: lomov_andrey wrote - It’s also interesting to read about the Dyatlov Pass. The topic is dark and I was even wondering if you could find something previously unknown, I don’t want to wait a month, so if I may ask a question from me: The Mystery of the Dyatlov Pass.
Having looked at how many of these versions there are, I decided that let’s collect here very briefly the maximum number of them. Where possible, links will lead to their more expanded interpretation. And you are required to choose the most likely version in your opinion in the comments (if you are reading this on infoglaz.rf) or by voting at the end of the post (if you are reading this on LiveJournal). In the meantime, I’ll briefly tell you what happened at the pass:
On January 23, 1959, the group went on a ski trip in the north of the Sverdlovsk region. The group was led by experienced tourist Igor Dyatlov. The group left for the starting point of the route in full force, but Yuri Yudin was forced to return due to pain in his leg. On February 1, 1959, the group stopped for the night on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl (Kholat-Syahl, translated from Mansi - “Mountain of the Dead”) or peak “1079” (although on later maps its height is given as 1096.7 m), near an unnamed pass (later called Dyatlov Pass).
On February 12, the group had to reach the final point of the route - the village of Vizhay and send a telegram to the institute sports club. There is a lot of testimony from participants in search operations and UPI tourists that with Yu. Yudin leaving the route, the group postponed the deadline to February 15. The telegram was not sent either on the 12th or 15th February.
An advanced search group was sent to Ivdel on February 20 to organize searches from the air. Search and rescue work began on February 22, with the dispatch of several search teams formed from students and UPI employees who had tourist and mountaineering experience. A young Sverdlovsk journalist, Yu.E., also took part in the search. Yarovoy, who later published a story about these events. On February 26, a search group led by B. Slobtsov found an empty tent with a wall cut from the inside, facing down the slope. There was equipment left in the tent, as well as shoes and outerwear for some of the tourists.
This is how the Dyatlovites’ tent was seen during investigative actions.
On February 27, the day after the discovery of the tent, all forces were pulled into the search area, and a search headquarters was formed. Yevgeny Polikarpovich Maslennikov, Master of Sports of the USSR in Tourism, was appointed head of the search, and Colonel Georgy Semenovich Ortyukov, a teacher at the military department of UPI, was appointed chief of staff. On the same day, one and a half kilometers from the tent and 280 m down the slope, next to traces of a fire, the bodies of Yuri Doroshenko and Yuri Krivonischenko were discovered. They were stripped down to their underwear. 300 meters away, up the slope and in the direction of the tent, lay the body of Igor Dyatlov. 180 meters from him, higher up the slope, they found the body of Rustem Slobodin, and 150 meters from Slobodin, even higher, of Zina Kolmogorova. There were no signs of violence on the corpses; all people died from hypothermia. Slobodin had a traumatic brain injury, which could be accompanied by repeated loss of consciousness and contributed to freezing.
The search took place in several stages from February to May. On May 4, 75 meters from the fire, under a four-meter layer of snow, in the bed of a stream that had already begun to melt, the corpses of Lyudmila Dubinina, Alexander Zolotarev, Nikolai Thibault-Brignolle and Alexander Kolevatov were found. Three had serious injuries: Dubinina and Zolotarev had broken ribs, Thibault-Brignolle had a severe traumatic brain injury. Kolevatov did not have any serious injuries, except for damage to his head caused by the avalanche probe used to search for bodies. Thus, the search work ended with the discovery of the bodies of all participants in the hike.
It was found that the death of all group members occurred on the night of February 1-2. Despite the efforts of search engines, the full picture of the incident was never established. It remains unclear what really happened to the group that night, why they left the tent, how they acted next, under what circumstances the four tourists were injured and how it happened that no one survived.
Official investigation
The official investigation was opened by the prosecutor of the Ivdel region Tempalov upon the discovery of the found corpses on February 28, 1959, was conducted for two months, then was extended for another month and was closed on May 28, 1959 by a resolution to terminate the criminal case, which states that the group , apparently, faced some dangerous circumstances in which there were no signs of a crime, and was unable to successfully resist them, as a result of which she died. The investigation, first of all, studied the circumstances of the case regarding the possibility of any other people being in the area of the group’s death at the time of the events. Versions of a deliberate attack on the group (by Mansi, escaped prisoners or anyone else) were checked. The task of fully clarifying the circumstances of the death of the group, apparently, was not set at all, since from the point of view of the goals of the investigation (making a decision on the existence of a crime), this was not of decisive importance.
