making a trip to the present-day Dyatlov Pass would have to spend some time and money in preparing for it. He or she would also need to have a certain degree of fitness as it is best to make the last part of the journey by foot, although for the well-heeled it is possible to fly there by helicopter (though very expensive) from
Uktus general aviation airport 3 miles (5km) south of the main Koltsovo Airport for Ekaterinburg. It is also possible to go in a four-wheel drive vehicle and a number of adventurous types have done this, but it can be a difficult journey – some experienced hikers say it is possible to pass these vehicles on foot, so slow can be the going due to the condition of the muddy and waterlogged ground in the initial stages of some of the route the Dyatlov group took along the Auspia and Lozva rivers (or the route further north depending on whether you support the official or unofficial versions of the story). A number of tour groups and guides offer accompanied trips to the Dyatlov Pass with an English-speaking guide. These are not cheap (around 26,500 rubles per person as at summer 2012) and they usually require a group of around eight or more people. Yury Kuntsevich of the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation regularly makes trips to the Dyatlov Pass from Ekaterinburg accompanying both individuals and groups and it is highly recommended to make the journey in his company. Apart from his unsurpassed knowledge of the Dyatlov tragedy, he is also very knowledgeable on the ways of the Mansi and he generally takes groups along Mansi trails and meets with Mansi hunters.

Conclusion

Probably what happened on the night of 1/2 February 1959 will never be actually known. Each theory of what happened to the Dyatlov group has its own adherents with no overall majority for one particular theory. Perhaps the answer is a mixture of more than one theory. There is, however, a fairly overwhelming agreement among the theorists that, whatever theory they hold, there has been an official cover-up of some kind.

The official attitude towards accidents involving the military in the Soviet Union is best illustrated by what happened in 1979 in the same city where twenty years earlier the Dyatlov group set out from – Sverdlovsk. On Friday 30 March 1979 a worker in Military Compound-19 in the south-west of the city took an air filter off a piece of drying machinery in order to clean it as it was clogged, and left a note for his supervisor informing him that he had done so. The supervisor did not see the note and therefore did not make an entry in the logbook as he should have done. The supervisor of the next shift arrived on Monday 2 April 1979, and not seeing anything in the logbook, started up the machinery. The result was the release of deadly anthrax spores in an aerosol form into the open atmosphere between 1.30 p.m. and 4 p.m. that day. Military Compound-19 and its associated Military Compound-32 in Sverdlovsk was a microbiological warfare research establishment containing 5,000 people (Military Compound-32 contained a further 10,000 people). The anthrax was the most virulent strain known as ‘anthrax 836’, which among other uses was intended to be fitted to the warheads of SS-18 ICBMs targeted on cities in the USA. The air filter was found and put back on and the accident reported to the local military command, but was not immediately reported to the local city authorities. Had the wind been going in the opposite direction, the spores would have gone into the city of 1.2 million people. As it was, the wind carried the spores in a south-east direction into the countryside. Nevertheless, there were a number of deaths. Workers in a nearby ceramic plant were given pills to take but many were dead within a week. The total number of people who died will probably never be known but it is estimated at least sixty-five deaths. All medical files and records in local hospitals associated with the patients were confiscated by the KGB. The official announcement by the authorities was that contaminated meat sold by local butchers was responsible for the deaths. When livestock in six villages lying south-east of Military Compound-19 died from anthrax, this was given as proof of the source of the outbreak. There was deep concern in the West, not least that the USSR was breaking the terms of the 1972 Microbiological Warfare Convention by continuing research in this area. Despite assurances given by Soviet physicians, including a visit to the USA to give a presentation, it was to be 1992 before a Western team led by Professor Matthew Meselson of Harvard University arrived in what was now Ekaterinburg to investigate.
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Professor Meselson had accepted the original story of contaminated meat, but his investigations in 1992 left no room for doubt of a military accident – and this was without access to the medical files of the deceased, which had been confiscated by the KGB. It is believed that all the medical records and any associated evidence were destroyed by the KGB.

Involved in the cover-up was the future Russian premier Boris Yeltsin, who was the local Communist Party boss at the time and, coincidentally, a graduate of the same university as the Dyatlov group – UPI.

No journalist has been allowed on the site since 1992 and the site is still heavily guarded by troops with dogs, although all work of this nature was moved to underground facilities.

There are similarities with the Dyatlov group deaths. Perhaps the most overwhelming similarity between the two cases is that the authorities are not giving the full story and in both cases there is possible military involvement. There is also KGB involvement in both cases, with the existence of ‘a secret file’. The KGB files in the anthrax case were destroyed in 1990 by order of the Council of Ministers.

While the investigations into the anthrax case by Professor Meselson and his team have virtually proven military involvement, despite the denials of the Russian authorities, the same cannot be said in the Dyatlov case. At the very least, the general feeling is that the authorities have not released all the facts of the Dyatlov case. The final ‘official’ report into the matter consists of two thick files and it concludes that the Dyatlov incident was ‘not a man-made disaster’.
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This is a term that can be interpreted in a number of ways, including an act of God or the supernatural. Coupled with the term from the autopsies of ‘an unknown compelling force’
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killing some of the group, it is a most unsatisfactory conclusion.

There is also the question of another case file, Case No. 3/2518–59 (see Chapter 7), which the authorities will not release.

Despite the despatch of four experts from Moscow, the presence of so many senior civil and particularly military officials in Ivdel during the period of the search raises the question: why? Why in particular would one or more military officers of the rank of general be involved in what was basically at that stage a search for lost skiers, and civil ones at that? At the near height of the Cold War, one would have expected military generals to be concerning themselves with planning to fight a potential war against their capitalist foes in NATO rather than supervising a search for missing skiers in a provincial backwater. Even if help was requested from the military by the civil authorities (in addition to a civil Mi-8, two military Mi-8 helicopters also took part in the operations), it would have been expected that a general would have let someone further down the pecking order concern himself with the detail and involvement in the search itself. The conclusion that must be drawn from all this is that the deaths of the Dyatlov group were, in all probability, due to some kind of an accident caused by the military.

The tenth member of the Dyatlov group, Yury Yudin, who saved his life by turning around because of illness, sadly passed away on 27 April 2013. He spent his retirement living in Solikamsk, a city 200km north or Perm, and assisting wherever he could in maintaining the memory of the Dyatlov group through the Dyatlov Foundation. He was finally reunited with his friends in the Mikhailovskoe Cemetery on 4 May 2013.

1 Route taken by the Dyatlov group from Sverdlovsk, north to Mount Otorten.
Leah Monahan

2 Route taken from Vizhay to the woodcutters’ settlement (41st Kvartal), the abandoned geologist settlement and Kholat Syakhl.

3 The missile lanes from Kapustin Yar to the impact areas north of the Aral Sea, and the lanes from Baikonur to the impact area at Klyuchi on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Leah Monahan