In the Footsteps of the Lost Expedition

Lyudmila Dubinina says goodbye to Yuri Yudin, who is leaving the group due to illness. In the background Igor Dyatlov: “We’re not parting forever!”

Our special correspondents followed the route of the ski hikers who died in the Northern Urals half a century ago under very mysterious circumstances.

The inexplicable disappearance of an An-2 plane with a pilot and 12 passengers on board in the Northern Urals in June of this year made us recall once again the equally mysterious story of the Dyatlov Pass, where 9 students and graduates of the Ural Polytechnic Institute died in the winter of 1959.

They were desperate and experienced athletes who had repeatedly completed the most difficult hikes. But something terrible forced them to leave their tent half-naked at night. Why did all the hikers freeze? Investigators were never able to find a solution to this tragedy. The case was closed with a hint of mysticism: "The students' deaths were caused by a force of nature that they were unable to overcome."

This story was immediately taboo for the media in those Soviet times, but it was passed from mouth to mouth, frightening citizens with the most terrifying assumptions. The military was suspected of the hikers' death. There were rumors that the guys were accidental witnesses to a secret weapon being tested. That's why the special forces killed them. But escaped convicts, poachers from the regional party committee, and ordinary hunters were also suspected. American spies were suspected, as were UFOs that were flying over the Northern Urals at the time. But even now, with the emergence of investigative documents, all these versions have not disappeared, but have become even stronger in people's minds.

The truth is out there

We also got carried away by studying that story, having conducted our own big investigation. The truth about the death of those hikers, as it seemed to us, is somewhere very close - which is what we will talk about. But for the uninformed readers, we will first tell you about those events.

On January 23, 1959, ten skiers from the UPI sports club set off from Sverdlovsk to the Northern Ural mountains. Here are their names: group leader Igor Dyatlov, Zinaida Kolmogorova, Rustem Slobodin, Yuri Doroshenko, Yuri Krivonischenko, Nikolay Thibeaux-Brignolle, Lyudmila Dubinina, Aleksander Kolevatov, Semyon Zolotaryov (born in 1921, a hiking instructor). And finally, Yuri Yudin is the only one from the group who survived.

The guys had to ski 350 kilometers and conquer the mountain on the way

Otorten, 1182 meters high. The group had to return to the village of Vizhay and send a telegram to their relatives by February 14.

The hike started off easy and fun, as recorded in the hike diaries. There were confrontations with the police at the train stations and on the trains because of the students' loud laughter and singing. However, the guys had a piece of paper-armor, which clearly stated that their hike (no joke!) was timed to coincide with the opening of the 21st Congress of the CPSU. And the matter was resolved without protocols. But a serious problem occurred before going out on the ski track. The tenth participant, Yuri Yudin, felt a sharp pain in his joints and was forced to return. His farewell was captured by a photographer. There, Lyuda Dubinina seemed to be playing "farewell of a Slav" for the camera...

Time passed, but there were still no telegrams from the guys... On February 26, rescuers found an empty cut tent on Mount Kholat Syakhl and traces of bare feet down to the forest. Later, within a radius of one and a half kilometers, they found 5 frozen bodies. The bodies of the rest were discovered only in May under the melted snow. Almost all the hikers were barefoot and half-naked. Some had fatal injuries - broken ribs, broken heads. Others died from the cold. Lyudmila Dubinina had no eyes or tongue. Forensic experts were unable to explain the cause of the injuries. Even now, no one can say for sure the most important thing - why did the hikers leave the tent for the bitter cold and their own death?

The investigators found no blood stains or signs of a struggle either in the tent or nearby. All the hikers' valuables and money were left in the tent. There was also an uneaten dinner. And what's even more mysterious is that the tent was ripped open from the inside! That is, something happened during dinner that made the hikers immediately cut up the tent and get out...

Our special correspondents followed the route of ski hikers who died in the Northern Urals half a century ago under very mysterious circumstances.

Hikers' corpses were autopsied in a prison morgue

Ivdel greeted us with sticky tropical heat of over 30, which we did not expect in August in the latitudes of the Northern Urals. We also did not expect that this town in the taiga wilderness would turn out to be quite beautiful and clean against the backdrop of mountain landscapes. True, its appearance is marred by a large prison hospital, surrounded by a blank fence with barbed wire and watchtowers. Since pre-war times, this region has been full of prison camps, since logging and mining of mineral ores require a lot of labor.

Igor Dyatlov's group arrived in Ivdel on the night of January 25, 1959. In their diaries, they devoted only a dozen words to this city:

"...Around 24.00 we arrived in Ivdel. Large waiting room. We took turns on duty all night. The bus to Vizhay will leave early in the morning." A month later, the first bodies of the hikers will be brought to the same city.

