Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident (11 page)

Kuntsevich went to the corner and roused his guest from his bed on the couch. Yudin arose sleepily and held out his hand in greeting. He stood at about five-foot-seven and had a full head of spiky gray hair. There was something delicate about the way he moved, even for a man in his mid-seventies, reminding me of his various lifelong ailments. We shook hands before he shuffled into the kitchen to make tea.

I had worried that it might be difficult for him to talk about the tragedy, and indeed, when Yudin returned to the room, my fears were confirmed. Through our translator, he explicitly laid down the rules for our conversation. The focus of the story should not be about him, he said, and everything about the tragedy had already been told. He then turned his clear, slate-blue eyes toward me: “Do
you not have mysteries in your own country that are unsolved?” Of course I did. What could I say? In lieu of an answer, I smiled and suggested we sit down at a table in the center of the room. He picked up my tape recorder and examined it with curiosity. Yudin then told me something that had not occurred to me. Today was February 27, fifty-three years ago to the day that the first bodies of the hikers had been discovered.

It was Yudin who started with the questions: Which picture do you want to paint? The one rooted in the Revolution, or that of the Iron Curtain? Puzzled, I told him that while the political backdrop of the time certainly interested me, I wasn’t looking for a political angle on the story. But, because he appeared to be expecting me to choose, I stammered something about the Iron Curtain being of interest. This answer appeared to please him and he began.

Outdoor exploration had been a huge part of young Soviets’ lives in the late ’50s, Yudin said, and hikers like the Dyatlov group had used expeditions to escape the confines of big cities. “After Stalin died,” he said, “things opened up more, and students could go almost anywhere within the country. But we still couldn’t go abroad.” To Yudin and his friends, the next best thing to international travel had been escaping into the wilderness, which held a romance all its own. Yet at the same time, domestic
tourists
were providing a useful service in helping to map out uncharted regions of the country, particularly Siberia and the Ural Mountains.

Fraternity, equality and respect were considered the reigning values among Russian hikers. “If someone was not friendly or did not work well within the group, they were not invited back,” Yudin said. Furthermore, women were on equal footing with men. In his view, unlike the culture then prevalent in the United States—where women’s careers hadn’t advanced much beyond their prewar positions as telephone operators, schoolteachers and secretaries—there were fewer limitations on women of the Soviet Union at the time.
This equality was reflected in the Dyatlov group, where Zina and Lyuda were considered as capable as their male counterparts. “Within the team there was no gender. We were all equal in everything. We had a strict code of ethics and discipline. At that time, the most important goal was the spirit of being together as a team, and overcoming the distance.”

Given Yudin’s rheumatism and the accompanying arthritic symptoms that had plagued him since childhood, his decision to join the Dyatlov group may have seemed counterintuitive. But the challenges that came with hiking and mountaineering allowed him to better cope with his chronic condition, both mentally and physically. The very illness that had driven him to the sport, and had potentially put Yudin in harm’s way, had also, in his words, become his “salvation.”

To my surprise, talk of his illness led Yudin to open up about his poor childhood, which was spent in the town of Emelyashevka, a half-day’s drive outside of Yekaterinburg. During the summers he had walked barefoot outside so that he could preserve his only pair of shoes for the winter months. In instances where he had to wear shoes at his destination, he would tie them to a stick and carry them over his shoulder as he walked. During the Second World War, food rations were the norm. “I tried sugar for the first time when I came to school,” he told me. “I was seven and it was wartime, and nobody had anything. The government was giving us a loaf of bread and a teaspoon of sugar, which we’d spread out on the bread.”

Yudin’s much older brother served as an aviator during the war and survived. Their father also served, but was not so lucky. His death left Yudin’s illiterate mother to care for him and his older sister. It was a difficult time, Yudin said, but conditions improved for his family when his brother returned from the war and was able to segue into a teaching career.

The post-Stalinist period came with new opportunities for Yudin’s generation, including wider access to education. After the Dyatlov tragedy, Yudin went on to earn his degree in geology from UPI. After attending graduate school for economics, he moved north to Solikamsk, a mining city in the Perm district, where he settled into a career as an engineer in a magnesium plant. Yudin worked at the same Solikamsk plant his entire life before his retirement from factory life in the late ’90s.

After the tragedy, Yudin’s rheumatism abated enough for him to continue enjoying the outdoors. Yudin has retained his love of hiking and has continued to organize trips into the Urals. “It’s a university tradition which carries on,” he said proudly. “Hiking has always been my hobby. And of course what happened in 1959 was a horrible thing, but it’s what I do.”

Talk turned to the upcoming expedition, which was still over a week away. Kuntsevich interrupted our conversation to inform us that weather conditions in the northern Ural Mountains were going to be very unpredictable. Sudden blizzards and violent winds were a real threat, and a clear sky could lull one into a false sense of security. And once you’re above the tree line, there’s no place to seek cover. I nodded my understanding that I was aware of the dangers. But if his intention was to spook me, he had succeeded. I reluctantly wrapped up my talk with Yudin for the day, and we made a plan to resume the following morning.

That night after dinner, I slipped out of the apartment in search of a beer to soothe my growing agitation. I found a bar within ten minutes, tucked below street level in the subbasement of a concrete building. The three beers I ended up drinking there were a bad idea, and by the time I left the cigarette-choked bar and was walking home, a strange paranoia overtook me. Kuntsevich had found out earlier in the day that the car hired to pick me up at the airport a few days prior had been deliberately banged up after dropping me off. Kuntsevich theorized that the FSB, the modern equivalent of
the KGB, had damaged the hired car as a warning for me to stop looking into the case. I had found Kuntsevich’s Cold War–level of paranoia amusing, endearing even, but as I walked home that night, it seemed that everyone I passed on the street was looking at me a beat too long. What if Kuntsevich was right, and I wasn’t welcome here? I hurried back to the apartment, touched to find that Olga had stayed up past her bedtime to make sure I returned safely.

