Ivanov letter 1991

Russian

Central Television
Program "Ecology of the Unknown"
Comrads Kuzovkin, Myagchenkov

Dear comrades!

Perhaps you will be interested in my information about the events of thirty years ago in the Northern Urals. During this time, all information about this event was classified, and now several publications have been made about it: in the Sverdlovsk regional newspaper "Uralsky Rabochiy" and the Kustanay regional newspaper "Leninsky Put". Recently I learned that some information was also given in the Sverdlovsk newspaper "Na Smenu". But the thing is that, unfortunately, I am the only one left who knows the true circumstances of this tragedy. The circumstances are in my notes.

I need to make a "presentation" so that you understand the reliability of the source of information.

From 1951 to 1962, I worked as a prosecutor-criminologist of the Sverdlovsk regional prosecutor's office /this is something like a captain-supervisor in the navy/. According to my position, I was obliged to help investigate the most complex cases, and I accepted some cases of particular complexity for my own production. This is how it is done now. In 1959, on behalf of the regional prosecutor Klimov, I investigated this case.

From 1962 to 1965, I worked as the head of the investigative department of the prosecutor's office of the Tselinny Krai, and after the dissolution of the region - as deputy prosecutor of the Pavlodar region, and from 1968 to 1978 - prosecutor of the Pavlodar region, from 1978 to 1985 /until retirement/ I worked as a prosecutor of the Kostanay region, I have the class rank of State Justice Advisor of the 3rd class, Honorary Worker of the Prosecutor's Office. Now retired - a personal pensioner of republican significance, I work as a lawyer of the Kostanay city legal consultation. So, it seems, the source should deserve from you trust.

You may not return the manuscript.

Respectfully yours

Lev Nikitich Ivanov,                       signature

March 8, 1991

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... tried to find any of the currently living employees of the regional prosecutor's office who knew anything about this case, and apart from Korotaev, a former investigator of the Ivdel prosecutor's office who started this case, you won't find anyone. No one in the prosecutor's office knew anything about this case, and those who did, didn't say anything about it. In those days, it was not customary to talk about issues that were not assigned to you. I remember when Powers was shot down, after May Day, Kolya Sterehov /now an associate professor at the Law Institute/ came to work and said that the day before yesterday they interrogated an American spy who was shot down over Sverdlovsk on May 1st. And no one knew yet that a spy had been shot down. I saw how they shot him down, but I thought that an anti-aircraft shell had just gone off. It was a state secret. And when Sterehov said this, someone told him: you, Kolya, don't blab until you've got where you need to go. And later, at a session of the Supreme Soviet, Nikita Khrushchev said this. It was not customary to blab.

But there were those for whom silence was beneficial. First of all, the director /or whatever his name was/ Gordo was silent. He was one of the culprits of the detachment making a lot of mistakes. The head of the city sports committee /I don't remember his last name/ was silent, because he was also guilty of the detachment being "semi-wild", moving into the stage of "wildness" at the final stage.

I was quite surprised that at the bureau these two absolutely guilty people in the death of the guys were slightly punished, I think they were given a reprimand. And this meant that it was impossible to bring them to criminal responsibility, because They were members of the CPSU, and until very recently, until 1986, the Instruction of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the instructional letter of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, signed by Stalin and Molotov in 1939 on the issue of eliminating serious distortions in the fight against enemies of the people, were in effect. This letter said that many cases of unjustified prosecution of people were allowed at the local level, abuses were allowed in the NKGB and NKVD bodies in this matter, and it was proposed that a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) could be brought to criminal responsibility only with the consent of the party committee, and he could be arrested only with the personal sanction of the first secretary. /only the first secretary wrote a resolution and the seal of the district or city committee was put on it/. So, the city and regional committees did not give such consent to bring these two people to justice. And that's it, the issue is resolved. I told you - this was before 1986. And I was a prosecutor and was obliged by my position not only to demand from others, but also to observe the law myself. And this was the law. Now all this has been overthrown

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stupid, illiterate, anti-people, criminal. Descendants will still stigmatize the current leaders. In our time, in the grocery store on Vainera, herring was 19 rubles /in pre-Khrushchev prices/, butter was 24 rubles per kg. And now in Sverdlovsk you can't buy it for 120, meat was 44 rubles, chum salmon 12-60, red caviar in the grocery store on the corner of Levin and Tolmachev for 32-70 kopecks, and my salary in the prosecutor's office was 1200, and as a teacher at the law institute I also received half a salary.

