Mountain of the Dead (4 page)

They spent the night of 31 January at the very edge of the forest before continuing the following day (Sunday 1 February). The final part of the last entry in the diary states:

Tired and exhausted, we start to prepare the platform for the tent. Firewood is not enough. We didn’t dig a hole for a fire. Too tired for that. We had supper right in the tent. Hard to imagine such a comfort somewhere on the ridge, with a piercing wind, hundreds (of) kilometres away from human settlements.

Nothing is known of the remainder of their journey to the mountain pass on Kholat Syakhl as no diary entry was made for this day (1 February). The group would have risen as normal, packed up the tent and their gear, and once again made their slow way onwards to their destination. At some point on the afternoon of 1 February they decided to pitch their tent on the pass at Kholat Syakhl, where it was eventually found by the search party. The sun set at 5.02 p.m. on that day so it would have been some time before that when they set up camp. An unusual aspect of the site they chose is that they appear to have lost their way and ended up on the eastern slope of Kholat Syakhl (‘Mountain of the Dead’) rather than on Mount Otorten (‘don’t go there’) as they had originally intended. There are no entries in the diary to say why this is and, in fact, the last entry in the diary on the previous day merely concerns itself with practicalities, with a final comment about a piercing wind and the fact that they are miles away from civilisation. There is no reference or seeming awareness that they are in the wrong place and not in their intended destination. Considering they were all well experienced in hiking and ski tourism, which entailed map reading, it appears an odd error to make. Mount Otorten lay 9 miles (15km) directly to the north of where they were. One of the last photographs taken of the group on their final day (1 February) shows them in a line moving forward but the visibility is very poor. However, it is possible that as they made their way up from the tree line, they could have been aware of where they were, but with darkness falling decided to pitch their tent and correct their bearings the following morning. Another of the final photographs shows what appears to be Zina Kolmogorova wrapping a bandage around the ankle of Alexander Kolevatov while the others in the group dig out the snow to prepare the area for pitching their tent.

On this last stop, they were obviously ready for sleep, having reached the point of exhaustion after travelling for the whole day. This final stage of their journey was tough for them as the ground was getting steeper. In the days leading up to this, the tone is noticeably subdued and the high spirits and exuberance apparent in the earlier photos and diary entries had disappeared. From the final diary entry onwards, everything is conjecture, up to the bodies being discovered by the search parties.

On the last evening, after the tent had been pitched, the party were preparing to eat their supper and would have been getting ready to bed down for the night. At some stage after this, something happened that caused them to panic and exit the tent as fast as possible. Whatever it was, it created such alarm that in their panic they slashed their way out of the tent using knives so as to get away as quickly as possible rather than open the tent at the front. In their rush, they left behind knives, hatchets, shoes (each had two pairs – one for outside and one soft pair for inside the tent) as well as warm clothes. In other words, they left behind everything that would enable them to survive the harsh winter conditions they faced outside the tent. When the tent was later examined, it could be seen that two large gashes had been made to allow someone of adult size to get through. The bottom part of the gashes had been cut right across the tent, in effect almost removing the whole side of the tent. There had also been smaller slit holes made at crouching height, which looked as if they may have made these first in order to look outside the tent to see what was there. Assuming they had used knives to damage the tent so they could see what was outside, rather than going out through the front, shows that whatever was outside the tent was deeply alarming and probably life threatening.

Nothing is known about what caused the group to behave in such a completely irrational way, which would lead to their certain deaths once they had left the confines of the tent.

The bulk of this chapter is constructed from the group diary for the period of their journey along with comments made by the sole survivor, Yury Yudin.

  
1.
  Dyatlov group diary extract.

  
2.
  Dyatlov group diary extract.

  
3.
  The nuclear accident that happened in 1958 in which Krivonischenko took part in rescue operations actually took place at a closed city known as Chelyabinsk 40, not far from Kyshtym, but it is referred to as the Kyshtym Accident or Incident.

  
4.
  See
The Decryption of a Picture
by Henry S. Lowenhaupt (declassified CIA files available on the Internet) – a fascinating account of how information was extracted from a single photograph in the July 1958 issue of Russian magazine
Oganek
on how power was supplied to atomic facilities in the Urals. The picture showed the Sverdlovsk Central Despatching Office of the Urals Electric Power System. Charles V. Reeves (working for the CIA’s nuclear energy power division) was able over a period of time to work out the power consumed by the plants from diagrams on a board in the photograph
www.cia.gov/library
.

  
5.
  See
The Decryption of a Picture
by Henry S. Lowenhaupt
www.cia.gov/library
.

  
6.
  Details from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/ivdel
.

  
7.
  It is possible that some of the ‘workers’ they described are actually workers from the Ivdel camp system, i.e. Gulag prisoners, but there is no mention in the diary.

  
8.
  Illegal songs may have been sung by ex-Gulag prisoners present at the camp.

  
9.
  Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code introduced the notion of an ‘enemy of the worker’ as opposed to an ‘enemy of the people’. The Dyatlov group were, strictly speaking, in contravention of Section 12 of the code, which allowed for the arrest and prosecution of any onlookers who failed to report instances of anyone contravening Section 10 of the code. Section 10 allowed for the arrest and prosecution of anyone indulging in ‘propaganda or agitation against the Soviet Union’. Article 58 was extensively rewritten after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin.

Despite the events of the night of 1/2 February being more than fifty years ago at the time of writing, it is still well within the living memory of many people. The geopolitical situation has completely changed in that time and these changes have probably been more marked in the present-day Russian Federation than anywhere else.