- I was young then, I worked as a nurse, - recalls Zoya Nikitichna Savina. - I saw them at the bus stop. They were all so cheerful. They were laughing loudly. And then they were brought to the morgue, I looked in the window. There was a girl lying there and some guys, I don’t remember how many. The girl had socks on her feet. And their friend, who didn’t go with them, stood by the morgue and cried.

We must think that only a joint disease saved their friend Yuri Yudin from that incomprehensible death. According to people who know Yudin, all these years he has been… waiting for his group. He has never married. He lives alone and very poorly. He suffers from Russian disease and keeps four cats.

Maria Ivanovna Solter worked as a surgeon’s assistant in the same hospital’s morgue. If we are to believe a number of sources, then after the year of glasnost she said that not 9, but 11 corpses were brought to Ivdel from the site of the hikers' deaths.

"...Where the other two came from - I don't know. I recognized them immediately, I saw them in these clothes the last time at the bus stop. They brought them to our military hospital for autopsy, but they didn't even show one body, they took it straight to Sverdlovsk. Some soldier was there during the autopsy, pointed at me and said to Dr. Prutkov: "Why do you need her?" Prutkov was a polite man, but that time he immediately said: "Maria Ivanovna, you can go!" They still made me sign a non-disclosure agreement. They made them from everyone, including the drivers and pilots who transported the bodies..." (Vadim Chernobrov, 1999)

Unfortunately, Maria Ivanovna died recently. And her daughter could not remember such stories of her mother. But the current chief physician of the military hospital in Ivdel, Colonel Vladimir Konyushevsky, told us from his father's stories that the hikers' bodies were first taken to the morgue of their hospital, and then transported for autopsy to a nearby prison hospital. Perhaps for reasons of special secrecy? Konyushevsky's father did not say anything like that about the number of corpses, but he saw that the bodies were orange. This could have been so-called maceration - redness from frostbite.

Dyatlov group route map

КГБ

There were many versions, even connected with some kind of spy-sabotage trail, since all the hikers had a security clearance. UPI students were prepared to work at closed enterprises, others were already working at secret factories. It was even assumed that there could have been one or more spies among the hikers. And these spies, having killed their comrades, flew abroad on an enemy plane or helicopter. Possibly with hostages. Otherwise, where are the bodies of the other four? Therefore, before we set off on the trail of the deceased group, the newspaper's management turned to the FSB with a request to provide some materials from the investigation of those years along the line of the State Security Committee. The FSB officers eagerly dug into their archives and gave us an answer that surprised us greatly and added another big mystery to this case. But we will outline this mysterious answer later in the course of this investigation.

Mansi Roma believes that the skiers were killed by a rocket.

The Radio Operator's Tale

In Ivdel we met Vladimir Alekseevich Lyubimov, who was working as a radio operator at the time. At the end of 1958, Vladimir Alekseevich and his wife were sent to spend the winter under Mount Yaruta. It is 200 km north of the Dyatlov Pass. In the summer, geologists were looking for minerals under Yaruta and left several tons of explosives for the winter. Vladimir Alekseevich was supposed to guard this property until it got warm and report his activities by radio. And not long before that, a spy was exposed in the village of Saranpaul in the Subpolar Urals. He had a radio. And at night, leaving home supposedly for work, the spy passed on secret information to the enemy. His wife suspected treason and wrote about it to the party committee. His comrades began to monitor him for vice, and inadvertently exposed the spy!

- After that, - recalls Vladimir Alekseevich, - all of us, radio operators, were ordered to listen in on the air and report any suspicious conversations. And so, in January or February, it's hard to say, I was monitoring the air on different waves and heard some very strange conversations in an unintelligible Aesopian language. It was only clear that something terrible had happened. Of course, I reported it to my superiors. And a day later I received an order: stop listening on this wave! But I was curious, and I began to secretly continue listening. I remember what they said - we can't find two. We're looking for two more...

- Maybe they were talking about four? - we clarified, since the bodies of four were discovered only in May.

- Perhaps, - he thought, - that they said about four. It's hard to remember now... When I returned from wintering, I found the radio operator who had transmitted all this. It was my friend Yegor Nevolin. I asked him to tell me the details. But Nevolin replied that he had no right. Those were the times of secrecy. I think that the guys were exposed to some kind of poisonous gases. Other corpses were found with foam at the mouth, which indicates poisoning.

During the investigation, experts examined the cuts on the hikers' tent.

The Mansi are not to blame

The Mansi tribe lives 150 kilometers north of Ivdel in the village of Ushma. In 1959, their ancestors were the first to fall under suspicion of killing the hikers. According to the investigation, the Mansi hunters could have killed the uninvited guests for some reason, including religious ones. The hunters were arrested, but a week later all suspicions were suddenly lifted. The prosecutor's investigator Lev Ivanov (now deceased) gave the following explanations during the perestroika years. They say that an experienced seamstress, Baba Nyura, accidentally walked into the police station where the cut hikers' tent was. She saw the tent and said: it was cut from the inside! Experts later confirmed this, and therefore the Mansi had nothing to do with it...

