In 1959, UPI—along with many of the educational institutions in the Soviet Union—was experiencing a kind of renaissance. Khrushchev had taken office a few years earlier with aims to alleviate the cultural suppression of the Stalin years. His reforms resulted in a rapid flowering of the arts, sciences and athletics—a nationwide post-Stalinist softening known as “the Thaw.” For artists and intellectuals, the Khrushchev years were badly needed irrigation after decades of cultural drought.
“Few men in history have had such long and devastating effects—and not only on their own countries but on the whole world as a whole—[as Stalin],” writes Robert Conquest in the introduction to his definitive study of the Russian leader, Stalin: Breaker of Nations. “For two whole generations Stalin’s heritage has lain heavy on the chests of a dozen nations, and the threat of it has loomed over all the others, in the fearful possibility of nuclear war. Stalin, to whom the aura of death clings so strongly, is himself only now ceasing to live on in the system he created. When he died in 1953 he left a monster whose own death throes are not yet over, more than a generation later.”
Even so, after Stalin’s death, intellectual society opened up for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution, resulting in more freedoms and opportunities for everyday people. This heady and short-lived period in Russian history was particularly liberating for those who had survived the devastating losses of World War II and, before that, the punishing show trials of the ’30s—famously fictionalized in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon—during which Stalin had imprisoned and murdered perceived political rivals.
In the mid- to late-’50s, for the first time in decades, young Russians felt a renewed sense of promise—sports, the arts, technology and accessible education were all part of this new optimism. It was a hopeful period that wouldn’t recur in Russian history until the fall of the Soviet Union some three decades later. By Soviet standards, the Thaw was an exhilarating time to be young, physically fit and intellectually curious. The ten members of the Dyatlov group were all of these.
IT IS IN THIS YEAR OF CULTURAL FLOWERING, 1959, ON a day in February, that Igor Dyatlov’s younger sister, Rufina, is leaving campus. At twenty-one years old, she is a pretty version of her brother, with a penetrating gaze and the well-defined bone structure found often in Slavic faces. The siblings are close and share a passion for science and technology. Rufina is, in fact, following Igor’s example by majoring in radio engineering at UPI.
Mid-February is the time of year when campus fills up with students recently returned from home or—in the case of the sports club—hiking expeditions. By now most of the hiking groups have returned in time for the new term, their young minds and lungs invigorated by the recent weeks spent in crisp mountain air. But Rufina’s brother is not among the returned. In fact, Rufina has just come from a frustrating meeting at the administrative building. It is February 16, three days after Igor was due home, and no one seems particularly worried.
Perhaps the university’s lack of concern is due to the hiking commission’s having thoroughly checked the soundness of Igor’s proposed route. Or maybe it’s because delays are routine in the world of mountaineering, particularly in winter. With no way for the hikers to communicate with their hometown—aside from the occasional telegram sent from an outpost—should they run up against delays, there is little for their families to do but wait.
Rufina is not looking forward to informing her family that her errand at the university has failed. Perhaps she will keep the news from her twelve-year-old sister, Tatiana, who is still so young and very attached to her older brother. Tatiana needn’t know that the school administrators were unsympathetic to Rufina’s pleas, and that they had given her only noncommittal responses and baseless assurances. A group of student hikers is missing, Rufina thinks, and no one outside the hikers’ families seems to care. Not that she didn’t detect a degree of unease among the members of the UPI sports club, but most everyone seems to agree that Igor, their hiking star, and his companions are simply late. Delays happen. All it takes is one hiker to sprain an ankle and the progress of the entire group slows to a hobble.
But Rufina knows her brother and is familiar with his strengths as an outdoorsman. Igor, in the fashion of their older brother, Slava, is a tourist—though not in the Western sense of the word. A tourist in the Russian sense is much closer to adventurer: a hiker or skier who journeys into the wilderness to explore new territory and push past personal limits of endurance. And Igor, in the eyes of his fellow hikers, is a tourist of the highest magnitude. But where his classmates at the hiking club see this as reason to expect his return, Rufina only finds more cause for worry. If a man as capable and careful as her brother hasn’t returned by now, she reasons, it could only mean that something is very wrong.