Based on the results of the investigation, organizational conclusions were made regarding a number of tourism leaders in UPI, since their actions showed insufficient attention to organizing and ensuring the safety of amateur (the term “sports” was not yet used at that time) tourism.
The full materials of the case have never been published. They were available to a limited extent to the Yekaterinburg Regional Newspaper journalist Anatoly Gushchin, who quoted some of them in his documentary story “The Price of State Secrets 9 Lives.” According to Gushchin, the first investigator was appointed a young specialist V.I. Korotaev from the Ivdel prosecutor’s office. He began to develop a version of the murder of tourists and was removed from the case, as management demanded that the event be presented as an accident. The prosecutor-criminologist of the Sverdlovsk Regional Prosecutor's Office Ivanov L.I. was appointed as the investigator. It should be noted that information about Korotaev's role in the investigation is provided by Gushchin without any documentary evidence. The investigation materials of V.I. Korotaev are not included in the archival criminal case, which consists of one volume, an album and a package marked “Top Secret”. According to Yu. E. Yudin, who was familiarized with the case, it contains technical correspondence between the prosecutor's office of the Sverdlovsk region and the prosecutor's office of the RSFSR, which became familiar with the case in the order of prosecutorial supervision.
According to some commentators, the investigation did not study the facts fully enough to clearly classify the incident as a crime or an accident. In particular, the identity of some of the found objects and the reasons for their appearance in the area of the death of the group were not established (a scabbard, a soldier's winding and other objects of unknown origin were found). Later it turned out that the ebonite sheath found near the cedar matched A. Kolevatov’s knife (a number of sources mention a second sheath near the tent). It has not been determined what kind of tool was used to cut down or cut off the trunks of the flooring found near the stream, an examination has not been carried out to establish an avalanche, an examination of traces of biological tissue on a cedar trunk, presumably left by tourists, an examination of Thibault-Brignolle’s skull injuries with an answer to the question: what object could cause these fractures and whether they were of artificial origin. The source of radioactivity in some items of clothing is vaguely identified. It remains unclear whether a biochemical examination was carried out on the blood and biosamples of the bodies of tourists, which (according to Gushchin) were selected and packaged by Korotaev in Ivdel. There are no resolutions in the case recognizing the relatives of the deceased tourists as victims, and therefore their legal representatives cannot exercise their rights to participate in a new investigation of the criminal case, if there are legal justifications for it.
In 1990, Ivanov L.I., who conducted the investigation, published an article “The Mystery of Fireballs” in the newspaper “Kustanayskaya Pravda”, in which he stated that the case was closed at the request of the authorities, and the real reason for the death of the group was hidden: “... Everyone was told, that the tourists found themselves in an extreme situation and froze... ...However, this was not true. The true reasons for the death of people were hidden from the people, and only a few knew these reasons: the former first secretary of the regional committee A.P. Kirilenko, the second secretary of the regional committee A.F. Eshtokin, the regional prosecutor N.I. Klimov and the author of these lines, who were investigating the case ..." In the same article, L.I. Ivanov suggested that a UFO could have been the cause of the deaths of tourists. Some researchers suggest that the mystical bias that prevailed in the press of the 90s, and references to such artifacts, indicate the impossibility of the investigation to clearly and in detail explain the causes of the tragedy due to imperfect knowledge, both on the part of the investigators and in the scientific community of that time.
There are more than twenty versions of why the Dyatlov group died, from everyday to fantastic
And now the versions:
1. Quarrel between tourists
This version was not accepted as serious by any of the tourists who had experience close to the experience of the Dyatlov group, not to mention the greater one, which the overwhelming majority of tourists have above the 1st category according to the modern classification. Due to the specific nature of training in tourism as a sport, potential conflicts are eliminated already at the stage of preliminary training. The Dyatlov group was similar and well prepared by the standards of that time, so a conflict that led to an emergency development of events was excluded under any circumstances. It is possible to assume the development of events by analogy with what could happen in a group of young, difficult-to-educate teenagers only from the position of an ordinary person who has no idea about the traditions and specifics of sports tourism. Moreover, characteristic of the youth environment of the 1950s.
3. Avalanche.
The version suggests that an avalanche hit the tent, the tent collapsed under the load of snow, the tourists cut the wall when evacuating from it, after which it became impossible to stay in the tent until the morning. Their further actions, due to the onset of hypothermia, were not entirely adequate, which ultimately led to death. It was also suggested that the severe injuries received by some of the tourists were caused by the avalanche.
