Mountain of the Dead (23 page)
The outside of the Ural Polytechnic Institute (UPI) that the Dyatlov group attended is still the same as it looked in 1959, although in 2011 it merged with the other university in Ekaterinburg, the Ural State University (URGU). Both are now known as the Ural Federal University (URFU), although many people in the city will probably still refer to it as UPI.
Anyone travelling north from Ekaterinburg on the same route as the Dyatlov group will see more or less what they saw on the journey. The main railway station in Ekaterinburg is much the same as it was in 1959 and the sombre Siberian Taiga they looked out upon is still the same. The military and nuclear facilities in the region, which were the cause of spy flights in the Cold War, are still there and are now watched by satellites. The gaseous diffusion plant for the enrichment of plutonium U-235 at Verkh Neyvinsk has been upgraded, and the huge facility for the production of (and separate facility for) storage of nuclear warheads at Nizhnyaya Tura has been expanded since 1959. A non-Russian wishing to recreate the Dyatlov group’s journey from Ekaterinburg should be aware of these military and nuclear plants as they are within clearly defined restricted zones, yet the railway north and the road both travel very close to them. The first closed area to avoid is to the west from the railway line between Nizhny Tagil and Ivdel, limited by the River Ivdel from the north and by a line from Kushva-Serebryanka from the south (excluding the railway and the aforementioned towns). The second closed area is part of the Neyvansk and Kirovgrad regions, limited by a line from Verkh-Neyvinsk to Kalinov to the railway station at Murzinka to the village of Belorechka to the village of Neyvo-Rudyanka back to Verkh-Neyvinsk. Many people have probably made the journey north while being oblivious to these restrictions. If by chance someone should find themselves within these areas and they are stopped, they would need to have a very good explanation as to what they were doing there.
These facilities were joined in 1996 by a new underground nuclear command post for the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces at Kosvinsky Mountain in the Ural Mountains, west of the town of Serov. This post is intended to launch all Russian nuclear missiles in the event that the nuclear command facilities near Moscow are knocked out by a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Although this is well off the route north from Ekaterinburg to Serov and Ivdel, it is in the mountains south of where the Dyatlov group died and also should be avoided. Also in the region, but not on the direct route north, is a large ICBM base for road mobile SS-25 missiles to the east of Nizhny Tagil, with a further facility close to the south-east of Ekaterinburg named Kosulin-1 (near the village of Kosulin), used for for storage of nuclear weapons with facilities to take rail-mobile SS-25 ICBMs. In short, the eastern Urals region is a large area but packed with sensitive military nuclear facilities.
Upon reaching Ivdel itself, it could be said to still contain some descendants of ‘cops and prisoners’. The Gulags have disappeared from across Russia and been replaced by far fewer prisons and camps. The approximately 100 Gulag camps and subcamps around Ivdel and the surrounding region in Stalin’s time have been replaced by one particular camp that occupies a sinister place in the hierarchy of Russian prisons. Known as Maximum Security Penal Colony No FBU-IK 56 and situated 25 miles (40km) north of Ivdel (at the village of Lozvinsky) and holding around 300 inmates at any one time, it is one of five colonies in Russia in which the majority of convicts would have been sentenced to death, but are serving life terms instead after Russia’s moratorium on the death penalty in 1999 (which was passed but not ratified, although death sentences have been suspended since).
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The Ivdel special colony is nicknamed
‘The Black Eagle’, so named
because of the sculpture of an eagle holding a serpent’s head that is located at the entrance and made by one of the inmates, a former traffic policeman Khabas Zakuraev, who is jailed for murder. Zakuraev explains his sculpture as ‘an eagle searches everywhere for carrion, he who breaks the law is carrion himself’.
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Interestingly, the other four Russian colonies that are identified by numbers also have nicknames (The Black Dolphin, The Vologda Coin, The White Swan and Village Harp).
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One facet of the Gulags that had not changed in the years since Stalin and the Dyatlov tragedy was that an inmate attempting to escape from The Black Eagle would still run the risk of being shot by a guard from one of the perimeter watchtowers.
