Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident (13 page)

Meanwhile, about a mile away in the Lozva River valley, Mikhail Sharavin and another member of Slobtsov’s group, Yuri Koptelov, are scouting an area suitable for camp. With the growing number of searchers, they’ll need a place to sleep for the night and a central base where they can store equipment and send radiograms back to Ivdel. Scouting out the evening’s campsite is not the most thrilling task, but it’s an order from Ivdel, and Sharavin doesn’t argue.

Around midday, the young men come across a spot that doesn’t seem quite right. Beneath a large cedar tree, they notice charred cedar boughs partially buried by snow. As they draw closer, they find what looks like traces of a fire pit. The haphazard nature of the pit tells them this was not a proper campsite. Nor does it appear to
be the remains of a Mansi fire, as the Mansi tended to stick close to the woods and river to set their winter fur traps.

Footprints made by one of the nine hikers,, February 1959.

Just north of the pit, one of the men points to something sticking out of the snow. As they draw closer, they see that it is a human knee.

SHARAVIN AND KOPTELOV LEAVE THE SITE UNDISTURBED
and head back to camp to alert the others. A group including Yevgeny Maslennikov is dispatched to the cedar tree; and, when the snow is excavated from around the exposed knee, they find not one body, but two, lying side by side, both men. They are not wearing jackets, or, for that matter, pants. One has on a checkered shirt and a pair of swim trunks under long underwear. Only the right leg of the underwear remains, with the other leg torn away. His feet are bare,
with snow wedged between his toes. The other body is slightly more covered, in an undershirt, a checkered shirt, long underwear, briefs and socks. But the clothes on both bodies are brutally shredded, with pieces apparently missing, leaving much of their discolored skin exposed. One lies facedown in the snow, his arms folded under his head like a pillow. There are broken cedar branches lying beneath him. The other lies on his back, his face turned upward. His mouth and eyes have been gotten at by an animal, probably a bird.

A piece of clothing found near the cedar tree, February 1959.

Despite the damage to his face, Sharavin and Koptelov are able to recognize the upturned hiker as Georgy Krivonishchenko. The body lying face down is his classmate, Yuri Doroshenko.

11

2012

MY FIRST INTERVIEW WITH YURI YUDIN HAD BEEN
predictably stiff, but by our second meeting, he was relaxing into my company and joking about my fascination with the case. Like Kuntsevich, Yudin was perplexed by the idea of an American traveling to Russia to solve a mystery that by all appearances had nothing to do with him. “Do you not have mysteries in your own country?” he asked again, teasing this time.

As we sat down and I started the tape recorder, Yudin pulled out a yellowed songbook he used to take with him on hiking trips. Because there were few public radio stations broadcasting music in the ’50s, he and his friends often had to make their own music. It was the beginning of what he called “an era of the bards,” in which lyrics about love, nature and politics—accompanied by mandolin or guitar—became popular among Russia’s youth. Bard songs, much like folk music in America, had spontaneously sprung up outside of the establishment. For those who wished to avoid reprisals from the Soviet government, these songs had to be memorized, as any recordings could serve as evidence against them. “We would be sitting on the train, and maybe one hundred students would be singing songs,” Yudin said. “Sometimes they were very antigovernment, but no one worried about it.”

On shorter trips, Yudin and his friends might take along a portable record player, and at night in the tent, they would play
bard, jazz and classical music. Many of their records were etched on a kind of vinyl called
roentgenizdat
or “bone records,” which were illegal. During World War II, rationing in Russia had made vinyl prohibitively expensive, and cheap X-ray film became the bootleg music industry’s substitute. After purchasing a used X-ray plate for a ruble or two from a medical facility, music lovers could cut the plate into a disk with scissors or a knife before having it etched with their favorite tunes. Students studying engineering, I was told, particularly excelled in this bootlegging process.

But even a thawed Khrushchev regime had its standards to uphold, and in 1959 the government began a crackdown on this illicit music market. One government tactic was to flood record shops with unplayable records, many intended to damage record players. Some of these records included threatening vocals placed in the middle of a recording, which screamed at the unsuspecting listener, “You like rock and roll? Fuck you, anti-Soviet slime!” Eventually the use of bone records declined as replacement technologies, such as magnetic reel-to-reel tape, took over. But until then, bone-record makers were hunted down and sent to the Gulags. Particularly offensive to the Soviet government were bootleggers who reproduced American jazz records, music Stalin had declared a “threat to civilization.”

