Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident (24 page)

Yudin similarly recalls the families being infuriated with regional officials. “The families wrote letters and were in an uproar to have their funeral in the city.” He remembers them insisting: “We want to visit our families, our kids. We want to visit them at their graves.”

When the families stood their ground, demanding the return of the bodies, a compromise was reached between city authorities and the parents of the deceased. They would be allowed to bury their children in Sverdlovsk, but under the condition that the funeral not be a single event. The memorial services, they stipulated, would be divided into two services held on two separate days. Minimizing the funeral turnout, and therefore minimizing the deaths of the young hikers, was the authorities’ express intention, Yudin says. “They wanted to pretend that nothing happened.”

20

2012

MY COMPANIONS AND I HAD LESS THAN TWO HOURS TO
find School #41 and be back in our seats before the train departed. The trains here, I was told, were Mussolini punctual. Much of Russia’s industry had been privatized, but the railway system remained stubbornly state owned. We dared not put its efficiency to the test.

As we stepped out into Serov, I looked back at the old pre-Revolution station, pleased to see that the masonry structure hadn’t been rebuilt since the Dyatlov group set foot here. On that January morning in 1959, the attendants hadn’t allowed any of the passengers inside the station, and the ten weary hikers had been forced to look for shelter elsewhere. School #41 had become their impromptu hotel. We had no idea if the school still existed, but Kuntsevich suggested that we set out on foot toward the most concentrated area of town. We headed down a snowy road bordered by rustic houses and winter-beaten trees with their tops sawed off. I noticed that the log-cabin-style houses we were passing were the very same ones that appeared in the photographs Igor and his friends took here—images I had developed from the negatives Kuntsevich had given me on my previous trip. I remembered a slightly blurred picture of the oldest member of their group, Sasha Zolotaryov, standing between two such log houses, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Next, there was an image of a mother and her adolescent daughter, posing obediently for the camera, their heads wrapped in snug winter scarves.

Along the way we came upon convenience shops that sold common items such as combs, lotions and toothbrushes. We stopped at one or two of these shops to ask for directions, but when Kuntsevich inquired about the school, the proprietors only shook their heads. I remembered from the hikers’ diary entries that the station had been fairly close to the school, close enough for the children to have followed the hikers back to their train. If we didn’t come across something soon, we’d have to try the other end of town. But about a quarter mile down the road, we found a building that stood out amid the houses. It was three stories of concrete painted a faded yellow, with red-framed windows and a peeling blue fence. There was nothing to indicate that this was a school, but the primary colors of the place seemed to evoke childhood. When I took a closer look at the windows, I could make out the universal sign of an elementary school: paper snowflakes taped to glass.

We entered the building and found a security guard at the front desk. Voroshchuk and Kuntsevich made their inquiries, and after a moment, Kuntsevich gave me the signal that this was indeed School #41. Through Voroshchuk, I learned that the security guard was surprised by our visit: No one had ever come to ask about the hikers, at least not since he’d started working there. After a moment’s hesitation, he agreed to accompany us on a quick tour of the building.

As we started down the main corridor, the first thing I noticed was that the building was oddly empty for a Tuesday afternoon. There were no children in sight and, aside from the guard, no staff that I could see. Like many of the Russian buildings I’d been in, the place felt suspended in time. The walls were painted in a two-tone parfait of lime green and off-white, a color scheme not unlike that of the hikers’ dorms. I later learned that this particular shade of green was often used in Soviet public spaces because of its durability and low cost.

The time-capsule nature of the building, and the absence of children and teachers, allowed me to easily project Igor and his
friends into this space. I stepped away from my companions for a moment to stick my head into an empty classroom. I had no way of knowing which room the hikers had visited, but this one would do as well as any other. I imagined the ten hikers assembled at the head of the room, thirty pairs of eyes watching them with rapt attention. Sasha and Zina had been the stars that day—Sasha with his brief lecture about hiking, and later his playful song. Zina, of course, had won the children over with her general ease and magnetic personality. Yudin’s diary entry had even captured humorous scraps of their dialogue:

Sasha: “Children, we’ll tell you about . . . Hiking is . . . provides opportunities . . .” (Kids are sitting silent in fear.)

