Mountain of the Dead (24 page)

There was one final issue being considered in 2012 and that was the possible disinterring of the grave of Semyon Zolotarev, as a number of people, including his sister, did not feel that it was his body that had been buried. This disinterment can be carried out against the wishes of the relatives if any organisation (as opposed to a private individual) makes an application stating their reasons for the disinterment – and provided that the city authority is satisfied with the reasons and issues a permit for the disinterment to go ahead. The remains afterwards must be cremated and not reburied.

On 20 March 2003 an article appeared in
Evreiskii Kamerton
newspaper under the heading ‘Investigation – Death at the Pass’.

The article contained the story of Shimon Davidenko. Davidenko described himself as having lived in Israel for the previous twenty years but prior to that he had lived in Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg). His story was that in 1958 he entered the Ural Polytechnic Institute and he immediately signed up to Igor Dyatlov’s tourist group. Dyatlov was four years older than Davidenko and he had a far greater experience of hikes of different categories of difficulty (including the highest levels). In autumn 1958 Davidenko joined a group led by Igor Dyatlov that made a hike to the crest of Kholat Syakhl, or ‘height 1079’, as it was marked on the topographic maps at the time. This hike took place in the November holidays, which was the weekend of 7 November, to celebrate the great October socialist revolution. The group consisted of ten people, including Igor Dyatlov as the leader and also Davidenko. On this trip they walked along the edge of the pass and Mount Otorten and found a good route to the top. However, it started snowing heavily and as the group considered they had reached their objective, they turned back.

Davidenko then goes on to say that on 31 January 1959, Igor Dyatlov set out again for Kholat Syakhl and no one came back. Rescuers who searched the slopes for the lost tourists over a period of several days found nine dead bodies but, the article states, no one was looking for the tenth member of the group, which was himself. It was generally believed that he had not been on that hike. This was because in the middle of January, after he had failed at the Sopromat exam (a very difficult technical subject on the strength of materials), he caught pneumonia as the student vacation began and went to stay with his grandmother, Valentina, in the village of Okvoki in order to recuperate.

As Davidenko’s article continues, he describes what he learned about the incident from the accounts of rescuers, the identification protocols and by talking to journalists of
Uralsky Rabochy
(
Urals Worker
), who had not been allowed to publish a word about the tragedy at the pass. The article goes on to describe the group setting up their tent on the slope of Kholat Syakhl before proceeding the following day. He describes the strong wind and snow on that day and says the blue edge of the wood could be seen 1.5km below them. He also describes the search for the missing group and what they found.

He claims in the article that former Sverdlovsk residents living today in Israel or the USA would not disagree with him when he says that the rumours circulating in Sverdlovsk at the time were fantastic. Among the rumours was one that the Dyatlov group had been ritually killed by Voguls (an ancient people related to the Mansi) who lived in the area of the pass. Another rumour was that aliens had appeared in front of them and looked so horrible that it drove them all mad. The third rumour, the one that he said he found most likely, was the testing of a new type of weapon in the area of the pass, related to the testing of a similar weapon at the Novaya Zemlya test field, which was an island over 620 miles (1,000km) to the north in the Polar region.

He states that shortly before his repatriation to Israel in 1990, he spoke to Stanislav Bogomolov, a correspondent of
Uralsky Rabochy
at that time. Bogomolov told him that in the late 1950s work on the design of the first cruise missiles started in the USSR. Bogomolov had only learned this recently at the time, from the
Tekhnika-Molodezhi
(
Technology for the Young
) magazine. In the late 1950s, manufacture of gyrointegrators, or co-ordinate finders for missiles, were being carried out at an electrical instruments plant in Perm. There is a settlement not far from Perm named Bershet where, in that period, a division of the Strategic Missile Forces was deployed.