In our opinion, this is a very strange excuse. In addition, the head of the Dyatlov Group Memorial Fund, Yuri Kuntsevich, has this opinion about the cut. It could have been pierced with a knife by a person standing outside, who, moving the blade towards himself, ripped the tarpaulin from the inside.

The investigators could not help but understand this. Why did they release the Mansi so soon? No, we are not going to suspect the taiga hunters. It only seems that the order came from above: release the natives, because up there they knew for sure that the Mansi were not guilty.

Shot myself and survived

Mansiysk settlement Ushma. There are no regular buses here and there is no electricity. Until recently, there was a prison zone here, but during perestroika, the prisoners were released and the Mansi people from another taiga settlement, which had burned down, were resettled in their place. The fire victims were given solid huts, baths, and storage facilities. In general, the natives were surrounded with excessive care and given good pensions. Smart businessmen immediately flocked here. The Mansi, as representatives of the taiga tribe, have the right to kill animals without any license. Therefore, a brisk exchange of furs and meat for surrogate alcohol, VCRs, and porn cassettes began. Visiting businessmen - a father and son - were especially successful in this field in the 90s. The old Mansi people repeatedly begged them not to transport alcohol and porn. However, they did not listen to the old people and one day disappeared on the road to Ushma. But their business was soon continued by others. Then someone burned the bridges across the rivers on the road to Ushma. But the businessmen armed themselves with powerful SUVs and now ford the rivers. So, due to drunkenness and other harmful civilization, little is left of the Mansi...

In addition, the road to the famous pillars on the Man-Pupy-Ner plateau now goes through the Mansi village, and tourist buses based on "Urals" stop in Ushma. Drivers generously give the Ushma residents alcohol, increasing their mortality.

We tried to find out something in Ushma about the death of the Dyatlov group and about the Mansi hunters who were suspected. But the old-timers are long gone, no one remembers their stories. The current ones assume that a strategic missile flew over the Dyatlov group and burned up the oxygen. That's why the suffocating hikers ran down the slope, where they froze...

One young and drunk man, Misha, with a crippled cheekbone, begged the public to know that the Mansi were not to blame. They weren't brought up to go out into the wet!

As we were told, one of the grateful hunters brought this man ten liters of alcohol last winter. After a three-day drinking binge, he developed a fever. He grabbed a gun, shot himself in the chin and fell dead. The drunk men dragged him to a storage shed, covered him with a canopy, deciding to bury him later. And in the meantime, they went to drown their sorrows. But Mikhail, having lain in the bitter cold for a couple of hours, came to his senses, got up and fell with his jaw hanging open right into the house…

The Ivdel drivers warned us that the Mansi are very hospitable and love to treat all visitors with delicacies. But you can't eat anything, since the village is on the site of a prison zone and almost everyone here, including children, suffers from tuberculosis. And the visiting doctors - under the program for the treatment of small peoples - allegedly also flog here, taking advantage of the homelessness, and do not treat anything... . We politely refused the treats and went to the Dyatlov Pass.

Our correspondents set up their tent on the same site.

The road to the pass

On the way to the Dyatlov Pass on the banks of the Auspiya we met the expedition of Yuri Kuntsevich, the head of the Dyatlov Group Memorial Fund. There were 16 of them, loaded with backpacks with tents and food, with axes and a chainsaw, metal detectors and gas burners, a guitar and photographic equipment. And 72-year-old Valentin Yakimenko was still carrying a box of sand and cement (10 kilos) to repair the monument to the perished "Dyatlov group".

Head of the Foundation for the Memory of the Dead Group Yuri Kuntsevich
shows that very tree.

Diagram of Dyatlov Pass

It's about 14 kilometers from Auspiya to the pass. But it took us two days to move along crooked paths with a heavy load through swamps and windfalls. Valentin Yakimenko told how in March 1959, as a student at UPI, he took part in the search. He and his comrades walked in a chain at the foot of Mount Kholat Syakhl, poking pins into the snow in the hope of finding the bodies of the four "Dyatlovites" who had not yet been found. At that time, the students believed that their comrades had been victims of an atomic explosion. But they saw no melted snow or other traces of the bombing.

However, prosecutor Lev Ivanov, who was in charge of the case, later told the media: "When Maslennikov and I inspected the scene of the incident in May, we discovered that some young fir trees at the edge of the forest had burn marks, but these marks were not concentric or in any other pattern. There was no epicenter either. This once again confirmed the direction of a kind of heat beam or a strong, but completely unknown - at least to us - energy acting selectively."

The investigators' later revelations are very interesting, which we will discuss later.