4. Exposure to infrasound.
Infrasound can occur when an air object flies low above the ground, as well as as a result of resonance in natural cavities or other natural objects under the action of wind, or flowing around solid objects, due to the occurrence of aeroelastic vibrations. Under the influence of infrasound, the tourists experienced an attack of uncontrollable fear, which explains their flight.
Some expeditions that visited this area noted an unusual condition that may be characteristic of exposure to infrasound. Mansi legends also contain references to oddities that can also be interpreted in a similar way.
5. Ball lightning.
As an option natural phenomenon, which frightened the tourists and thus initiated further events, ball lightning is no better or worse than any other assumption, but this version also suffers from the lack of direct evidence. As well as the absence of any statistics on the occurrence of CMM in winter in Northern latitudes.
6. Attack of escaped prisoners.
The investigation inquired about nearby correctional facilities and received a response that no prisoner escapes were detected during the period of interest. In winter, escapes in the Northern Urals region are problematic due to the severity of natural conditions and the inability to move outside of permanent roads. In addition, this version is contradicted by the fact that all things, money, valuables, food and alcohol remained untouched.
7. Death at the hands of Mansi
“Kholat-Syakhyl, mountain (1079 m) on the watershed ridge between the upper reaches of the Lozva and its tributary Auspiya, 15 km southeast of Otorten. Mansi “Kholat” - “dead people”, that is, Kholat-Syakhyl - mountain of the dead. There is a legend that nine Mansi once died on this peak. Sometimes they add that this happened during the Great Flood. According to another version, during the flood, hot water flooded everything around, except for a place on the top of the mountain, sufficient for a person to lie down. But Mansi, who found refuge here, died. Hence the name of the mountain..."
However, despite this, neither Mount Otorten nor Kholat-Syakhyl are sacred among the Mansi.
Or a conflict with hunters:
The first suspects were local Mansi hunters. According to investigators, they quarreled with tourists and attacked them. Some were seriously injured, others managed to escape and then died from hypothermia. Several Mansi were arrested, but they categorically denied their guilt. It is not known what their fate would have been (the law enforcement agencies of those years mastered the art of obtaining recognition to perfection), but the examination established that the cuts on the tourists’ tent were made not from the outside, but from the inside. It was not the attackers who were “breaking” into the tent, but the tourists themselves were trying to get out of it. In addition, no extraneous traces were found around the tent; the supplies remained untouched (and they were of considerable value to the Mansi). Therefore, the hunters had to be released.
8. Secret weapon tests - one of the most popular versions.
It has been suggested that the tourists were hit by some kind of test weapon, the impact of which provoked the flight, and, perhaps, directly contributed to the death of people. The damaging factors mentioned were vapors of rocket fuel components, a sodium cloud from a specially equipped rocket, and a blast wave, the action of which explains the injuries. Excessive radioactivity in the clothing of some tourists, recorded by the investigation, is cited as confirmation.
Or for example a nuclear weapons test:
Having dealt with the enemy’s machinations, let’s consider the version of the secret test of nuclear weapons in the area where the Dyatlov group was located (this is how they try to explain the traces of radiation on the clothes of the dead). Alas, from October 1958 to September 1961, the USSR did not conduct any nuclear explosions, observing the Soviet-American agreement on a moratorium on such tests. Both we and the Americans carefully monitored the observance of “nuclear silence.” In addition, during an atomic explosion, traces of radiation would have been on all members of the group, but the examination recorded radioactivity only on the clothes of three tourists. Some “experts” explain the unnatural orange-red color of the skin and clothing of the deceased by the fall of a Soviet R-7 ballistic missile in the Dyatlov group’s campsite: it supposedly frightened the tourists, and the fuel vapors that ended up on the clothes and skin caused such a strange reaction. But rocket fuel does not “color” a person, but kills instantly. Tourists would die near their tent. In addition, as the investigation established, no rocket launches were carried out from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the period from January 25 to February 5, 1959.
9. UFO.
The version is purely speculative, it is based on observations of certain luminous objects made at another time, but there is no evidence of the group meeting with such an object.
10. Bigfoot.
The version of the appearance of a “bigfoot” (a relict hominoid) near the tent, at first glance, explains both the stampede of tourists and the nature of the injuries - according to Mikhail Trakhtengerts, a member of the board of the Russian association of cryptozoologists, “as if someone had hugged them very tightly " The traces, the edges of which would already be fuzzy by the time the search work began, could simply be mistaken for blows or protruding stones sprinkled with snow. In addition, the search group was primarily looking for traces of people, and such atypical prints could simply not have been paid attention to.