Bogomolov felt that these were pertinent factors and he spoke to a former state security officer who had been in the KGB in the 1950s and 1960s. Bogomolov had asked him if he knew of the Dyatlov tragedy. The officer (named Nikolaev) replied that he did. He related that there had been food riots by prisoners north of the Sverdlovsk Oblast in November 1959 (presumably meant to be 1958) and that at the end of January 1959 the
zeks
(criminal prisoners) killed their guards and started moving in the direction of the railroad. It was a crowd of several hundred and they were well armed. Troops with artillery and tanks were brought up to the railway; fifty
zeks
surrendered and the rest disappeared into the Taiga. A decision was taken to fire cruise missiles on all passes and it was bad luck for the Dyatlov group to be there at that time. The cruise missiles were described by the officer as being fitted with vacuum bombs, the effects of which (as already discussed in Chapter 7) can cause injuries like those found on members of the Dyatlov group.

Davidenko confirms in his article that a prisoners’ insurgency did take place in the autumn of 1959 (again, presumably he means 1958) and that
zeks
(criminal prisoners) escaped. He again mentions that ‘Dyatlov and his people’
5
died not only from hypothermia but also from internal injuries and the ‘look of horror on all faces was also a fact that could not be ignored’.
6

Davidenko then goes on to describe the effect of the power of a vacuum bomb covering an area of several hundred square metres, leaving practically nothing. He stated that such a bomb exploding close to the Dyatlov’s tent would have left nothing and they would have been unable to crawl away. He then asks a number of questions: what caused the redness in their eyes? What caused the strange colouring on their faces? Why had the snow around the tent stayed untouched? What must have been the concentration of missile fire to cover the whole of the pass area where the
zeks
were supposedly hiding? Why were no other traces of vacuum blasts around? Finally, where are those hundreds of dead bodies of the escaped
zeks
on whom the missile attack was made?

He then says that all the foregoing was nonsense and gives his own version. He says that the correspondents in the winter of 1959 who were trying to understand the causes of the tragedy had omitted one fact that was, however, mentioned in the materials of the investigation case. Dyatlov’s group went to the pass carrying with them a ten-person tent and a full outfit and supply of food for ten people. Rescuers found nine bodies. Investigators came to the conclusion that there were nine members of the expedition, and all of them died. The tenth one should have been Davidenko, but he had fallen ill and could not join the Dyatlov group – and so stayed alive.

In February 1959 he was summoned to the prosecutor’s office three times, and Investigator Lev Ivanov persistently questioned him
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about how it happened that he had been so lucky, and what he knew about the dead student’s personalities. Ivanov seemed to be quite satisfied with a UFO version of the deaths and did not take the trouble to find out whether Davidenko had really spent those days with his grandmother in the village.

Yet Davidenko says he had not been with his grandmother. On the evening of 30 January 1959 he ran away from his ‘poor old granny’ and joined the Dyatlov group right before they went on the hike. He says the group were expecting him and accordingly were carrying a complete outfit and equipment for ten people. He had agreed everything with Igor Dyatlov on the phone and had not the least desire to drink fresh warm milk by the stove while the group would have been ascending Kholat Syakhl.

Davidenko says he was with the group on that night at the pass and he was the only one who stayed alive. For thirty-six years, he says, he kept silent about what he had witnessed. What he has read over the years about the incident, he describes as an amount of fiction and nonsense that exceeds all limits. The memory of his comrades, he says, which he felt was being played with like a long-forgotten toy, is the reason he could not keep silent any longer.

The following is quoted in his own (translated) words:

On the night of 2 February we reached the edge of the pass and set up a tent. Igor Dyatlov and Natasha Kolmogorova made dinner, we sang songs to a guitar and went to sleep at about midnight. The weather was fine, the sky was cloudy, it snowed slightly, the calm air and frost were bracing, and we felt very warm in the tent.

    I woke up at 1.30 a.m. because it seemed to me that I heard some howling at a distance. I listened and decided that it was the rising wind and I was hearing its gusts. Wind could destroy our plans, so I got dressed, left the tent and laced up the entrance to keep the warm air inside.

    There was no wind, and it had stopped snowing. The howling came from the side of the forest, from the ravine below. I felt my hair stand on end under the cap. Truly, it was that raising feeling of horror of which investigator Ivanov spoke later. I wanted to run, no matter where, just run away as far as possible.