Labaz

...Finally, we reached the place where the Dyatlov group's had their last overnight stay before the tragic ascent, where they had built a storage shed in order to climb Otorten relatively lightly. However, the head of the expedition, Yuri Kuntsevich, has serious doubts that the storage shed in this place was built by the "Dyatlov group." In his opinion, the cache of food could have been built by other people in order to confuse the investigation. This was indicated by food from army warehouses and cans of stew in... a cardboard box. It is really unclear why hikers would carry a box with them?

In the morning we set off for the site of the tragedy. The distance is two kilometers, but the long climb of 25-30 degrees exhausted us quite a bit. The "Dyatlovites", apparently, moved here on skis for a long time and along serpentines. They arrived at the site of their last camp clearly very tired. Researchers do not have a unified opinion regarding the location of their tent on Mount Kholat Syakhl. On the slope there are several places marked by man-made monuments - scattered from each other for hundreds of meters. In 1959, the location of the tent was not clearly marked. So now the researchers are guessing: where was the tent?

Valentin Yakimenko, a participant in the search in March 1959, shows where the food cache was found.

Kurumniki

Yuri Kuntsevich took us to the site of the Dyatlov group's tent, marked by a monument. Mikhail Sharavin, who was the first to find the tent in 1959, pointed this out to Kuntsevich. But if we compare it with the view in the photograph from 1959, it seemed to us that this place was slightly shifted to the south relative to the landscape in the photo. And this is very significant! If the Dyatlov group left for the forest from here at the time of the tragedy, then they were moving along a relatively safe area. The fact is that there are many kurumniks running down the slope of Mount Kholat Syakhl. These are stone streams lined by nature with rough cobblestones. In many places, the kurumniks have cliffs from half a meter to a meter. If you fall, you will be seriously injured. If we assume that the Dyatlov group's tent was located a little further north (as we see in the photo), then the hikers, descending to the forest, should have come across these scree slopes, invisible at night. They could have stumbled and fallen onto the rocks from a height of a meter. This could explain the rib fractures of two people and the head injuries of two others. But... when falling onto scree slopes, there should also have been, if not fractures, then severe bruises of the limbs. And everyone's arms and legs are intact.

From the tent, at the moment of danger, the group walked one and a half kilometers to the saving forest. Before the forest, the hikers overcame two ravines with deep snow, and they lit a fire near a large cedar.

It is interesting that even now there are charred branches lying near this cedar. According to Kuntsevich, these are the same ones from the Dyatlov group's fire. The cedar itself is majestic and strong. We even took several ripe cones from its branches.

- I was 12 years old, - Kuntsevich told us, - when the Dyatlov group was buried in the cemetery opposite my house. My two older brothers were studying at UPI at the time. And they knew the victims well. I was at the funeral. This tragedy has been etched in my memory forever.

But it is not a fact that this misfortune with the guys happened exactly where their bodies and tent were found. Besides, it is unrealistic to cover that distance from the tent to the cedar in complete darkness in winter barefoot. Perhaps the hikers became victims of some circumstances. These could be man-made tests, or a clash with the military... There are a lot of versions. I have more than 60 of them in my archive. Every year we spend the night in a cold tent, in winter, in a strong wind. This is normal for sports hikers. Therefore, everything that the rescuers saw here was most likely a staged event.

"Cleaned" as dangerous witnesses?

The "clash with the military" version, as we were told, was especially popular among ordinary people in the first years after the tragedy. It was implied that the hikers became accidental witnesses of some top secret tests. It was believed that they could see how some kind of weapon was being tested on local prisoners... And supposedly for this reason the hikers had to be removed... We will leave this without comment for the readers' judgment. But the version is interesting as an indicator of the population's trust in the government at a time when ideology was shouting from every corner that "the people and the party are united!"

- But how can we explain, - we asked Kuntsevich, - not far from the cedar, a snow hole in a ravine and a flooring of branches at the bottom of it? This shelter was obviously made by the Dyatlov group?

- It is also doubtful, - he answered, - that the guys could have dug a large hole with frozen hands and cut branches. The hole with the flooring was most likely built by other people - as an identification mark for dropping bodies from a helicopter.

- But such a staging must have involved many people. They could not all keep such a terrible secret for the rest of their lives. Some would certainly have let it slip...

- Most likely, only a very limited circle of high-ranking people knew the truth, and the rest were just carrying out the task. Those same pilots might not even have known that they were transporting corpses. ...Why is there so much nonsense in this case? For example, there is an interview with pilot Georgy Karpushin, who claims that on February 25 he found a tent and two corpses next to it. But officially the tent was found by students Sharavin and Slobtsov only on February 26, and they did not see any corpses there.

The same place in August 2012. Our correspondents in the role of searchers.

The story of pilot Karpushin

We will begin this part with an excerpt from an interview with pilot Georgy Karpushin, published in AiF-Ural in 2004 and which stirred up people who believed that the hikers were killed by the military. And then they pretended to have had an accident.