Rufina thinks back to Igor’s previous trips, searching for some kind of precedent for his absence. She thinks of his love of nature and photography, and how his strong visual talents informed his entire approach to nature. His deep love of the outdoors was evident in the way he wrote about his hiking trips in his journals.
Photo taken by Igor Dyatlov, 1958.
July 8. We are in a beautiful meadow, walking along blossoming willow-weed, chamomile, and bluebell. The grass is high, so we walk in single file. The flat, expansive meadow is surrounded by hills, and far away we can see the bluish foothills of the Ural Mountains. The air is warm, the smell of grass is intoxicating, and the birds are chirping—what a dream!
Most of the journal entries from Igor’s trips read this way: tranquil, with a deep appreciation for the plant and animal life of the Urals. There might have been trips during which her brother was caught by surprise by some unforeseen danger, but there had been nothing he wasn’t capable of handling. There was that trip a couple summers ago when Igor and his friends encountered a herd of wild horses, an incident documented in the group’s journal:
Suddenly from behind comes a powerful roar, of some unknown origin but approaching very quickly. We look back and freeze in terror: heading toward us is a herd of wild horses—many, many of them, a whole bunch! The first thought is run! But where to?! Igor commands firmly: “Stop! Nobody move!” We gather in a tight group, some covering their eyes, others with eyes wide open in horror, watching in complete silence the herd of about thirty horses racing towards us at full speed! About fifteen meters before they smash into us, the herd suddenly splits into two and, without slowing down, streams around us, like the river around a rock, and continues on its way.
But summer in the Ural Mountains presents an entirely different set of dangers from those of winter. Rufina knows that winter hiking is far more perilous than hiking in any other season, and that the sooner the university begins to look for her brother, the better her family’s chances of bringing him home safe.
IGOR DYATLOV’S FAMILY IS NOT ALONE IN THEIR UNEASE. On February 13, the day of the Dyatlov group’s appointed return, and in the days following, family members of the hikers begin to express their worry. The parents of Rustik Slobodin are the first to express outward concern. Rustik’s father, Professor Vladimir Slobodin, who teaches at a local agricultural university, phones the UPI Sports Club, at which point he is informed that Lev Gordo, the middle-aged director of the club, is himself on a trip and won’t be returning for several days. Until Gordo returns, the professor is told, little can be done.
As two more days pass, the university’s telephones ring with repeated calls from nervous relatives. They are told variations of the same thing: The Dyatlov group is delayed, the president of the club is absent, nothing can be done at the moment, please be patient. But for the parents of the hikers, assurances from the sports club mean little in the conspicuous absence of their children, and they stay close to the phone. On February 17, bowing to pressure, university officials send an inquiring telegram to Vizhay, the village from which the Dyatlov group would be traveling. Meanwhile, the families make a request to the university for search planes. The request is re
fused.
The following day, club director Lev Gordo returns from his dacha to discover the tempest that has been brewing in his absence. But today, the university is in a position to give the families information, though not the information they are hoping for. A reply telegram has come from Vizhay: “The Dyatlov group did not return.”
This turns out to be the necessary incitement for the university to take action, and a Colonel Georgy Ortyukov, a lecturer of reserve-officer training at UPI, takes charge of assembling a formal search party for the missing hikers. Lev Gordo, meanwhile, together with UPI student Yuri Blinov—whose group had shadowed Dyatlov’s on the first leg of their trip—is assigned to travel the following day to Ivdel, the gateway to the northern Urals.
But the search party’s efforts are stymied before they’ve begun: The Dyatlov group’s approved route is nowhere to be found at the local hiking commission. Either the route has been lost or was never filed. Though their general destination north is known, there is no way to know precisely which route they took within those mountains. Without a definitive map of the hikers’ course, the search party might as well be stepping into the Russian wilderness half blind.
