In memory of Igor Olegovich Makushkin

A year ago, to our great regret, another person related to our topic of the Dyatlov Pass passed away - senior lecturer of the forensic science department of the Ural State Law University named after Veniamin Fedorovich Yakovlev, Igor Olegovich Makushkin. Igor Olegovich is the son of forensic expert Genrietta Churkina, who conducted an examination of the Dyatlov tent in 1959. For all of us, another thread of memory was broken, between our modern reality and the events of the distant 1959. I was lucky enough to have time to talk to Igor Olegovich on the phone, and most likely I am the last person from our Dyatlov community who talked to him before he fell seriously ill some time later and passed away. Of course, my written communication with Igor Olegovich Makushkin began long before we spoke on the phone. I have the most pleasant impressions of Igor Olegovich, as a sociable and open person, and in memory of him, I want to share with all researchers of Dyatlov case a transcript of the recording of that telephone conversation with him, which took place on December 25, 2022.

Igor Olegovich himself suggested that we talked on the phone after my latest letter to him, which had the following content:

Dear Igor Olegovich, hello!

Sorry to bother you, but I'm back to you with another question on the Dyatlov group tragedy. I can't explain it too briefly, because I need you to understand why this question is being asked. The fact is that in the report of the Moscow commission from the organizing bureau of the union of sports societies, there is the following statement: "Experts have established that at first the tent slant was cut open from the inside by several knife blows." This is where the conspiracy theory is created, that even before the official examination, which was conducted by your mother, a secret one was conducted, the results of which are in the "super secret" zero case. There are memoirs of the former judge of Ivdel, Novokreshchenov, with the following content: "A tent was brought to Ivdel and I was lucky that I was in the prosecutor's office, this case was in the morning, a female expert from the Ural Bureau of Expertise arrived, this tent was erected in Korotaev's office, the regional prosecutor Nikolay Ivanovich was present."

In addition to this, there is Yarovoy's book, that some female expert examined the tent back in Kozhara - this is how he calls Ivdel in the book. You have already answered the question about Yarov, and said that this woman looks like your mother's friend. Novokreshchenov has the following recollection of this expert: "A pretty middle-aged woman."

But it would be nice to have direct confirmation from you that this expert was most likely your mother's friend - colleague, and that if an expert inspected the tent in the first ten days of March, then this is enough to refute the conspiracy theories about a secret examination. After all, ordinary people don't care about procedural subtleties, whether it's an examination or just an urgent inspection to help the investigation, and to understand which way to go. This means that Muscovites had this expert in mind. I would like confirmation from you, please, that such an inspection is quite real, and the described expert could well have been your mother's friend. And please, name her name again. And maybe you can remember some more details about her. I would be very grateful to you.

Igor Olegovich Makushkin

In response, Igor Olegovich wrote to me:

Hello, Olga! I don't get it at all about "mom's friend". Yes, mom was in Ivdel herself. I never said anything about any "friend". Let's set a time and call each other. Otherwise, we won't figure it out, I suppose.

That's how our conversation took place, and of course not only about the question I asked, but also about many other things that are directly related to our topic.

- Igor Olegovich, hello! I probably confused you with my last question.

– Hello, Olga. No, but I didn't understand what you were talking about, so I suggested that it would be better for us to talk instead of writing suggestions here and there. I haven't studied the Criminal Case, but I've read parts of it, of course, since I've talked to Natalya Varsegova and Oleg Arkhipov, of all those interested in this topic. I have a comrade, a friend, my former colleague Vova Ankudinov, we used to sit in the same office when we worked in the in Forensic Examination on Bazhova St. Sometimes we'd discuss something, and I know that he wrote on Taina.li. The last time I looked there was when Maya Piskareva contacted me, it was more than five years ago, maybe even ten. It was a long time ago. That's it, I haven't had any more communication, and so the question left me puzzled. Which friend are you talking about? Did you mention Yarovoy?

– Yes, there was such a writer and journalist, he was present at the search in 1959, and a few years later he wrote a book that describes a real story related to the tragedy of the Dyatlov group. In this book, he described this woman who inspected the tent in Ivdel. Could it have been your mother's friend, who became the prototype of that female expert from Yarovoy's book?

– In the letter you mentioned some woman, but I don't remember who exactly - either Varsegova, or someone else I could have talked to about this, that my mother had a colleague who worked at the department, but she was a forensic doctor, a certain Zinaida Fedorovna Semushina. But she was nothing more than my mother's colleague at the department, at the institute. She had no connection or participation in this case, I have never heard of this. She was simply a colleague and friend of my mother.