"... On February 25, the weather was simply wonderful... About 25-30 km before the mountain, we very clearly saw a tent that was stuck to the eastern slope... We made several passes. It was clearly visible that it was cut on the northern side. Near the tent, with its head towards it, lay a corpse, judging by its long hair - a woman's. A little further away there was another body. It struck me that the tent was pitched incorrectly, on a slope of about 30 degrees, open to all winds and rockfall... This mistake proved fatal for them... They recorded the position of the tent on the map and contacted Ivdel, where they received the order to return... I can say for sure, since I saw the bodies of the dead, that they were a natural color, not orange, as they later claimed... Apparently, the Mansi, seeing that the hikers had climbed close enough to the sacred places, decided to scare them. After the students left the tent in panic, the rest was done by the cold and the fractures the guys received when they ran down the mountain..."

Isn't it strange: Karpushin believes that the fatal mistake was the incorrectly pitched tent on a steep slope. And at the same time, he thinks that the hikers were driven out to their death by the Mansi. In the pilot's story, it is doubtful that the tent was seen almost 30 km away. It was too far! Or was it a typo? Why does the pilot talk about the color of the bodies? They weren't naked. Or did he see their faces? And the slope there wasn't 30 degrees, but about 15.

So did pilot Karpushin see the tent and two corpses next to it on February 25? Or is he still confused about something? After all, according to the criminal case, student Mikhail Sharavin was the first to see the last refuge of the "Dyatlov group". And with his comrade Boris Slobtsov, they got into the tent before the investigators. There were no corpses in the tent or nearby. According to supporters of the "cleanup", someone brought Sharavin and Slobtsov to the scene of the staging. We met with Mikhail Sharavin himself, and here is what he said.

This is how Sharavin and Slobtsov saw the tent of the dead skiers.
Everything indicated that the guys were getting ready for dinner and overnight.

Sharavin's recollectionss

- On February 21st, they gathered us, experienced hikers, and sent us out to search. In Ivdel, two guides joined us. One was a forester, Pashin. And the second, Cheglakov, was supposedly a fireman. But it can be assumed that Cheglakov was also a KGB officer. I will tell you about that later. The search was complicated by the fact that Dyatlov did not leave route books, we did not really know their route.

On February 23rd, we flew by helicopter to explore Mount Otorten, where the group was heading, but for some reason the pilots did not take us there, dropping us off near the Lozva valley, where we spent the night. And in the morning, a plane arrived and dropped a pennant with a note that the Mansi in the lower reaches of the Auspiya had found one of Dyatlov's camps. And that we should go there. So on the 25th, we came out onto the barely noticeable Dyatlov ski track. We spent the night in this place. On the morning of the 26th, Slobtsov, Pashin and I reached the outlier, where the ski track disappeared. Probably, the Dyatlov group was met by a strong wind here. They decided to spend the night in the forest and went down to the south to Auspiya, where the storage shed was later found. Then Pashin started showing us in the direction of Otorten. He said that there was a hole there, where avalanches were possible. We went there. Then I noticed the corner of the tent sticking out of the snow. Pashin was already tired, and Slobtsov and I ran up to the tent, saw an ice axe, skis at the entrance. The pole was also visible there. And the far one was dropped. And most of the tent was covered with snow. We took an ice axe, cut the firn snow down the center of the tent and tore the canvas.

Where did the alcohol come from?

- Tell me, was there a flashlight on top of the snow on the tent, as it says in the case?

- I don't remember. When we opened the top, we saw a stove at the bottom of the tent, closer to the exit. There was firewood inside. On the bottom were padded jackets, backpacks, blankets. The boots were lying by the wall, at the head of the bed. Apparently, they lay with their heads facing the slope. And there was a saw inside, and buckets at the entrance.

- How did they manage with all this gear: buckets, saws, axes? Would it be logical to take the buckets outside the tent?

- There was a snowfall, so we brought everything in so it wouldn't get buried. There was room. There were 11 of us in the same tent.

- Where did the flask of alcohol come from?

- Yes, it was hard for students to get alcohol back then. But there were two comrades from the outside in their group who had the opportunity. The parents identified this flask. Krivonischenko's parents, I think. And there was a second flask in the tent, filled with coffee. Someone's parents identified it too.

- Were there footprints near the tent?

- There was a strong wind blowing nearby. And then, five or seven meters away, we saw footprints. They were walking down from the tent, towards the forest.

- Why didn't you follow these tracks right away?

- It was useless. If there's nothing in sight, then after so long ago you have to search thoroughly.

- They write different things about the tracks. Either nine pairs or eight?

- We didn't count, but it was clear that the tracks were arranged in a chain, like a rank. And there were tracks in boots, and tracks left by a sock, and a track in felt boots.

- Tracks in boots - one or two boots on the feet?

- I think one. We didn't study them. But it looks like they weren't running, they were walking calmly.