11. Dwarfs from the continent of Arctida, Descendants of the ancient Aryans and so on in the same spirit.
The version is that the group came across some artifacts belonging to representatives of certain legendary peoples and sects, carefully hiding from people, or met with them themselves and was destroyed to preserve the secret. No unambiguously interpreted confirmation of this version (as well as evidence of the existence of these peoples or sects) is provided.
12. Zolotarev’s secret service background (Efim Saturday’s version).
He was forced to move from place to place, hiding from those who had reason to take revenge on him (former colleagues or victims of SMERSH). Zolotarev could not turn to the authorities for help, since he had a “secret” that he did not want to share. This “secret” was the goal of Zolotarev’s pursuers. Semyon moved further and further until he ended up in the Urals.
13. Galka’s version of the crash of a military transport plane
In a nutshell, the fuel carrier aircraft made an emergency release of cargo, presumably methanol (or itself collapsed in the air). Methanol caused sliding, unusually mobile landslides, and then, possibly, an avalanche.
14. This is the work of the KGB.
There are a lot of hidden facts, evidence, alterations of information and ignoring certain facts.
15. Military poachers
It is our military that has long been the most unpunished of all possible poachers. Try to catch up with a combat helicopter yourself on a motorcycle or a regular motor boat. At the same time, often, shooting is carried out at everything “that moves,” and military personnel sometimes do not think about the problem of collecting their hunting trophies at all.
16. Crime, gold.
In the village of 2nd Severny (the last settlement), still with Yudin, who had left the group, they visited a warehouse for geological samples. They took several stones with them. Yudin took some (or all?) with him in his backpack. From Kolmogorova’s diary: “I took several samples. This was the first time I saw this rock after drilling. There is a lot of chalcopyrite and pyrite here.” Several sources note that rumors among the “locals” during the search and investigation included: “The guys’ backpacks were stuffed with gold.” In principle, some samples could look like gold. They could also be radioactive to one degree or another. Maybe they were looking for these stones (even if they were taken by tourists by mistake?)
17. Political, anti-party and anti-Soviet coloring
Ill-fated "magic power piece of paper", which gave official status to Dyatlov’s group of tourists, with all the ensuing consequences, can be compared to a plane ticket doomed to inevitable death with all its passengers.
If the Dyatlovites had gone as ordinary wild tourists along with the Blinovites, then both episodes with the participation of the police could have seriously influenced the behavior of Yura Krivonischenko, and even in the village. Vizhay there would be no special need to stop, and if we had to spend the night there, we would have spent the night “in the same club where we were 2 years ago”. They would not have to communicate with the leadership of the colony, thereby actually worsening their living conditions in the village. Vizhay. The Dyatlovites would not have had to advertise the purpose of their campaign in the village of Vizhay, timed to coincide with the beginning of the 21st Congress of the CPSU...
18. The mysterious death of members of the Dyatlov group was associated with airborne electric discharge explosions of fragments of a small comet.
Quite quickly I identified about a dozen witnesses who said that on the day the students were killed, a balloon flew by. Witnesses: Mansi Anyamov, Sanbindalov, Kurikov - not only described him, but also drew him (these drawings were later removed from the case). All these materials were soon requested by Moscow...
19. A slightly modified version of the thunderstorm based on the fact that it is lightning discharges that are a direct consequence of the death of the group, and not temperature or a snowstorm.
20 The prisoners escaped and had to be either captured or destroyed.
Fishing in the forest thickets in winter? Pointless. Destroy - with what.
No, not cruise missiles, of course, and not vacuum bombs. Gases were used. Most likely a nerve agent.
Or like this:
One version of conspiracy theorists: the Dyatlov group was liquidated by a special unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which was pursuing the escaped prisoners (it must be said that there were indeed quite a few “zones” in the northern Urals). At night, special forces encountered tourists in the forest, mistook them for “prisoners” and killed them. At the same time, for some reason the mysterious special forces did not use either bladed weapons or firearms: there were no stab wounds or bullet wounds. In addition, it is known that in the 50s. escaped prisoners at night in the wilderness were not usually pursued - the risk was too great. They handed over directions to the authorities in the nearest settlements and waited: you couldn’t last long in the forest without supplies; willy-nilly, the fugitives had to go to “civilization.” And most importantly! Investigators requested information about escapes of “prisoners” from the surrounding “zones.” It turned out that there were no escapes at the end of January - beginning of February. Therefore, there was no one for the special forces to catch on Kholat-Syakhyl.