– I will try to explain in more detail why this question arose at all. At the beginning of the search, Muscovites from the All-Union Tourism Section came to the Pass, they studied the scene of the incident and the search area for the missing hikers. And at the end of March, on the 23rd, they compiled a report on the circumstances of the case. It stated that "experts established that at first the tent slant was cut open from the inside, with several knife blows..." But the fact is that your mother received the tent for examination only on April 3, and finished the examination on April 16. But in the report, the mention of experts was recorded as early as March 23. Thus, it turns out that the information from the conclusions of the Sverdlovsk Research Forensic Laboratory could not have gotten into their report. Writer Oleg Nikolaevich Arkhipov drew attention to this fact, that one of the experts did examine the tent, even before its official examination.
And there was an assumption that Yarovoy described your mother's friend in his book, that it was she who was in Ivdel in March, and even before sending it for examination, examined this tent. Well, then it wasn't her. There is one interesting and memorable feature in Yarovoy's book - this woman was a smoker.

– You see, this woman, Zinaida Fedorovna Semushina, she was a forensic doctor. But she did not take part in this case with Vozrozhdenniy. Yes, she smoked "Belomor", one after another, I remember her well, and I knew her daughter, and her family. And I visited them at their dacha, well, in general, we visited while I was still a child. That's why I remember this woman very well. She's not exactly a local legend among forensic doctors, but she's known and remembered to this day. These are people of that school, of that era, like Ganz, for example: "Ah, that's that Ganz!" And they're still remembered. But she was a forensic doctor, and she couldn't have had anything to do with that tent.
And I, frankly speaking, thought that this Dyatlov fire had somehow died down. They shot films, argued with each other, and that's it. At one time, the Sverdlovsk Region prosecutor's office reopened the investigation, but it was more like a mouse fuss that ended in nothing. I sometimes talk to Vova Ankudinov, he is so meticulous, in the good sense of the word, very painstaking. We once worked together as experts, and he is an expert from God, although he later became a judge, but that is another story. His expert approach was always very meticulous, he always tried to get to the bottom of everything very carefully, to the end. He told me that he conducted a study on typewriters, and that the protocols of forensic doctors were printed on the same typewriter as the prosecutor's papers.

– Igor Olegovich, if we return to the question about the Dyatlov tent, I am interested in your opinion on the same point. At the end of March, Muscovites had already drawn up a report to the Central Committee of the CPSU, in which it was written that some experts had found cuts from the inside, as well as tears in the slants, which indicated different impacts on the tent. How could they know this? After all, at that time no expert had examined the tent. And what kind of experts inspected the tent, even before the start of its official examination? You exclude the presence of your mother or her friend. In addition, the nature of the damage should have been determined by a trace expert, who at that time should have had all the appropriate tools for research at hand. What kind of experts do you think could have been discussed in the Muscovites' report?

- The point is that the word "expert" shouldn't be taken so literally. I have been teaching forensics for many years. And even now, investigators, judges, with whom I often attend court hearings, do not see any difference between an expert and a non-expert. If someone has researched something it means he is an expert. In many commodity and evaluation examinations even expert and appraiser are confused. The word "expert" is absolutely not attribute to a procedural document, which is called Expert's Conclusion, or Judicial Expertise. Someone came, someone looked, expressed their opinion - this is what the expert told you. We also hear on TV everywhere, in numerous programs: the opinion of the expert, the opinion of the expert. That is, at the everyday level, the word "expert" means a different thing, so a person who inspected a tent is simply called an expert, and that's it. They simply choose to use this term for lack of better one. Even judges or investigators are talking to me, this is a conclusion that has been made, and why are there no expert signatures in front of him, responsibility under article 37, for a knowingly false conclusion? I'm telling you - don't you understand that this is not an expert, this is a specialist. And a specialist is not obliged to give any signatures. This is in procedural terms - not a judicial expert. Therefore, I am inclined to think that it could have been any person who came and performed some kind of operative examination without a decision on the appointment of an expert. Someone came, they asked him - can you express your opinion? And then they wrote about it - an expert said. But the person was not an expert. And then everything was just put on a term that was examined by an expert. Or maybe a specialist, but not authorized by the expert, in respect of which no decision has been made, that he is brought in as a judicial expert, legaly. And I heard that opinion, now I can't relate it to any specific fact that some seamstress or dressmaker was inspecting the tent....