A glowing ball

- What could have happened?

- There is a trace of a white spot on the walls of the tent, which was captured by the last picture of their camera. They took pictures from the inside of this wall of the tent - the light is so clear, white, as if there was some kind of light radiation from the outside, this, I think, is the emergency that led to the tragedy. The camera with the picture was found inside the tent. Then this film was confiscated by investigator Ivanov. After his death, Ivanov's daughter gave us these pictures.

- It turns out that the hikers sat down to have dinner before going to bed, and suddenly - some bright light through the canvas. Did they photograph it first?

- Most likely, it did not develop that quickly. They had time.

- There are such stone ridges on the mountainside - scree. Could they have been injured there in the dark?

- I think that the place that researcher Borzenkov defines as the location of the tent is overstated. In my opinion, the tent was located further south and closer to the remnant. I intuitively determined this place in 2002, when we flew there. Then I checked Maslennikov's azimuths, he gave approximate azimuths. And according to these approximate azimuths, it is even listed much closer to the remnant. Therefore, they should have gone to the forest a little to the right of the scree.

- On the 26th, you found the tent, what then?

- On the 27th, searcher Koptelov and I approached this place. And from there we began to move towards the cedar. Most of the snow was hard. That's why their tracks aren't visible everywhere.

- Where did the guys get such injuries?

- If they left the tent uninjured, then they couldn't have gotten such injuries on the way to the cedar. That's why the injuries of those four can't be explained otherwise than by the intervention of strangers in the cedar area. After all, with such injuries, they could live no more than ten minutes, and then in a state of agony.

Outsiders

- Many people are talking about the involvement of strangers in the death of the "Dyatlov group". Do you share this opinion?

- There is evidence of strange bright balls in the sky. These balls were later seen by searchers. And on the western slope of the mountain, such compacted snow, funnel-shaped, were noted. Investigator Karatayev spoke about this 50 years later. This means that the balls are not something mythical, but most likely this is what exploded here, fell. And this should have been the reason that not only caused panic, but could have had a chemical effect. Because the guys showed signs of chemical poisoning - foam in the mouth. Maybe these were missiles that were launched from a temporary launch site to test the missiles themselves as engines. Even if the missile does not carry weapons, then the missile itself, having fallen nearby, could have caused such an effect. There was evidence from one radio operator who was on the frequency at that moment and said that he saw the glow of some tests in the direction of Otorten. And this evidence is consistent in time with the balls that the Mansi saw.

Did someone carefully cover the hikers' bodies with a blanket before the searchers arrived?

- Let's go back to the cedar. What did you see then?

Searchers found the bodies of Yuri Doroshenko and Yuri Krivonischenko under a cedar tree. The bodies were covered with a blanket.

- When we approached the cedar on the morning of the 27th, we saw the dead Yuriy - Doroshenko and Krivonischenko. The remains of a fire, not covered with snow, caught our eye. Moreover, the branches were thick. I was surprised that there was little snow near the cedar. We took off our skis, and our feet did not fall through. And on the way there was deep snow. And here the fire was bare. We thought that since the cedar was on a hill, this area was well ventilated. The corpses were also not covered. There was a blanket on them.

- There was a blanket on the corpses?!

- Yes. Doroshenko had thin socks on his feet, white underpants. And his hands were brown. At first I decided that they were so frozen that, not feeling the burns, they warmed them in the fire. But now I think: it is unlikely that this is possible if he warmed them and saw how they were charring.

- Judging by the case materials, the comrades took them off the dead and cut off their clothes to warm themselves. And here is a blanket... And even the taiga predators did not touch the bodies for a month.

- We do not find an explanation. But some believe that the guys did not die here. They were moved through the snow on a blanket. Then they were laid out and covered with the same blanket... Many believe that this is one of the blunders of the staging. A blunder of the clean-up group.

How did the KGB behave?

- Were the bodies of Doroshenko and Krivonischenko taken from the cedar on the day they were discovered?

- They were taken away on the evening of the 28th. I was present when the bodies were raised to the pass and photographed. But on the 27th, after us, someone took the blanket from the corpses, because on the 28th, the rescuers who came for the bodies did not find the blanket there.

- The KGB took it away so that there would be no questions: who covered the corpses before the rescuers arrived?

- I don’t know…

- You were the first to arrive at the scene of the emergency, did you not feel any traces of third parties there?

- The search was completely disorganized. There was no briefing before us. We did not realize that we should not cut down the tent, keep an eye around. And when the investigator was conducting the investigation, he did not study it very meticulously either. He simply stood aside and wrote down, and several people sorted through things and trampled everything.

- There, next to the cedar, 20 fir trees were cut down. Who could have cut them?

- That's also a mystery.

- Were you personally the subject of the KGB's work?

