Igor Dyatlov was a handyman, an inventor and a lover of the desert. Born in 1936, near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), he built radios as a child and loved camping. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, he built a telescope so that he and his friends could watch the satellite travel the night sky. At that time, he was an engineering student at the city’s Ural Polytechnic Institute. One of the country’s leading technical universities, UPI has trained top engineers to work in the nuclear power and weapons, communications, and military engineering industries. During his years there, Dyatlov led a number of arduous nature trips, often using outdoor equipment he had invented or improved upon. It was a period of optimism in the USSR. The Khrushchev thaw had freed many political prisoners from Stalin’s gulag, economic growth was robust, and living standards were rising. The shock that Sputnik’s success brought to the West further bolstered national confidence. In late 1958, Dyatlov began planning a winter expedition that would exemplify the daring and vigor of a new Soviet generation: an ambitious sixteen-day cross-country ski trip to the Urals, the northern mountain range. south which separates Western Russia from Siberia, and therefore Europe from Asia.
He submitted his proposal to the UPI sports club, which gladly approved it. Dyatlov’s route was three hundred and fifty miles north of Sverdlovsk, in the traditional territory of the Mansi, an indigenous people. The Mansi came into contact with the Russians around the 16th century, when Russia was expanding its control over Siberia. Although largely Russified by this time, the Mansi continued to pursue a semi-traditional way of life – hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding. Dyatlov’s party would ski two hundred miles, on a route no Russian, as far as we know, had taken before. The mountains were gentle and rounded, their barren slopes rising from a vast boreal forest of birch and fir trees. The challenge would not be rough terrain but extremely cold temperatures, deep snow and high winds.
Dyatlov recruited his classmate Zina Kolmogorova and seven other comrades and recent graduates. They were among the elite of the Soviet youth and were all very experienced winter campers and cross-country skiers. One was Dyatlov’s close friend Georgy Krivonishchenko, who graduated from UPI two years earlier and worked as an engineer at the Mayak nuclear complex in the then-secret town of Chelyabinsk-40. Jug-ear, small and nervous, he told jokes, sang and played the mandolin. Two other recent graduates were Rustem Slobodin and Nikolay Thibault-Brignoles, of French descent, whose father had been worked almost to death in one of Stalin’s camps. The other students included Yuri Yudin, Yuri Doroshenko and Aleksandr Kolevatov. The youngest of the group, at twenty, was Lyuda Dubinina, an economics student, track athlete and ardent Communist, who wore her long blonde hair in braids tied with silk ribbons. On a previous outing in the wild, Dubinina had been accidentally shot by a hunter and had survived – cheerfully enough, it was said – a fifty mile journey to civilization. Days before the group left, the UPI administration unexpectedly added a new member, much older than the others and largely unknown to them: Semyon Zolotaryov, a thirty-seven-year-old WWII veteran. with an old-fashioned mustache, stainless steel crowns on his teeth and tattoos.
The party left Sverdlovsk by train on January 23. Several of them hid under the seats to avoid buying tickets. They were in good spirits – so high that during a stopover between trains, Krivonishchenko was briefly detained by police for playing the mandolin and pretending to beg in the train station. We know these details because there was a communal journal and many skiers also kept personal journals. At least five had cameras, and the photos they took show a group of lively and surprisingly good-looking young people living the adventure of a lifetime – skiing, laughing, playing in the snow and getting caught up in it. camera.
After two days on the train, the group reached Ivdel, an isolated town with a Stalinist-era prison camp which, at that time, held mostly criminals. From there the group traveled another day by bus, then in the back of a lumberjack truck, and finally on skis, guided by a horse-drawn sleigh. They slept in an abandoned logging camp called Second Northern. There, Yuri Yudin had a sciatica flare which forced him to withdraw from the trip. The next day, January 28, he turned around, while the other nine headed for the mountains. The plan was to meet in the small village of Vizhai around February 12 and telegram to the UPI sports club that they had arrived unharmed. The expected telegram never came.