21. "Controlled delivery"
And here is the most “exotic” version: it turns out that the Dyatlov group was liquidated... by foreign agents! Why? To disrupt the KGB operation: after all, the student tour was only a cover for the “controlled supply” of radioactive clothing to enemy agents. The explanations for this amazing theory are not without wit. It is known that investigators found traces of a radioactive substance on the clothes of the three dead tourists. Conspiracy theorists connected this fact with the biography of one of the victims, Georgy Krivonischenko. He worked in the closed city of nuclear scientists Ozersk (Chelyabinsk-40), where plutonium for atomic bombs was produced. Samples of radioactive clothing provided invaluable information for foreign intelligence. Krivonischenko, who worked for the KGB, was supposed to meet with enemy agents at Mount Kholat-Syakhyl and hand over radioactive “material” to them. But Krivonischenko made a mistake on something, and then the enemy agents, covering their tracks, destroyed the entire Dyatlov group. The killers acted in a sophisticated manner: threatening with weapons, but not using them (they didn’t want to leave traces), they drove the young people out of the tent into the cold without shoes, to certain death. The saboteurs waited for some time, then followed in the footsteps of the group and brutally finished off those who were not frozen. Thriller, and nothing more! Now let's think about it. How could the KGB officers plan a “controlled delivery” in a remote area that was not controlled? Where they could neither observe the operation nor protect their agent? Absurd. And where did the spies even come from among the Ural forests, where was their base? Only the invisible man will not “show up” in small surrounding villages: their residents know each other by sight and immediately pay attention to strangers. Why did the adversaries, who had planned a clever staging of the death of tourists from hypothermia, suddenly seem to go mad and begin to torture their victims - breaking ribs, tearing out tongues, eyes? And how did these invisible maniacs manage to escape the persecution of the omnipresent KGB? Conspiracy theorists have no answer to all these questions.
Rakitin's version
22. Meteorite
The forensic medical examination, examining the nature of the injuries inflicted on the group members, concluded that they were “very similar to injuries caused by an air blast wave.” While examining the area, investigators found traces of fire on some trees. It seemed as if some unknown force was selectively influencing both the dead people and the trees. At the end of the 1920s. Scientists were able to assess the consequences of such a natural phenomenon. This happened in the area where the Tunguska meteorite fell. According to the recollections of the participants of that expedition, the badly burnt trees at the epicenter of the explosion could have been located next to the survivors. Scientists could not logically explain such a strange “selectivity” of the flame. Investigators in the Dyatlov group’s case were also unable to find out all the details: on May 28, 1959, a command came from “from above” to close the case, classify all materials and hand them over to a special archive. The final conclusion of the investigation turned out to be very vague: “It should be assumed that the cause of the death of tourists was a natural force that people were not able to overcome.”
23. Poisoning with methyl alcohol.
The group had 2 flasks with ethyl alcohol, which were found unopened. No other alcohol-containing objects or traces of them were found.
24. Meeting with a bear.
According to the recollections of people who knew Dyatlov, he had experience encountering wild animals on a hike and knew how to act in such situations, so it is unlikely that such an attack would have led to the escape of the group. In addition, no traces of a large predator being in the area, nor signs of an attack on the bodies of already frozen tourists, were found. This version is also contradicted by the fact that several members of the group, judging by the position of the bodies, tried to return to the abandoned tent - no one would do this in the dark, when it is impossible to be sure that the animal has already left.
What other versions have I missed?
Which version do you think is more likely?
4 (3.5 % )
5 (4.4 % )
17 (14.9 % )
6 (5.3 % )
Where I arrived on the morning of January 24th. Describing this day, Yudin made an often quoted entry in the group’s general diary:
January 24.
7.00. Arrived in Serov. We traveled with Blinov’s group. At the station the horror was greeted hospitably: they were not allowed into the premises and the policeman pricked up his ears; everything is calm in the city, there are no crimes or violations, as under communism; and here Yu. Krivo<нищенко>began to sing, he was immediately grabbed and taken away.
Noting for the memory of Mr. Krivonischenko, the sergeant explained that clause 3 of the internal regulations at stations prohibits disturbing the peace of passengers. This is perhaps the first station where songs are prohibited, and where we sat without them. We go to Ivdel from Serov at 6.30 pm. At the school next to the station I was greeted very warmly. The caretaker (who is also the cleaning lady) heated water for us and provided us with everything she could and needed to prepare for the hike.
Free all day. I would like to go to the city, for example, to local history museum and on a meth excursion<аллургический>factory, but there is a lot of work with the distribution of equipment and its preparation.
12-2.00. During the break between the 1st and 2nd shifts, we organized a meeting with students. There were so many of them, so many of them, and everyone was so curious.