It would be prudent for visitors to register their presence with the Department of the Interior, Migration Registration Service (only necessary if staying overnight in a hotel) in Ivdel and state the route being taken in the northern Urals, although many people do not do this. Trucks can still be hired in Ivdel, just as the Dyatlov group did to travel north to start the journey to the pass, then continuing either on foot or with skis and skimobiles in winter. One notable difference, however, is the village of Vizhay, where the group spent the night of 25/26 January. Although relatively small, Vizhay was an established village, but it was burned down in 2010 in one of the many summer forest fires that regularly sweep though the region.
On the mountain itself (Kholat Syakhl) there is very little visible change from the night that claimed the lives of the group, with only the memorial plaque on the rock at the saddle of the mountain to show human input. It is said that the cedar tree where the bodies of Yury Doroshenko and George Krivonischenko were first found can still be identified although this is probably more wishful thinking. In keeping with what appears to be happening elsewhere in the world, the area is becoming subject to the problem of rubbish being left behind by visitors. Despite being a very remote area, there is a steady throughput of visitors, not just to the Dyatlov Pass itself but also passing through to other scenic areas of interest, such as the large rock formations known as Manpupuner, roughly 75 miles (120km) to the north-west of Kholat Syakhl.
While the story of the Dyatlov tragedy is only becoming better known in the West in recent years, the story of the deaths of the skiers is well known in Ekaterinburg and the eastern Urals region. Every once in a while, something happens that prompts further speculation in the local and Russian media. The most recent example concerns the disappearance of an aircraft from Serov airfield. It will be remembered that the Dyatlov party passed through Serov on their way north from Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg) on 24 January 1959 when they had trouble with the police, when George Krivonischenko started singing at the railway station there and later the group had more trouble with a drunk who accused them of stealing his wallet.
On 11 June 2012 (the eve of Russia Day) an Antonov An-2R with the registration RA-40312 belonging to a local operator Avia Zov took off illegally from Serov Airport.
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On board were believed to be a group of twelve, who had all been having a party and drinking heavily. The group included the chief of police in Serov, three police inspectors, a Serov airport guard, a security guard for a private company at the airport, a shop owner, an unemployed man, a pensioner, plus three others including the pilot. A number of cars belonging to the group were left at the airport when the An-2R took off. The reason for the drunken party commandeering the aircraft was that they wanted to go somewhere to continue the party, to go fishing and take a sauna. From 10 p.m. on 11 June 2012 when the plane took off, there has been no further sighting of the aircraft or its party on board. It was widely assumed that the aircraft had crashed, particularly considering the drunken state of the party. However, despite the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations searching an area of 275,800km/sq by 20 July 2012, nothing has been found. The Siberian Taiga is vast and the aircraft may have gone into a river, lake or ravine. By the end of summer 2012, the search had found the remains of a crashed aircraft (not the Serov An-2R), the remains of a crashed helicopter, and a man wearing few clothes found wandering in the Taiga in a hallucinating and emaciated state, who died of pneumonia in hospital before anyone could find out what had happened to him. This has inevitably led to speculation that the complete disappearance of the aircraft and its passengers is somehow linked to the deaths of the Dyatlov group and that there may be a supernatural element to the disappearance of the An-2R. An article in
Komsomolskaya Pravda
newspaper dated 13 June 2012 outlined this possibility. Another mysterious element to the story was three radio signals picked up and recorded by radio ham Valenin Degtyarev in Nizhny Tagil. Two were made on 4 September 2012 and the third was made on 5 September 2012 between 1.00 a.m. and 3.00 a.m. All were made on the frequency 96.00FM. The signals were weak and it was a rarely used frequency. The transcript of the last message was:
Help! 120 degrees 14 minutes … bears will eat us up! 120 kilometres from Serov on straight line … it’s all empty, no cartridges. Apply to investigative committee. Help bears will eat up … help us. 120 kilometres from Serov. 120 thousandth … upon my soul … us … help. Two are wounded. If you don’t come that will be the end! Daughter will testify … knows where … had been … the Cossack Ataman was here … nobody’s looking for us. Pothunters, they saw us … Father, pray for us, hear … 0 degrees 13.9.7 … hungry bears will eat up.