- There is such a memory of one of the investigators in this case that the seamstress was inspecting the tent, even before it was sent for examination in Sverdlovsk.

- Well, some seamstress expressed her opinion. And after all, under my eyes, this tent was taken out and thrown into the garbage.

– Have you seen Dyatlov group's tent?

– Well, yes. Then said to my mother - that's it, they threw away this tent of yours. The fact is that my mother left the laboratory in 1967, and I came to work in it in 1981. I worked in the same laboratory from 1981 to 1993.

- The tent was there this whole time?

- Yes, and they threw it out in 1985 or 1987. The tent was stored from 1959 to 1985, it was there for 25 years, all this time. Not only that - now it's called corporate events, and then there were outdoor excursions, so they took this tent with them so as not to sit on the cold ground.

- Evidently because the tent was not considered an evidence for a long time.

Well, if only someone needed it. But it was lying around, they moved it, moved it again, then the sewer burst, everything was flooded, it started to mold, they threw it out, and that's it. And, no one paid any special attention to it then, for everyone it was a routine matter. But maybe if no one had flown to the north by plane then, if, say, Vozrozhdenniy hadn't climbed into a barrel of alcohol after autopsies, then no one would have paid any attention at all. A common criminal case.

– It is unlikely that Vozrozhdenniy climbed into a barrel of alcohol, this is also a kind of myth.

– At least such conversations took place.

– It is possible that this is greatly exaggerated. But of course they used alcohol, for example, to disinfect hands, to preserve biomaterial for histology, and who knows what else, when working with cadaveric material. But exactly like that, so that they would completely immerse themselves in a barrel of alcohol, most likely this does not correspond to reality.

– The thing is that when I discussed, I don’t remember exactly with whom, with Varsegova or with Arkhipov, about the fact that when everyone was still alive and well, everyone could still be asked about everything. And when all this disappeared into oblivion, only then did they start digging it all up, come on, come on. But there was no one to ask.

– And by that time, the tent had long since been thrown into the trash.

– And then no one even considered it a tent. My mother in her late years started blaming the tent fr all her illnesses that, let's say, manifested themselves before their age criterion. She told me - "It's only now that it has become known that there could have been radiation, so maybe we caught some radiation in Ivdel back then, and the radioactive background could have also come from this tent." They were working without Geiger counters back then, no one measured anything, and they were working with their bare hands, and practically crawling on it.

Forensic expert Henrietta Eliseevna Churkina, who conducted an examination of the tent of the deceased Dyatlov group from April 3 to 16, 1959, at the Sverdlovsk Scientific Research Forensic Laboratory.
Photo courtesy of Oleg Arkhipov.

There was no point in telling a child about any of it. But I myself, somewhere towards the end of school, or when I entered the institute, began to be interested in such stories of my mother, that she participated in such and such an examination, or that she flew on a plane to the north, where such and such happened. After all, we knew of more high-profile murders here in the 60s, my mother also conducted a handwriting examination there. And this is one of several such cases that were etched in her memory: "But you know, this happened..." I will not say that these stories were of such a professional research nature, a simple presentation of the facts, that this and that happened, she went and investigated with Vozrozhdenniy. Any expert has such stories that they do not forget. And even more so if all this was somehow cultivated in those years, supported by the media, or some researchers, but for 25-30 years there was complete oblivion, no one remembered, and there was no sense of any special significance, well, it was and it's forgotten.

– It seems to me that mass interest in the topic appeared after the release of the documentary series about the Dyatlov tragedy, filmed by TAU in 1997. It was with him, most likely, that many people began to get acquainted with the mystery of Dyatlov Pass.

– Mom died in 1999, and a few years before that, maybe about 5, I know that some correspondent, either from the newspaper "Uralskiy Rabochiy", or from somewhere else...

– Gushchin, probably?

– I don't remember the last name, but some journalist contacted her, she talked to him, then some article came out. But that was the only time. And as far as I can roughly compare in time - if she died in '99, then it was 3-5 years before that.

– Most likely it was Gushchin, in his article he wrote about the purple tint on the clothes of the last victims, which were removed from the bodies and hung up for research, and about the story of the missing tongue, with which our communication began when I first contacted you to clarify this issue.

– Regarding the tongue. I was told about this without any particularly interesting versions, but simply the fact that yes, Dubinina did not have a tongue. But the specific reason was never indicated. And then it began: it broke off during transportation. I even gave someone, I don't remember, maybe Varsegova, such an example, that biological tissue, it is the same, so at a meat-packing plant frozen pigs are thrown into the back of a car, but nothing breaks off from them. If we imagine what the oral cavity and tongue are, then in the oral cavity, like a tongue inside a bell, it does not dangle there separately. In a frozen state, it will not be some separate element that can break off on its own.