    All was quiet in the tent, the tourists slept. I managed to take control of myself. I was trembling, and slowly started moving down to the ravine, where the group’s dead bodies would later be found. The howling was getting louder, the feeling of horror was rising, but it was that feeling from which, in theory, I should have run away from as fast as I could, but it was drawing me down, towards its source.

    Can you imagine the situation? Something terrible awaits you in a black room, but you go exactly there and are unable to do anything about it.

    I remember vaguely what happened next. I think I was saved because I was warmly dressed and I also found chocolate in the pocket of my overalls, which I instinctively put in my mouth. I think I was the only one at the pass on that night who had been properly dressed and the only one who had some food. Igor Dyatlov with the others, in horror, jumped out of their sleeping bags into the cold, and this killed them. There were several hundred
zeks
at the pass on that night, they were poorly clothed and hungry and that killed them, too. The lower in the ravine, the stronger was the horror that, like the frost, seized my mind. I forgot absolutely about the others I had left on the slope. I was only looking ahead, and at some moment saw a group of people. They were howling in horrifying voices and stripping off their clothes. One of them fell down, but nobody stopped. Then another one fell down, and one more …

    I remember how I stepped over a body, and how I ran after those screaming and howling people. I only remember for sure that I myself ran in silence and chewed chocolate while running. I never liked chocolate before, but this time I could not resist it, and put lump after lump in my mouth. It was probably an instinct of self-preservation, which knows better than your mind what one must do.

    Then I completely stopped thinking what was happening around me.
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Davidenko then says he came to his senses in the morning and was dragging himself along a road. He saw a farmstead ahead of him. He knocked on the door and asked where he was and was told Korobeiniki, which Davidenko says was 4 miles (7km) south of their route. From Korobeiniki he went to Bitnoye where he took a bus to Perm with the little money he had and was back at his grandmother’s village the following day. He told no one about what had happened and surmised that neither vacuum bombs nor cruise missiles had been used to kill the
zeks
, but he says it was most likely a nerve gas of neuroparalytic action. His opinion was that before it took effect, the gas would allow someone to continue for a distance, as the members of the Dyatlov group had, moving down the slope from the tent. His opinion of the serious internal injuries suffered by Luda Dubinina, Semyon Zolotarev and Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolle is that it was misinformation ‘leaked’ by the Prosecutor’s Office and he asks if anyone has seen the autopsy reports.

After that night, he says that a reddish sheen appeared in his eyes but that the colour of his skin did not change, otherwise the watchful investigator Ivanov would never have let go of him and he would not have got to Israel.

Davidenko’s article also appeared on an Internet forum where the responses in the comments were very negative and critical to the extent that some are unprintable.

There are numerous anomalies in Davidenko’s, it has to be said, quite fantastic account.

There is no mention of Yury Yudin, who was the tenth member of the group. The start date of the expedition was 23 January not 31 January. The searcher he names in his article as Latyshev is an unknown name. The early stages of the search did not take three weeks, as he claims, and they were not held up by snow. The Dyatlov group had no sleeping bags, only blankets. The front of the tent was buttoned not laced. The guitar is a mandolin.

He talks of Natasha Kolmogorova in his article rather than Zinaida Kolmogorova, and there was no official mention anywhere of her blood staining the snow near her mouth, as Davidenko states. His statement that ‘According to the rescuers, the faces of all the dead had an expression of horror’,
9
is probably journalistic licence, as most of the bodies were in a state of semi-decomposition and no expressions could be made out. His statement that
the eyes of all the dead had a reddish
colour is not mentioned anywhere else, and also the eyes of some of the bodies were actually missing when found. Okvoki village is not mentioned on present-day maps, which is not to say it has not been absorbed into a larger settlement. Korobeiniki is south of Perm, but Perm itself is almost 300 miles (490km) from the pass and Kholat Syakhl. Bitnoye is several kilometres north of Perm, but would have been impossible to be reached by foot in one day from the pass.