Zolotarev: “Children, now we will tell you... Tourism happens, it gives you the opportunity...” Everyone sits, silent, afraid. Z. Kolmogorova: “Tra-ta-ta-ta, what’s your name, where were you, wow, what great fellows, and they lived in tents!” And it went, and it went. There was no end to the questions. I had to show and explain every little detail from the flashlight to the tent. The guys occupied us for two hours; they didn’t want to let us go. We sang songs to each other. The whole school accompanied us to the station. It ended with the fact that when we were leaving, the kids roared and asked that Zina stay with them and be their counselor, they would all listen to her and study well.
In the carriage, some young alcoholic demanded half a liter from us and stated that we had stolen it from his pocket.
Dispute - a conversation about love at the provocation of Z. Kolmogorova. Songs. Audit, Dubinina under the seat. Garlic with bread, without water. And we arrived in Ivdel around 12.00.
Large waiting room. Complete freedom of action. They took turns on duty all night. The bus to Vizhay will leave early in the morning.
Yudin
In the evening we went by train to Ivdel. We arrived in Ivdel on the night of January 24-25; in the morning of the same January 25, the Dyatlovites went by bus to Vizhay, where they spent the night in a hotel.
On the morning of January 26, the group hitched a ride to the logging village (village 41 quarters). There, on January 27, they put their backpacks on a cart allocated by the head of the forest site, got on their skis and went to the abandoned village of the 2nd Northern Mine, which was previously part of the IvdelLAG system; on the same day it was discovered that Yuri Yudin could not continue the hike due to pain in his leg. Nevertheless, he walked with the group to the 2nd North to collect stones for the institute and, perhaps, hoping that the pain would go away before the active part of the route began.
On the morning of January 28, Yudin, having said goodbye to the group and giving his comrades his part of the total cargo and personal warm things, returned back with a cart. Further events are known only from the discovered diary entries and photographs of the participants in the campaign.
The first days of the hike along the active part of the route passed without any serious incidents. Tourists skied along the Lozva River, and then along its tributary Auspiya. On February 1, 1959, the group stopped for the night on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl (Kholat-Syahl, translated from Mansi - “Mountain of the Dead”) or peak “1079” (on later maps its height is given as 1096.7 m), not far from unnamed pass (later called Dyatlov Pass).
On the same day, one and a half kilometers from the tent and 280 m down the slope, near a cedar tree, the bodies of Yuri Doroshenko and Yuri Krivonischenko were discovered. The rescuers were struck by the fact that both bodies were stripped down to their underwear. Doroshenko was lying on his stomach. Below him is a tree branch broken into pieces, on which he apparently fell. Krivonischenko was lying on his back. All sorts of small things were scattered around the bodies. At the same time, it was recorded: Doroshenko’s foot and hair on his right temple were burned, Krivonischenko had a burn of his left shin 31x10 cm and a burn of his left foot 10x4 cm. A fire was found next to the corpses, which was buried in the snow. On the cedar itself, at a height of 4-5 meters, branches were broken off (some of them lay around the bodies), and traces of blood remained on the bark. Nearby they found knife cuts with broken young fir trees and cuts on birch trees. The cut tops of the fir trees and the knife were not found. However, there was no suggestion that they were used for heating. Firstly, they do not burn well, and secondly, there was a relatively large amount of dry material around.
Almost simultaneously with them, 300 meters from the cedar up the slope in the direction of the tent, the body of Igor Dyatlov was found. He was slightly covered with snow, reclining on his back, with his head towards the tent, his hand wrapped around the trunk of a birch tree. Dyatlov was wearing ski trousers, long johns, a sweater, a cowboy jacket, and a fur vest. On the right foot there is a woolen sock, on the left - a cotton sock. The watch on my wrist showed 5 hours 31 minutes. There was an icy growth on his face, which meant that before his death he had breathed into the snow.
About 330 meters from Dyatlov, higher up the slope, the body of Zina Kolmogorova was discovered under a 10 cm layer of dense snow. She was dressed warmly, but without shoes. There were signs of nosebleeds on the face.
A few days later, on March 5, 180 meters from the place where Dyatlov’s body was found and 150 meters from the location of Kolmogorova’s body, the corpse of Rustem Slobodin was found using iron probes under a layer of snow of 15-20 cm. He was also dressed quite warmly, with a felt boot on his right foot, worn over 4 pairs of socks (the second felt boot was found in the tent). A watch was found on Slobodin’s left hand that showed 8 hours 45 minutes. There was an icy build-up on the face and there were signs of nosebleeds.