- No. Only the prosecutor's investigator later took testimonies from all the participants. We believe that Cheglakov may have been a KGB agent with us in the search group of two guides. Cheglakov was the only one with a camera. He could have walked around freely. He wasn't with us on the 26th, but no one can say where he was on the 27th. Maybe he took the blankets from the corpses. Are the military involved in this tragedy?

Another version

"Both the fire and the pit with the flooring are the work of the Mansi"

Valentin Yakimenko, who brought 10 kilos of sand and cement to the pass, spent several days repairing the monument on the remnant. He was looking for those killed in March 1959. In his opinion, that night the frozen "Dyatlovites" could not have dug a deep hole in the snow with their hands, cut the tops of the fir trees and built a flooring. In addition, the bodies were found not in the pit, but about ten meters away from it. It is also unclear - there were a lot of coals under the cedar, the embers were quite thick. This means that the fire was big and hot, it burned for a long time. But if you examine the embers carefully, it looks like they were extinguished in their prime...

Therefore, Yakimenko believes that both the fire and the pit with the flooring were the work of a Mansi hunter who passed by shortly before the hikers. After all, the guys wrote in their diaries that they were following the Mansi trail. So the hunter lit a fire under the cedar, breaking off the lower branches of the tree, extinguishing the embers with water from a kettle. And then Doroshenko and Krivonischenko lit a fire there at the hour of the tragedy, using their diaries - since they were not found. But they could not find enough firewood in the darkness, and that is why they froze. As for the injuries, the guys received them falling from the stone rapids.

But it is unclear why the hunter made a flooring from branches for four people? Or was he not alone? In addition, a soldier's puttee was found there. But what if we assume that it was not hunters who were stationed in that area before the hikers arrived, but military personnel who had arrived to prepare the firing range? Let's say they were on duty on February 1, guarding the site of tomorrow's shooting from hunters. Maybe they even left measuring devices here, which the Dyatlov group did not see in the snowfall. And at midday, while it was still light, the military flew away for safety reasons. By evening, the hikers had arrived. And what did the military think at that time: "Who would think of going to the mountains in winter?"

Searcher Sharavin told us that the Dyatlov group could see some fireballs in the sky above the pass, were scared to death and jumped out of the tent, having managed to photograph them. And a month and a half later, rescuers also observed this unusual phenomenon.

The photo shows a luminous object moving quickly along a given trajectory.

We asked our photographer Anatoliy Zhdanov, who has worked with photographic film for many years, to study this photo.

- The photo shows a luminous object moving quickly along a given trajectory, which also leaves a light trail behind it. In the center of the photo is an ordinary glare from the bright glow of the object. The crooked strip at the bottom is a technical defect in the film.

- Could this photo have been taken inside a tent?

- Unlikely. Most likely, it was taken in an open space at night, and not in any room, since the strong light from the object would have partially illuminated what was inside. There is nothing like that on the photo.

Hikers from Ozersk show in which direction they saw the fireball on the night of August 5, 2012

Military secrets can be kept for a long time

The gentle slope of Mount Kholat Syakhl, where the hikers died, and the flat treeless plateau next to it are an ideal place for a testing ground in the dense taiga. Interestingly, this stone plateau, overgrown with moss and thick blueberry bushes, has in places frequent "dead" spots the size of a dinner plate, where there is not even lichen. According to Kuntsevich, these could be "splashes" of toxic rocket fuel. If we recall that in May 1960, over the Urals, about five hundred kilometers south of the Dyatlov Pass, a high-altitude American reconnaissance aircraft was shot down, then we must assume that air defense systems could have been tested in this area in 1959. If the guys were in the missile impact zone, then stunned, poisoned by the vapors of toxic fuel, they behaved as they did. They hurried to the forest. And somewhere halfway there, a subsequent explosion threw them onto the scree, hence the injuries. Dubinina's lack of eyes and tongue can probably be explained by the actions of birds and small rodents.

It is interesting that the former (in 1959) judge of the city of Ivdel Georgy Novokreshchenov told about his conversation with the district prosecutor Vasily Tempalov, who was inspecting the area from a helicopter. Tempalov allegedly said: "What can I say, rockets were falling there, there were craters all around, I am an artilleryman. What, I don't know or something."

Despite all the seemingly absurdity, the military version follows from a number of very logical conclusions. Judge for yourself. Investigators arrive at the scene of the emergency and see a cut tent and frozen people. What conclusions do they draw? The picture is crystal clear for the investigators - someone, obviously at gunpoint, drove the hikers out of the tent at night... Who did it? Only Mansi hunters. There are no other people here. Why? Because the hikers scare the animals by relieving themselves at sacred sites. That is why the investigators immediately took on these hunters. But the most incomprehensible thing is that they release the hunters without questioning them properly. There can only be one reason for this - the investigators were told from above that the hunters are not guilty. So, up there, they knew the true picture of the tragedy.