9

JANUARY 25, 1959

WHEN THE TEN HIKERS ARRIVED IN IVDEL, IT WAS STILL
dark, and a half-day’s wait lay ahead of them for their next means of transportation. For those traveling from Sverdlovsk, a ski-hiking excursion into the Urals meant several days of assorted travel in order to get anywhere near the point where they would begin using their skis. And because the railway deviated east from Ivdel, the group would have to take a bus to continue north to Vizhay. There, at their last civilized outpost, they would have a chance to send out any final dispatches before slipping off the radar.

Once again, Yuri Blinov and his group were shadowing Igor and his friends. Blinov, who would later become a devoted member of the search team, wrote in his diary of this period, “Together we went through all the transitions between trains, buses and trucks in Serov, Ivdel and Vizhay. In other words, on our way we still communicated like members of the same hiking team.” After spending the night at the Ivdel train station—a far more obliging terminal, as it turned out, than its counterpart in Serov—the hikers caught a tram to Ivdel proper. Situated at the junction of the Ivdel and Lozva rivers, the town existed first as a gold-mining settlement, and later as the location of the Ivdellag—a Soviet prison camp built in 1937.

Unknown to most Westerners until the 1963 English-language publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
—and, later,
The Gulag Archipelago
—Stalin’s ramped-up
secret prison system had only been rumored to exist at this time. In fact, the Gulag system predated Hitler’s concentration camps and would go on to function for many decades after the liberation of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It wasn’t until 1989 that Gorbachev finally began to reform the Soviet prison system.

But on their brief stay in the town, the young hikers would see none of the Soviet dissidents exiled to this region; they were focused entirely on readying themselves for their own temporary exile into the Russian wild. At the moment, this meant waiting at the Ivdel bus station. For the men, this would have been an ideal moment to break out the cigarettes and let their lungs fill with the heat of burning tobacco. But, as Zina liked to remind them, they had made a pact not to smoke, and no one had brought any cigarettes. So as they stood in the cold, the only smoke issuing from their mouths was their breath hitting the air.

At last, a small GAZ-651 rolled up. GAZ was a Soviet make of buses and trucks that had been mass-produced since the end of World War II. This particular bus most likely doubled as a transporter to shuttle local workers to and from the camps, but today it was a
tourist
bus. The GAZ had only twenty-five seats, and with the hikers alone numbering twenty, and a handful of locals needing seats of their own, the only solution was to pile baggage and people on top of one another.

If this had been the city, the driver might have felt compelled to turn away the backpackers, but camaraderie forms quickly in small towns, and everyone involved was determined to make it work. As the bus left Ivdel, the travelers were balanced comically on several layers of backpacks, skis and each other. “Top-layer passengers sat on chairbacks,” the Dyatlov group’s diary recounted, “with their legs on the shoulders of comrades.” But their discomfort didn’t stop Georgy from filling the air with the strumming of his mandolin, or his fellow passengers from singing along, as Ivdel receded through the windows.

The two-hour bus ride was an “express” of sorts, stopping only for bathroom breaks. In rural parts of the country—as is still in practice in Russia today—bathroom stops were at the whim of the bus driver, and when he pulled over, the doors were thrown open to the collective urinal of the roadside. Women filed along the left side of the bus, while the men went to the right.

At one of the more comfortable rest stops along the way, the bus to Vizhay parked near a shop, which allowed the passengers to stray farther from the bus and for longer than was usual. Because the vehicle was such a muddled heap of baggage and passengers, after it finally pulled away, it took the hikers some time to realize that someone was missing from their ranks:
Where’s Kolevatov?

It was certainly unlike the disciplined Kolevatov to have missed his ride. Was it possible that he had slipped away for an illicit smoke break? “He was always smoking an antique pipe during hikes,” Yudin later remembered his friend, “fuming everyone with an aroma of real tobacco.”

None of the hikers would have thought to keep tabs on Kolevatov because he tended to look out for himself. Yudin describes him as being a careful person, bordering at times on pedantic. But Kolevatov’s reputation had soared among those at the university’s hiking club the previous summer after his return from a hiking excursion into Siberia. The trip had taken Kolevatov’s group along the Kazyr River and through a particularly challenging section of the Bazybay rapids. When their raft overturned, and nearly all of their belongings were lost, it was Kolevatov’s foresight that saved the lives of his group: He was the only one to have properly secured his pack to the raft. Because he had the sole pack of flour and book of matches, he saved the group from starvation.

Whereas one of the other passengers might have been forced to stay behind to wait for the next day’s bus, the intrepid Kolevatov wouldn’t let his mistake ruin the trip. He did the only thing he could: He ran. The driver had a schedule to keep and couldn’t alter
his route or turn the bus around, but he agreed to wait. The hikers peered out the bus windows until they could see the figure of their friend sprinting toward them. Though Yudin doesn’t recall why Kolevatov missed the bus, he remembers how frightened his friend looked at having been nearly abandoned. When he boarded the bus, “His eyes were bulging from his head.”

Years later, Yudin couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if they had neglected to notice his absence until later. “Maybe he would have had to turn back, to wait the next day for the bus to Vizhay. The entire group would have been delayed by a day. It is difficult not to wonder: How would it have changed things?”