Zina: “Blah-blah-blah, you there, what’s your name, where did you go? Oh great, you even stayed in tents!” (and so on, and so forth)
.

I was eager to ask the guard if he knew anything more about the group passing through here, but just as this thought occurred to me, a man came in from outside, and told us we had to leave—immediately. He then asked us for our “papers.” I didn’t stick around to find out who the man was, as I had unwisely left my passport and Russian invitation on the train. I managed to slip away from the others and out a side door before he noticed me.

After reboarding the train, Kuntsevich told me we were very lucky to have found the school. The Dyatlov group, he said, were “with us in spirit.”

WE PULLED INTO IVDEL JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT
. AS I peered out the windows of the train, a sense of unease came over me: The buildings were dark and the clouds veiled any existing
moonlight. My creeping sense of foreboding had likely little to do with the darkness and more to do with the town’s history, of which I had been able to learn a little before my trip. We were now in Gulag territory. In Stalin’s time, and for decades afterward, there had been nearly a hundred labor camps in Ivdel—most of them devoted to the incarceration and torture of political dissidents.

In his 1973 “literary investigation,”
The Gulag Archipelago
, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: “If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”

The Gulags of Solzhenitsyn’s description were gone, but Ivdel’s economy still revolved around the penal system. Because of the moratorium placed on the death penalty in 1996, convicts who would have otherwise been executed were now serving out life sentences in the country’s most remote prison camps. One maximum-security prison just outside of Ivdel is still home to some of Russia’s worst criminals—though today, their offenses are mostly of a violent nature instead of a political one.

When I stepped onto the station platform, the darkness was startling, with the only light coming from the train and a few station lights. My companions and I walked down the street to await
the arrival of what I was told would be our “military transport” to the village of Ushma. Kuntsevich warned that the road there would be quite rough, and that even if the weather cooperated, we wouldn’t get there until early morning. We would be taking a slightly different route than the hikers did fifty-three years ago, only passing near what had been the woodcutting settlement of Sector 41. The settlement had long since been demolished and there would be nothing to see, even if we were to stop there. As we waited for our transport, I realized that though we weren’t tracing the hikers’ steps precisely, this ride would be similar to the one Yudin had endured with his growing back and leg pain.

Thirty minutes later, the headlights of our transport appeared, and a white van with a leather bra cover rolled up in front of the station. Other than a set of impressive tires and a high-beam spotlight on the roof that looked ready to blind every creature within a 50-yard radius, the vehicle looked more like a souped-up ’70s Volkswagen than anything out of the Russian military. The inside was outfitted with a metal bench and bucket seats bolted to a floral carpeted floor. Kuntsevich claimed shotgun to better help the driver, while the rest of us climbed in the back. With our gear piled on the carpet, Kuntsevich shut the side door and we were off.

We once again found ourselves in darkness. The windows were blacked out from the inside with a kind of camouflage covering. It was unlikely we’d be passing any lighted streets, but I held out hope that a bit of light, moonlight even, would filter in to give me something to focus on. But as the vehicle pulled away, I quickly realized that my claustrophobia was here for the duration. As I tried to transfer my attention from myself to the goal ahead, memories of previous vertigo spells began to assert themselves. Just a few months before, one of my spells had landed me in the hospital for overnight observation. Vertigo can manifest itself as nausea, vomiting and loss of equilibrium. I tend to experience all three. With my last attack, I had been useless for forty-eight hours,
either curled up in bed or positioned over a toilet bowl, completely unable to focus and barely able to walk. I had been so dehydrated from repeated vomiting that during my ambulance ride to the hospital, paramedics had been unable to locate a vein in which to pump fluids into my system.

I hadn’t told Kuntsevich or Borzenkov of my preexisting condition. Either I hadn’t seen the need to or I didn’t want to give them a reason to dismiss me. I had planned to stay alert on this journey, but this dark rumbling box was starting to feel like a moving coffin. So without a word to my companions, I popped a pill and lay back on the bench. As I waited for a Valium-induced sleep to arrive, I wondered if the young Yuri Yudin would have continued with his friends to Otorten Mountain had he been in possession of such powerful drugs. Lucky for him, he only had aspirin.

Funeral procession to Mikhaylovskoye Cemetery, March 9, 1959.