It was not known, at the time, if these messages were a hoax. However, the possible links with the deaths of the Dyatlov group, although pure speculation, continued to be promoted by some of the media and various commentators. This was finally laid to rest on Saturday 6 May 2013, when two grouse hunters came across the wreckage (in swampland) of the AN-2R only 8km (5 miles) from Serov airport.
The official conclusion in 2012 is still the same as it was in May 1959. The lead criminal investigator on the case, Lev Ivanov, died in the 1990s. After the conclusion of the case on 28 May 1959, he was promoted to Prosecutor in the Kostanai (then spelt Kustanai) Oblast in the Kazakh SSR (now Kazakhstan). He retired in the 1980s and worked for some time in Kostanai as a barrister. Ivanov held his personal belief to the end that the Dyatlov group had all died as a result of UFOs. In 1992 he wrote a letter in which he categorically stated that the cause of the deaths was a UFO.
There are numerous theories as to what happened to the group, with more theories and sub-theories arising all the time. An exchange of letters between the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB, formerly the KGB) in 2012 asking if they were holding any files or information and suggesting swapping of information (and also requesting a meeting) was met with a very firm rebuttal. The view of the FSB is that the case had been investigated and a conclusion reached, which as far as they are concerned is the end of the matter and the case is closed. This view, however, is not shared by anybody who has looked closely at the case. It is quite apparent that there are far too many anomalies and loose ends for the case to be considered ‘concluded’ by even the most unenquiring mind. This is not to say that the FSB do actually hold vital information or even take a view on these events (other than their official response to the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation). However, unless there is a change of mind within the FSB, it will never be known whether they have anything that may shed light on the mystery.
Seven of the group are buried in a row in front of a large memorial (which bears the photographs of all nine) in Mikhailovskoe Cemetery in Ekaterinburg. When they were buried, the plot was open to the street but a high wall was built around the cemetery and although the graves and the memorial are almost directly in front of a gate from the street, the gate is generally locked and you have to go to one of the main entrances and make your way up through the centre of the cemetery. In general, the cemetery is very poorly kept. In summer, areas of it are virtually impossible to get through because of the undergrowth. Many of the graves are almost impossible to see because of the high grass, bushes and trees. More disconcertingly, some bones from some of the graves have come to the surface and present a very unpleasant aspect to the place, quite apart from the disrespect to the memory of the deceased.
The main keeper of the Dyatlov group memory (Yury Kuntsevich of the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation) has long felt that the remains of George Krivonischenko and Semyon Zolotarev should be laid to rest alongside their friends in Mikhailovskoe Cemetery. There are actually eight graves in a row in front of the memorial to the group in Mikhailovskoe Cemetery. Seven of them are occupied by the Dyatlov group, while the eighth grave belongs to another student, Victor Nikitin, who was also from UPI but was nothing whatsoever to do with the group. He had died of pneumonia around the same time, and as eight graves had been prepared in front of the memorial and only seven used by the Dyatlov group, it was decided by the authorities that the eighth plot should be utilised preferably by someone from the same university who was recently deceased.
About 3 miles (5km) away on the other side of the city centre of Ekaterinburg lies Ivanovskoye Cemetery, where both George Krivonischenko and Semyon Zolotarev are buried very close to each other. Ivanovskoye Cemetery is as dilapidated as Mikhailovskoe, with very thick undergrowth in the summer, along with rubbish and empty beer bottles strewn around. Krivonischenko’s grave is surrounded by a fenced enclosure with a gate. Both graves lie not far from the footpath near the entrance to the cemetery on
Radishcheva Street. Zolotarev’s grave is a simple affair with the surround enclosed in concrete and brickwork. In 2012 Yury Kuntsevich of the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation made a request to the relatives of both Krivonischenko and Zolotarev that the graves be disinterred and transferred to Mikhailovskoe Cemetery. The relatives have unfortunately refused to give their permission. It was debated whether to remove some of the soil near both graves and transfer it to the Dyatlov memorial in Mikhailovskoe Cemetery, so that they would all be together finally, at least in spirit. However, the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation has instead arranged to move the headstone of Victor Nikitin, in Mikhailovskoe Cemetery, about 3m away to make room for two more slabs within the memorial area, which will be for Semyon Zolotarev and George Krivonischenko.