The location of all three bodies found on the slope and their poses indicated that they died on the way back from the cedar to the tent.
There were no signs of violence on the bodies of the first tourists found; all people died from hypothermia (during the autopsy it was revealed that Slobodin had a traumatic brain injury (skull crack 16 cm long and 0.1 cm wide), which could be accompanied by repeated loss of consciousness and contributed to freezing). Another characteristic feature was skin color: according to the recollections of rescuers - orange-red, in the documents of the forensic examination - reddish-purple.
The search for the remaining tourists took place in several stages from February to May. At the same time, rescuers first of all looked for people on the mountainside. The pass between peaks 1079 and 880 and the ridge towards Lozva, the spur from peak 1079, the valley of the continuation of the 4th source of Lozva and its continuation from the mouth along the Lozva valley for 4-5 km were also explored. But everything was to no avail.
Only after the snow began to melt did objects begin to be discovered that pointed the rescuers in the right direction to search. Exposed branches and scraps of clothing led to a creek hollow about 70 m from the cedar, which was heavily covered with snow. The excavation made it possible to find at a depth of more than 2.5 m a flooring of 14 trunks of small fir trees and one birch tree up to 2 m long. On the flooring lay spruce branches and several items of clothing. The position of these objects revealed four spots on the flooring, designed as “seats” for four people.
The first funeral took place on March 9, 1959, with a large crowd of people. According to eyewitnesses, the faces and skin of the dead boys had a purplish-bluish tint. “It looked like there were blacks in the coffins,” one of the funeral participants remarked. The bodies of four students (Dyatlov, Slobodin, Doroshenko, Kolmogorova) were buried in Sverdlovsk at the Mikhailovskoye cemetery. Krivonischenko was buried by his parents at the Ivanovo cemetery in Sverdlovsk.
The funeral of the tourists found in early May took place on May 12, 1959. Three of them - Dubinin, Kolevatov and Thibault-Brignolle - were buried next to the graves of their group comrades at the Mikhailovskoye cemetery. Zolotarev was buried at the Ivanovo cemetery, next to Krivonischenko’s grave. All four were buried in closed coffins.
Official investigation
The official investigation was launched after the initiation of a criminal case by the Ivdelsky district prosecutor Vasily Ivanovich Tempalov into the discovery of corpses on February 6, 1959 and lasted for three months.
The investigation into the death of the Dyatlov group was started by the investigator of the Ivdel prosecutor’s office, Vladimir Ivanovich Korotaev. After V.I. Tempalov visited Sverdlovsk with the case, the investigation was entrusted to the prosecutor-criminologist of the Sverdlovsk prosecutor's office Lev Nikitich Ivanov.
One of the cameras contains a photo frame (the last one taken), which depicts the moment of digging up snow to set up a tent. Considering that this frame was shot with a shutter speed of 1/25 of a second with an aperture of 5.6, with a film sensitivity of 65 GOST units, and also taking into account the frame density, we can assume that the installation of the tent began around 5 pm on February 1, 1959 . A similar photograph was taken with another camera. After this time, not a single record or photograph was found.
Mysterious 33rd photo frame from Yuri Krivonischenko’s film. According to one version, it was made in a tent when “someone” looked into it, according to another version, it depicts luminous balls in the sky, which were rumored during the search period. In Rakitin's version, this frame is considered a film development defect.
The attention of researchers into the death of the group was attracted by the 33rd frame of film from Yuri Krivonischenko’s camera. The most common version suggests that the shot was taken from a tent and was the very last one that night. Meanwhile, Alexey Rakitin suggests that the ill-fated photograph is the work of a forensic expert who, before removing the film, first pressed the shutter to see if it was cocked (the Zorki models of the 1950s did not have any marks, by which it was possible to determine the position of the shutter without pressing it) and rewound it back into the cassette, and therefore this 33rd photograph captures what was in the field of view of the lens at that moment (taking into account the unadjusted sharpness and shutter speed).
The investigation established that the tent was abandoned suddenly and simultaneously by all tourists:
The location and presence of objects in the tent (almost all shoes, all outerwear, personal belongings and diaries) indicated that the tent was abandoned suddenly and simultaneously by all tourists, and, as was subsequently established by forensic examination, the leeward side of the tent, where the tourists were located heads, turned out to be cut from the inside in two places, in areas that provided free exit for a person through these cuts.