I say this because, firstly, the case was not some kind of sensation, it was an ordinary case of group deaths of people. Nothing more. The truth is that it was reported to Moscow. Those who were supposed to know knew.

Who in Sverdlovsk now knows about the fire in the community center in the village of Gorny Shchit, Aramilsky District /then there was such a district/ I investigated this fire. In this wooden community center, during a movie screening, when there were 250 people in the hall, the stage caught fire. The fire spread to the hall, the walls were painted with oil paint, they immediately caught fire. And there was only one exit door open. And that was only half open - you know how they let people in with tickets. You can imagine how many people were burned and how many were burned, how many were trampled and how many suffocated in the smoke. The club burned down completely, to the foundation. /I described the investigation of this case in the collection "Investigative Practice", such a collection of genuine detectives, a very interesting collection, if you manage to get and read it, such a collection was published until recently/.

Who knew about it? Nobody. They said that the hospitals in Sverdlovsk were full of burnt people, and that's all.

And what about the case when a policeman in Verkhnyaya Pyshma shot 12 innocent people in one evening with a pistol? I loaded two truckloads of corpses then. Who knew about it? Nobody. The policeman was ambushed and he shot himself. And that was the end of it. It's no secret now, but as a criminal prosecutor I registered 530-560 intentional murders in the region every year. There was something to work on. True, there was no such rampant unpunished crime, thieves were caught 96% of the time, murderers were shot /there is such a place right in the city center/. It seems to me that there was more order, although, of course, there is no reason to regret that time. There should not be such pressure in the life of the state. But there must be order. And it will be. What is happening now will not last long.

All this is said to the fact that this was an ordinary case. And not even about murder, but about an accident. Therefore, there is no need to go into details that the hikers' films and other documents have not survived. The hikers' films themselves were developed and studied. By the way, I used them to calculate the time of the start

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of the last ascend - the last frame in one camera was taken in conditions of a severe snowstorm and poor visibility. If the film sensitivity is known /and the boxes have survived/, the aperture and shutter speed settings, the density of the negative, the length of the day, then it is not difficult to determine the time when the picture was taken. The tourists' films were stored in my archive for some time, but recently I could only find my films, and I cannot find the tourists' films even at Bogomolov's request and despite my promises. I am very busy and it takes a long time to find something in a personal archive of a long time ago. And there is no motive here at all: to give something and not to give something. I am ready to give everything, but, unfortunately, I cannot find it yet. I am sending you some photos of the search. To some extent, this is also the story of the tourists.

Your version about some murder by some soldiers is completely incomprehensible to me. I do not understand anything. What soldiers, who killed whom? Firstly, there were no soldiers at that time, secondly, they do not have external bodily injuries indicating an attack, etc. What kind of murder by soldiers are we talking about?

I just said that the version is not built on sand, but on some kind of foundation. Let it be small, but on a foundation. And there is absolutely nothing to build your version on.

About the notebooks. I don't remember at all. The most important thing. If they were there, they didn't contain any information that interests us. And then until the penultimate point there was a living witness.

I have the best impressions of Dr. Vozrozhdenniy. He is a great specialist in his field, but if he doesn't remember bodily injuries after 30 years, then I won't judge him - maybe it's professional: during this time I've gone through several tens of thousands of such episodes. For him, this is an ordinary matter, as it was for me. Dr. Vozrozhdenniy helped me understand the mechanism of the origin of the injuries, and taking into account the case materials and my specialty, he helped to establish exactly in what order did they die and the cause of death. This was important.

About the radiological examination. You write that it showed nothing. But I checked samples from the area for radiation and they did not show radioactivity, but the internal organs, cavity studies gave a significant background, which indicated a directed radiation targeting. The impression is that "they were wiped with a fairly wide beam" causing the internal bodily injuries. In several places, young fir trees had traces of burns,

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However, there were no traces of the explosion wave, Maslennikov and I carefully examined this.

Now I have nothing left from the hikers. All their clothes, dirty, cut by us while working with them and broken by stones of water streams /we found the second group in May, under the snow, where they lay, literally rivers flowed, and carried stones. Some of the faces were literally worn away by stones/ all the papers that did not provide information and everything else that also did not provide information, we burned. This is accepted in investigative bodies. That's how they write: such and such material evidence to destroy.

I regret that I can not give more than I have.

Give my regards to your fellow enthusiasts. It is good that you are interested in the past. It must not be forgotten.

Respectfully

L.N. Ivanov

Russian