At first, the UPI sports club assumed that the group had just been selected; there had been reports of a heavy snowstorm in the mountains. But, after several days, the group’s families started making frantic phone calls to the university and the local Communist Party office, and on February 20, a search was launched. There were several research teams: student volunteers from the UPI, prison guards from the camp of Ivdel, Mansi hunters, local police; deployed military planes and helicopters. On February 25, the students found ski slopes and the next day they discovered the skiers tent – high above the tree line on a remote mountain that the Soviet authorities called Height 1079 and the Mansi called Kholat Syakhl , or Dead Mountain. There was no one inside.
The tent was partly collapsed and largely buried in the snow. After unearthing it, the search team saw that the tent appeared to have been deliberately cut in several places. Yet inside everything was neat and tidy. The skiers’ shoes, axes and other equipment were placed on either side of the door. The food was laid out as if it was about to be eaten; there was a pile of wood for a stove, clothes, cameras and newspapers.
About 100 yards downhill, the search team found “very distinct” footprints of eight or nine people walking (not running) toward the treeline. Almost all of the prints were of shod feet, some even bare. One person appeared to be wearing only one ski boot. “Some prints indicated the person was either barefoot or in socks because you could see the toes,” a researcher later said. The group followed the tracks down six to seven hundred yards, until they disappeared near the treeline.
The next morning, researchers found the bodies of mandolin player Krivonishchenko and student Doroshenko under a large cedar tree on the edge of the forest. They were lying near a dead fire, wearing only underwear. Twelve to fifteen feet up the tree were recently broken branches, and on the trunk pieces of skin and torn clothing were found. Later that day, a search team discovered the bodies of Dyatlov and Kolmogorova. They were both higher up the slope, facing the tent, fists tight. They seemed to have tried to get back there.
All four bodies were autopsied, while the search for the others continued. The medical examiner noted a number of bizarre features. Krivonishchenko had blackened fingers and third degree burns on a shin and foot. In his mouth was a piece of flesh that he had bitten off with his right hand. Doroshenko’s body had burnt hair on one side of his head and a charred sock. All the bodies were covered in bruises, abrasions, scratches and cuts, as was a fifth body, that of recent graduate Slobodin, discovered a few days later. Like Dyatlov and Kolmogorova, Slobodin was on the slope leading to the tent, with a sock on one foot and a felt slipper on the other; his autopsy noted a minor fracture to his skull.
At the moment, a homicide investigation was underway, led by a prosecutor in his thirties, Lev Ivanov. Toxicology tests were performed, testimony was taken, diagrams and maps were made of the scene, and evidence was gathered and analyzed by forensic pathologists. The tent and its contents were transported by helicopter out of the mountains and relocated inside a police station. This led to a key discovery: a seamstress who came to the station to try on a uniform noticed that the notches in the tent had been made from the inside.
Something had happened that caused the skiers to force their way out of the tent and flee into the night, in a howling snowstorm, in twenty-subzero temperatures, barefoot or in socks. They were not new to the winter mountains; they would have been perfectly aware of the fatal consequences of leaving the tent half-clothed under these conditions. This is the central, and seemingly inexplicable, mystery of the incident.
Four bodies are still missing. In early May, when the snow began to melt, a hunter Mansi and his dog stumbled upon the remains of a makeshift den in the woods two hundred and fifty feet from the cedar: a floor of branches laid in a deep hole in the snow. Ragged clothing was found strewn about: black cotton sweatpants with the right leg cut off, the left half of a woman’s sweater. Another search party arrived and, using avalanche probes around the den, they picked up a piece of flesh. Excavations uncovered the four remaining victims, lying together in a bed of rock under at least ten feet of snow. Autopsies revealed catastrophic injuries to three of them. Thibault-Brignoles’ skull was so badly fractured that pieces of bone had been driven into the brain. Zolotaryov and Dubinina had crushed breasts with several broken ribs, and the autopsy report noted massive hemorrhage in the right ventricle of Dubinina’s heart. The medical examiner said the damage was similar to what is generally considered to be “the result of an impact from an automobile moving at high speed.” Yet none of the bodies had penetrating external wounds, although Zolotaryov’s did not have eyes, and Dubinina’s did not have eyes, tongue, and part of the upper lip.
A careful inventory of clothing recovered from the bodies revealed that some of these victims were wearing clothing taken or cut from the bodies of others, and a lab found that several items emitted abnormally high levels of radiation. An expert in radiology testified that because the bodies had been exposed to running water for months, these radiation levels were originally expected to be “several times higher”.