– As I understand it, first of all, due to the constant moisture inside the oral cavity, it should freeze to the inner surface of the lower jaw, in the form of a single monolith with it.

– The surface of the mucous membrane, it is wet, of course it should freeze to the bottom of the oral cavity. How can people come up with such absurdity when they put forward all sorts of versions. And those who had a direct relation to this, Vozrozhdenniy, my mother - all said then that this was a weapons test: yes - it was a missile, or something similar. And there simply could not be another opinion, only the fact that in the north there was a test of some secret weapon, which led to such and such a death.

– Do you also think that some kind of man-made disaster happened there?

– Of course, I can't have my own opinion on this matter, but from what I've heard in my circle - well, yes, of course, there is no other option. And the culprit of the death is definitely not snow. I know Ganz's stepson well, he is my friend, we used to work together: me, Vova Sharunov, Vova Ankudinov. I asked him: "Vova, do you know anything, did Ganz say anything about this?" He waved his hand - "No, no one said anything, it's all so old that it was forgotten long ago, I don't know anything." That's all.

At the entrance to the Forensic Laboratory on Bazhova Street 72, photo from the 80s.
First row: first from the left - I.O. Makushkin, fourth from the left - V.V. Sharunov.
From the archive of V.D. Ankudinov.

– So back then they didn't pay any special attention to this incident?

– Absolutely. If it hadn't been so far away that you had to fly there by plane, to Ivdel, that is, somewhere to the north in the middle of nowhere. That is, if it had happened somewhere closer, about 30 kilometers from the city, then no one would have paid any attention to this incident, that the hikers froze. Well, maybe the surrounding environment also gave this incident some significance in those years, the same colored clothes on the bodies. When there is a lot that is unclear, "but we were forbidden to talk about it". I know from my mother that this is absolutely true. They really did make them sign a non-disclosure for 25 years. If this were a simple examination, no one would do it. For some people from the KGB to come and take a non-disclosure agreement on any information related to this case. If, for example, an avalanche had descended - well, it descended, why couldn't it be disclosed? That means it was some kind of extraordinary event.
I've written so many examinations in my life. Hundreds! But no one has ever asked me to sign a non-disclosure, although there was a time in the 90s when all sorts of contract killings and criminal gangs started. Never once did that happen.

– Did you communicate with Boris Alekseevich Vozrozhdenniy?

– In those years, we worked together, doctors came to us for examinations, we did complex examinations together, and we went there to the Forensic Medical Bureau, to the morgue. My clothes and weapons were for examination, and they, for example, need not only to examine the body, but also to determine the shooting distance. But it is impossible to determine the shooting distance by the body itself, only by the clothes, and I had to do this - that is, there were some mutual works. Yes, we communicated, both with Vozrozhdenniy and with everyone who worked there. But I certainly didn't discuss this matter with Boris Alekseevich, because he would have told me: "What's wrong with you? Go ask your mother, we were there together." Boris Alekseevich discussed this with Ankudinov.

This Criminal Case, which we now have on display, may have been formed, so to speak, for the public. And the original, complete one is somewhere in the archive. And even if we abstract from all this, from all these aspects and evidence, no one would have taken a non-disclosure agreement from the participants in these events with no reason. Since there is the very fact of this agreement, it means that this is some kind of state secret that you have no right to disclose. Because of an avalanche, the security agencies would not have taken any agreements. And that was definitely the case, I remember it well from my mother. She even said: "At first I was afraid to even mention this case, because higher up people made me sign a 25-year non-disclosure." So now, in my opinion, there is no end to this case.

At the entrance to the Forensic Laboratory at 72 Bazhova Street, photo from the 1980s.
First row: first from the left - V.D. Ankudinov.
Second row: second from the left - T.I. Mihaylova (in 1959, she examined Dyatlov group's tent together with G.E. Churkina), third from the left - V.V. Sharunov, fourth from the left - I.O. Makushkin.
From the archive of V.D. Ankudinova.

* * *

Well, that seems to be all the most important things Igor Olegovich told me about our Dyatlov Pass topic. I still feel enormous gratitude to him for always being accommodating and patiently answering all my questions, sharing everything he knew and remembered about the Dyatlov Pass topic. Blessed memory to him.