Investigator Korotaev later told during the years of glasnost: "... the first secretary of the city party committee Prodanov invites me to see him and transparently hints: there is, they say, a proposal - to close the case. Clearly, not his personal, but an order "from above". At my request, Prodanov then called Kirilenko (the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional party committee). And he heard the same thing: close the case. Literally a day later, Ivanov took it into his own hands, who quickly closed it down... Of course, they put pressure on him too. Some generals, colonels came, strictly warned us not to let our tongues run wild. ... As a lawyer, I was very surprised by the quick time frame of the investigation - March, April, May - while such a case required a longer investigation. It would be necessary to examine these places, and in the summer, perhaps, some traces would be found."

However, in May the case was closed with an absurd, even by today's standards, formulation: "The cause of the students' death was an elemental force, which they were unable to overcome."

In 2008, representatives of the "Center for Civil Investigation of the Dyatlov Tragedy" talked with Zina Kolmogorova's sister, Tamara Zaprudina. And she said: "I have a sister, though she has also died now, she was a party member, she went to Sverdlovsk to see the first secretary Kirilenko. And they told her something like: are you a communist? What are you doing here? If your parents need a pension, contact the military. That's all..."

But they did not bother about the pension, apparently for the same party reasons. In this regard, the composition of the state commission that investigated the tragedy is interesting: Major General of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Mihail Shishkarev, Major General of Aviation Mihail Gorlachenko, Deputy Chairman of the Sverdlovsk Regional Executive Committee Vasiliy Pavlov, Head of Department of the Sverdlovsk Regional Committee of the CPSU Filipp Ermash, Prosecutor of the City of Sverdlovsk Nikolay Klinov.

Why is a major general of aviation investigating this case? It is no coincidence that the relatives of the deceased suspected the military. For example, here is what Lyudmila Dubinina's father, a responsible official of the Sverdlovsk economic council at the time, said during interrogation. Verbatim: "... I heard UPI students talking about how the escape of naked people from the tent was caused by an explosion and high radiation... the statement by the head of the administrative department of the regional committee of the CPSU, comrade Yermash, made to the sister of the deceased, comrade Kolevatova, that the remaining 4 people who have not yet been found could have lived no more than 2 hours after the death of those found, makes us think that the forced, sudden escape from the tent was due to a shell explosion and radiation near Mount 1079, the "filling" of which forced... to run further from it and, presumably, affected the vital functions of people, in particular their vision. The light of a projectile was seen in the city of Serov at about seven o'clock in the morning of February 2. According to UPI students, it was observed by a group of hikers who were at that time near Mount Chistop. I think that the supposed projectile was launched from outside the territory of the USSR, and therefore I am surprised that the hiking routes from the city of Ivdel were not closed... If the projectile deviated and did not hit the intended test site, in my opinion, the department that fired this projectile should send aerial reconnaissance to the site of its fall and explosion to find out what it could have done there. ... If aerial reconnaissance was done, then we can assume that it picked up the remaining four people. I have not shared my personal opinion expressed here with anyone, considering it confidential."

At the beginning of the article, we indicated that the newspaper's management had contacted the FSB with a request to provide us with materials on this case. The Moscow security officers contacted their colleagues in Yekaterinburg and received the answer that... the KGB had not investigated this case (!). No materials were found at Lubyanka either. This puzzled us greatly. It is impossible for the committee to be indifferent to such a high-profile story, possibly related to terrorism! But if we assume that the hikers were victims of missile or some military tests, then the KGB, of course, knew about it. That is the only reason they did not investigate. Most likely, the true picture is buried somewhere in the secret archives of the military prosecutor's office and may not surface anytime soon, if we assume that the children of the perpetrators of that tragedy now occupy some high positions... .

There are too many versions that support the version that the boys died from some kind of weapon. If so, then there is no doubt that those people who know the truth are still alive. And we would really ask them to finally reveal this truth. We are ready to meet incognito with those who possess this secret, and we promise not to disclose the names of our interlocutors.

At the site of the Dyatlov group's death, their comrades installed a memorial plaque.

Epilogue

And last night something was flying!

On the last day of our stay at Dyatlov Pass, we set off in the morning to the remnants, past which the road to the Manpupuner pillars goes. A jeep stopped near us, two excited guys got out and started asking: did we see something flying over there, in the east, over the mountain range that night? No, we did not study the sky at night. And the guys told us that somewhere after midnight, a large star danced over the horizon for about twenty minutes. It zigzagged up and down, to the right and to the left... They were far away and behind the clouds, they could not really see it and photograph it. But this dancing star left a vivid impression in the minds of the guys. Just in case, we wrote down the names of the witnesses. These are Vyacheslav Okhlestin and Vasily Smirnov - hikers from the town of Ozersk in the Chelyabinsk region... So the mystery of the death of the Dyatlov group is far from the only mystery of the Northern Urals.