In January 1959, a number of the Dyatlov group were students at Ural Polytechnic Institute (UPI) and their day-to-day lives were dominated by the background of the Cold War, particularly as the city they were living and studying in (Sverdlovsk) was the centre of a large region containing nuclear, industrial and military facilities that were all geared towards achieving dominance over capitalism in the USA and the West. Control of the numerous military facilities for the whole region came under the Ural Military District, which had sent over 2 million men to fight against the Nazis during the Second World War. As will be examined in later chapters, a number of the military aspects of the Cold War are to surface in more than one theory concerning the fate of the Dyatlov group.

Despite the death of Josef Stalin six years previously, the Soviet Union in 1959 was still a repressive state ruled with an iron rod by the Communist Party under the premier, Nikita Khrushchev, who had come through the war years as a political commissar and was a shrewd politician. Khrushchev ensured the removal of his main rival for power, Lavrenti Beria, the Minister of the Interior under Stalin.

The tragedy that befell the Dyatlov group is best understood in terms of the Cold War: in some of the theories as to what actually happened to them, and also in understanding their behaviour as good young communists.

The Cold War can be loosely described as the United States of America and the Soviet Union eyeing each other warily like two prizefighters pacing around a ring waiting for the fight to begin, with their supporters (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) in each corner waiting to jump into the ring and join in the fight as soon as it started.

After the end of the Korean War, the Cold War tension started to build up again in 1956 with a perception by the USA of what was known as the ‘Bomber Gap’. This was a term used to describe what the USA felt was a superiority in numbers of long-range bombers by the Soviet Air Force over the US Air Force. It was a completely erroneous view and had arisen as a result of growing concerns of Soviet bomber numbers and capabilities after the first mention in the West in February 1954 of the new Myasishchev M-4 (NATO codenamed Bison) bomber. The issue was exacerbated as a result of an observation at the Aviation Day at Tushino Airfield in Moscow in July 1955 when ten M-4 Bison bombers flew past the viewing stands and then, unknown to the majority of the observers on the ground, flew around and repeated the flypast no fewer than six times, which led the observers to think that a total of 60 M-4 Bisons had taken part in the flypast.
1
Analysts in the West worked out that at this rate of production, the USSR would build 600 bombers in a very short period of time. President Eisenhower did not believe the numbers, and the deployment of U-2 spy flights over the USSR was to eventually prove this to be the case, but that had not stopped massive resources being poured into the US Air Force to build up a gigantic fleet of its own bombers (over 2,000 Boeing B-47s and well over 700 Boeing B-52s).

The ‘Bomber Gap’ was followed by the ‘Missile Gap’. In 1957 the term ‘Missile Gap’ was used to describe the disparity between the numbers and power of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) between the USA and the USSR, with the numbers held by the Russians considered to be vastly superior in quantity and power to the US arsenal. The estimates that had been put forward in a report by the Security Resources Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (known as the Gaither Committee) were totally incorrect, but had basically been a useful way of frightening an already jittery voting public into going along with vast increases in military budgets in order to close the so-called ‘gap’. The ‘Missile Gap’ disappeared with the production of a CIA National Intelligence Estimate on 3 November 1959.

These events were compounded by the launch of the world’s first space satellite,
Sputnik 1
, on 4 October 1957, which gave the impression that the Soviet Union was leading the Americans in what became known as the Space Race.

The Cold War had not quite reached its height and the Cuban Missile Crisis was still over three and a half years away when, in the same month that the Dyatlov group set out on their fateful journey, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos entered Havana in Cuba – on 4 January 1959 – with Fidel Castro entering the city two days later. The following day, 7 January 1959, the USA recognised Fidel Castro’s new government. Fulgencio Batista had officially been ousted and Castro became Prime Minister on 16 February 1959.

The reality of the Cold War was to come close to Sverdlovsk when Francis Gary Powers was shot down by an S-75 missile (NATO codename SA-2 Guideline) on 1 May 1960 in his Lockheed U2 spy plane near to the village of Kosulino, not far from where the Dyatlov group had set off on their fateful journey just over a year earlier in January 1959. Powers was first detained by residents of Kosulino, who initially thought he was a Soviet cosmonaut who had returned to earth.

Over in the USA in 1959 Alaska had just become the forty-ninth US state, and the contrast between the day-to-day life in the USA with the dour austere life in the USSR could not have been greater. Despite colossal spending on the military, Khrushchev had wanted to improve the lot of the average Soviet citizen and looked to improve the quality of life in a number of areas. While Khrushchev pondered the question of raising Soviet living standards, the American Dream was being played out in full in the USA. Whereas students and young people in the USSR, like the Dyatlov group, tried to find their entertainment in activities such as hiking to remote areas where conversation and ideas could be freely expressed, their counterparts in the USA were immersed in pop culture: R. Berry Gordy Jr founded Motown Records on 12 January 1959; 3 February 1959 was the ‘day the music died’ when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (the Big Bopper) were in a Beechcraft Bonanza piloted by Roger Peterson when it crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa, killing all four of them; the Marx Brothers made their last TV appearance in
The Incredible Jewel Robbery
on 8 March 1959; the following day, the Barbie doll made its debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York (9 March 1959 is also Barbie’s official birth date incidentally).    

Against the backdrop of the American Dream, the arms race and space race were taken as seriously by the Americans as by the Russians. The Americans were pushing ahead with their quest for dominance in ICBMs, with the first successful firing of a Titan ICBM at Cape Canaveral on 6 February 1959. This was later followed by the launch of the submarine USS
George Washington
on 9 June 1959, becoming the first sub to carry ballistic missiles. On 9 April 1959 NASA announced its selection of seven military pilots for astronaut training – to become the first US astronauts. On 28 May 1959 the Americans sent into space a pair of monkeys named Able
and Miss Baker, aboard a Jupiter AM-18 rocket, as the first living beings to successfully return to Earth from space.