On Friday, February 20, the search for the missing hikers officially begins. Gordo and Blinov fly out from Sverdlovsk by military helicopter and arrive later that day in Ivdel. From there, they take a Yak-12 surveillance plane north toward Vizhay, up the Lozva River, over an abandoned mine, and past Sector 41—a cluster of log cabins populated by woodcutters. The plane then veers west to the Severnaya Toshemka River, where the pair scan the Ural ridge and western Ural slopes. But before they can get far, clouds and strong winds force them to turn back to the airfield for the night.
On the same day Gordo and Blinov are scanning the northern Urals by air, UPI student Yuri Yudin has returned to Sverdlovsk for the new school term. Because he was assumed to be among Igor Dyatlov’s group, his peers are surprised to see his face, and he is put in the position of explaining his peculiar non-absence. During the trip, Yudin’s chronic back pain had reached incapacitating levels, forcing him to turn back early. But instead of returning directly to Sverdlovsk, Yudin had taken a detour to spend the rest of winter break in his home village of Emelyashevka, about 150 miles northeast of Sverdlovsk. There, he took his time and enjoyed the company of his family, unaware of what was happening back at school.
Now, upon his return to campus, Yudin is surprised to learn that his friends have not returned. He knows Igor and the rest were running three days behind, a fact Yudin now realizes he forgot to relay by telegram to the university. Now the original three days of delay has become six. But Yudin is not yet convinced this is cause for alarm, and on his first day back at school, he buries himself in his geology studies and puts his friends out of his mind. Perhaps he believes he is partly to blame for all the fuss. If he had only communicated the Dyatlov party’s delay in the first place, he might have saved the university all this worry. It will be several days before Yudin begins to register his own alarm.
The next day Gordo and Blinov are in the air again, the weather has greatly improved since the previous day. They fly to the Vizhay riverhead and over the Anchucha tributary, which is the territory of the region’s indigenous people: the Mansi. Along with a neighboring tribe, the Khanty, the Mansi occupy sections of the Urals and northwestern Siberia. Their numbers are small, around 6,400, and they live in villages whose economies revolve around hunting, fishing and the herding of reindeer.
The first search team boards a helicopter in Ivdel, February 20, 1959.
Chopper drop-off for search and rescue, February 1959.
Upon landing, Gordo and Blinov approach the Mansi village of Bahtiyarova, a cluster of traditional yurts insulated with reindeer hides. There, the two men learn that a group of student hikers had stopped for tea in the village several weeks before. They were the guests of tribesman Pyotr Bahtiyarov, whose family gives the village its name. The hikers’ stay was reportedly brief, and after they finished their tea, the group moved on, electing not to stay the night. After extracting what information they can from the Mansi, Blinov and Gordo take off again, flying west to the Urals. When they peer out the windows, they are able to make out the tracks of a Mansi sleigh below—evidently a native courtesy in seeing off departing guests. The tracks lead away from Bahtiyarov’s yurt and heading west toward the Urals. But the tracks stop short of the tree line, and from there, any trace of the nine hikers seems to dissolve into the wild.
A diagram used by the rescue teams of the Vizhay forestry area indicating highways and local roads.
Graveyard monument to the Dyatlov group, Mikhaylovskoye Cemetery, Yekaterinburg.
4
2010
IN NOVEMBER 2010, THREE MONTHS AFTER MY INITIAL phone call with Yuri Kuntsevich, and nine months after I’d learned of the Dyatlov tragedy, I found myself traveling to Russia for the first time. The timing wasn’t ideal. My girlfriend, Julia, was seven months pregnant and we were going through all the related joys and upheaval of becoming parents. But we also knew that once the baby arrived, there would be little time for me to spend on the case—so to Russia I went. My close friend of twelve years and film-producing partner, Jason Thompson, graciously agreed to drop everything in order to join me on the trip. Jason shared my enthusiasm for the Dyatlov case and my need to know what happened to the hikers. We flew into Moscow and caught a connecting plane east to Yekaterinburg by way of Aeroflot. Founded by the Soviet government in 1923, Aeroflot is one of the oldest airlines in the world and is the same state-owned airline whose planes were employed in the search for the Dyatlov hikers. In fact, the company’s original insignia, a winged hammer-and-sickle that was emblazoned on the sides of the rescue planes, is still used by the company today.