Despite the capricious brutality of the Soviet government, Yudin remembers those times fondly. “We were poor, but we could live well because everything was cheap. The government helped us. They gave us money. And when it came to our hiking expeditions, they gave us money as well. . . . Now, under the Putin government, we are plankton. Now money is the authority. Money buys you freedom. I’m spitting on Yeltsin!” What Yudin said next sounded not only strange to my Western ears, but also surprising given his impoverished upbringing under Stalinist rule: “After Stalin’s death, everybody cried, everybody was sad. . . . I think that Stalin did the right thing and that he was a great man.”

As Yudin was telling me this, I noticed our translator shaking her head in vigorous disagreement. He didn’t appear to notice her stern disapproval, and continued: “That said, I hate Lenin. He was not a good man. . . . Again, this is only my opinion.” Before I could ask why he thought Stalin deserved such praise and not Lenin, Yudin abruptly segued into talk of the Dyatlov group’s leader: “You could almost say that Igor was a totalitarian type of a leader at times. He decided everything.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d been told of Igor’s dictatorial qualities. On my last trip I’d met with Aleksey Budrin, a friend of Igor’s from UPI, who described how Igor had enforced peculiar rules on hiking trips, including the strictest personal hygiene. “We had to wash our feet every night, even though sometimes we didn’t have a heater and maybe no hot water in winter,” Budrin said. “You have to be quite a strong-willed man to make others do it because some people didn’t want to. . . . It was quite unusual because no other hikers did anything like this, only Dyatlov.”

There were more stories like this among the diary entries I’d had translated, including one from a 1957 summer excursion Igor had led into the Caucasus—a hiking party that included Zina and Kolya. En route, the group’s westbound train passed through Stalingrad, inspiring Igor to pen a journal entry describing the still battle-scarred city. But beneath Igor’s earnest descriptions of shell holes and Battle of Stalingrad memorials, Zina scribbled a teasing addendum. She described how Igor had intended to leave the group’s backpacks on the train despite protests from the others that someone needed to stand guard. “At first Igor gave his decisive ‘no,’ ” wrote Zina, “but when the guys assaulted him again, he stood and thought for a long time like some Napoleon, and then said quietly, ‘Kolya and you, Zina, will stay.’ ”

As much as Igor preferred to control the course of the trips he led, the actual route of their final trip to Otorten Mountain had not, in fact, been his idea. “Originally it was the idea of some
other hiking students,” Yudin explained, “but they weren’t good organizers and they failed to find people to go. And then our group decided to do it because Igor in particular had tremendous organizing skills.”

In the years after the tragedy, one of the things that hurt Yudin most was how Igor and the others had been portrayed. Some of the published books, he felt, were merely searching for a lurid angle on the story: “Much has been made of the hikers’ relationships with the opposite sex—that somehow arguments with the girls led to their deaths. This,” he said, “is bullshit.”

Then what did Yudin believe? In response to my questions, he made it clear that he didn’t think the fate of his friends had anything to do with natural phenomena. “The number one possibility in my mind,” he said, “is that it was people who came with guns because they were in an area they shouldn’t have been in or they saw something they shouldn’t have seen.” He went on to say that the armed men had coerced the hikers into fabricating a scene to throw off investigators. The men forced them to walk into the forest half-naked, and to shred their own clothes before being left to die. “So they were forced to do it, to create this kind of madness.”

The clue that most convinced Yudin that the hikers had been led by gunpoint was Lyuda’s missing tongue. The reigning skeptic’s interpretation was that nine bodies lying out in the open for days and weeks are going to attract animals, and that, not unlike the bird that damaged Georgy’s face, the soft tissue of Lyuda’s tongue had been a target for rodents. Yudin, however, doubted this explanation. “If it had been a mouse, it would have happened to everyone, to all the bodies.” Instead, he believed someone had singled out Lyuda for punishment, possibly because she had been the most strong-willed and outspoken of the group. “Was it just an animal, or did she talk too much and that was a warning from government officials?”

In addition, a charm that Lyuda carried with her everywhere, a small stuffed toy in the shape of a hedgehog, had not been found
on her body. “She always carried it with her, but it was missing.” He pointed out that the chocolate the hikers had with them was also gone, with no evidence of the wrappers. Did someone whom the hikers encountered in the woods take these items, thinking that no one would notice? If so, who?

Later that night, as I reviewed the tape of our interview, I couldn’t help but feel slightly deflated that Yudin stood squarely in the company of Dyatlov case conspiracists. Lyuda’s toy was among the objects found at the campsite, and there was no evidence of her tongue being cut out, just missing. For all his connection to the tragedy, he was apparently no different from the many who suspected a government cover-up. In fact, his theory was nearly identical to the one related to me by Kuntsevich, who thought secret government case files would eventually prove him and others like him right.