I was unsure what would happen once we touched down in Yekaterinburg, but I had decided to tamp down the neurotic producer side of my personality and just let the trip wash over me. At this point, my dedication to the project was still in the exploratory stage. I had been initially obsessed with the case, sure, but I wasn’t certain how much of my life I could realistically afford to devote to it. Even so, I kept turning over the same questions: What led the hikers to leave their only shelter? Could the explanation be as simple as an avalanche? Were there really still classified case files hidden away in the Russian archives, as Kuntsevich had told me on the phone? And where was Yuri Yudin?
Over my final weeks of trip preparation, I had also become eager to make contact with Igor Dyatlov’s younger sisters, Tatiana and Rufina, who were rumored to still be living near Yekaterinburg. But like Yudin, after half a century of invasive questions from writers and journalists—many concerning unsubstantiated and salacious claims about the hikers’ personal lives (a lover’s quarrel, jealousy, group in-fighting)—they weren’t exactly handing out interviews.
It was early morning when we landed just southeast of Yekaterinburg at the Koltsovo International Airport. Built under Stalin in the 1920s as a military air base, the airport was now an international hub, the fifth largest in the country. At that point, I was grateful to have Jason by my side to share my total disorientation and lack of anything resembling a plan. All I knew was that we were meeting my one contact, Yuri Kuntsevich, somewhere near the airport exit. I’m not proud to admit that my image of the Dyatlov Foundation president up to this point had been fairly cartoonish. I half expected to meet a bearded, unsmiling tank of a man who smelled faintly of vodka and cruciferous soup.
We exited the international terminal and were funneled into a crush of anxious drivers bearing signs of identification. I began to look for my own name, hunting for Roman lettering amid the Cyrillic, when two words in wobbly black marker caught our attention. The sign was unmistakable and, despite its dark meaning, I smiled when I read it: “Dyatlov Incident.” On seeing Kuntsevich in the flesh, my image of the Russian hulk vaporized and was replaced by that of a kindly father figure. Kuntsevich was far into middle age—mid-sixties—but his
remarkably square, doll-like face still clung to youth. On our approach, he smiled broadly and let the sign drop to his side. The three of us exchanged handshakes and brief hugs, but aside from some broken English on his part and a few shards of phrase-book Russian on ours, we said little.
Having been shunted from plane to plane for the previous twenty-six hours, I was desperate to step outside. It was still fall, and there was no snow on the ground yet, but the second we stepped into the early morning air, I craved heat. We followed our host to a Renault. But either the heater wasn’t working in the car or the driver preferred not to use it. From the backseat, Jason and I listened to Kuntsevich speak insistent Russian into a cell phone that hung about his neck.
We traveled north to the city. Aside from the faint outline of smokestacks against the sky and the lights of the metropolis flickering in the distance, I could make out little else. For me, the city’s significance revolved entirely around the Dyatlov hikers and the university, but for most first-time visitors, the place held the psychic residue of a very different tragedy. In 1918, after the three-centuries-old Romanov dynasty had fallen to control of the Bolsheviks the previous year, Czar Nicholas and his family were imprisoned in Yekaterinburg’s Ipatiev House at the center of the city. In mid-July, as the country’s civil war continued to roil and the anti-Communist White Army threatened to take back the city, the order was given to execute the entire royal family. In the early morning hours of July 17, the czar and czarina, along with their five children and various attendants, were brought to the building’s basement where they were lined up—ostensibly for a family photograph—and executed at point-blank range. The scene was a protracted bloodbath. Those who did not die immediately by bullet were stabbed with bayonets. It would take yet another revolution, some seven decades later, before the Romanovs’ remains would be recovered from a swamp outside the city. As I looked out at the lights of Yekaterinburg and to the imagined swampland beyond, I thought of how the family’s bones had lain somewhere out there for decades, forgotten under a blanket of peat. Yet even after their bodies had been given a proper burial, the myths surrounding their deaths persisted—the most famous of which was that young Anastasia had escaped assassination to assume a new identity overseas. Russian conspiracy fabulists, it seems, never let facts get in the way of a good story.
Dead Mountain: The True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident Page 3