Below the tent, for up to 500 meters in the snow, traces of people walking from the tent into the valley and into the forest were preserved... Examination of the traces showed that some of them were left by almost bare feet (for example, in one cotton sock), others had a typical display of felt boots , feet shod in a soft sock, etc. The tracks of footprints were located close to one another, converged and diverged again not far from one another. Closer to the border of the forest, the tracks turned out to be covered with snow. No signs of a struggle or the presence of other people were found either in the tent or near it.
Investigator V.I. Tempalov, who was among the first at the scene of the tragedy, testified about the footprints: “Down from the tent 50-60 [m] from us on the slope, I found 8 pairs of traces of people, which I carefully examined, but they were deformed due to winds and temperature fluctuations. I was unable to establish the ninth trace, and it did not exist. I photographed the tracks. They walked down from the tent. The tracks showed me that people were walking at a normal pace down the mountain. The tracks were visible only on a 50-meter section; further on they were not visible, since the lower you go from the mountain, the more snow there is.” All this indicated that there was an organized retreat by a dense group; there was no disorderly or “panic” flight from the tent.
The head of the search, E.P. Maslennikov, in a radiogram dated March 2, 1959, indicated that the reason why the tourists left the tent was unclear:
The main mystery of the tragedy remains the exit of the entire group from the tent. The only thing other than an ice ax found outside the tent, a Chinese lantern on its roof, confirms the likelihood of one person getting outside, which gave some reason for everyone else to hastily abandon the tent.
The investigation initially worked out the version of the attack and murder of tourists by representatives of the indigenous people of the northern Urals, the Mansi. Mansi Anyamov, Sanbindalov, Kurikov and their relatives came under suspicion. Some were placed in a holding cell and accused of forcibly entering a tourist tent. Neither of them took the blame. However, soon, with the help of an employee of one of the Ivdel studios, who was invited as a witness to investigator Korotaev’s office, it was established that the cuts in the tent were made not from the outside, but from the inside. The appointed examination confirmed the weaver’s statement:
The nature and shape of all (...) damage indicate that they were formed from contact of the tissue with inside tents with the blade of some weapon (knife).
The examination established that on the slope of the tent, facing down the slope, there were 3 significant cuts - approximately 89, 31 and 42 cm long. 2 large pieces of fabric were torn out and were missing. In addition, there was a cut from the ridge to the side wall, located in the part of the slope farthest from the entrance, near the very back wall. In this case, the damage was caused by cutting from the inside with a knife, and the blade did not immediately cut through the fabric, that is, the one who cut the tarpaulin had to repeat his attempts over and over again.
As a result, the Mansi were released. In turn, the Mansi said that they saw strange “balls of fire” above the place where the tourists died. They not only described this phenomenon, but also drew it. According to Korotaev, after the case was transferred to L.N. Ivanov, the drawings disappeared from the case. “Fireballs” were observed during the search period by the rescuers themselves, as well as other residents of the Northern Urals.
Meanwhile, the search for the remaining tourists began to seriously drag on, and no main version was ever formed, although the government commission demanded certain results. Under these conditions, investigator Lev Ivanov, having multiple testimonies from uninterested persons, began to develop in detail a “man-made” version of the deaths associated with some kind of tests. He once again visited the scene of the accident, explored the forest, and together with E.P. Maslennikov inspected the scene of the incident. They found that some young fir trees at the edge of the forest had burn marks, but these marks were not concentric in shape or in any other pattern. There was no epicenter. At the same time, the snow was not melted and the trees were not damaged.
After finding the corpses of four tourists in the stream, at the insistence of L.N. Ivanov, their clothes were sent to the Sverdlovsk SES for radiological examination. The chief radiologist of Sverdlovsk Levashov made the following conclusion:
The items submitted for examination (sweater, trousers) contain radioactive substances. Some clothing samples contain a slightly higher content of a radioactive substance, which is a beta emitter. Detected radioactive substances are washed away during washing, that is, they are caused not by a neutron flux and induced radioactivity, but by radioactive contamination by beta radiation. The lack of appropriate instruments and conditions in the laboratory did not allow radiochemical analysis to be carried out to determine the chemical structure of the emitter and the energy of its radiation.
Transcript from the film “The Secret of the Dyatlov Pass”.
According to Anatoly Gushchin, a journalist at the Regional Newspaper of Yekaterinburg, radiation from clothing is only slightly higher than the natural background in Yekaterinburg - 10...18 microR/h.
Ivanov reported the identified results to the second secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional committee of the CPSU A.F. Eshtokin, after which the latter, with the approval of the 1st secretary A.P. Kirilenko, gave absolutely categorical instructions: absolutely everything should be classified, sealed, handed over to a special unit and forgotten about it . In addition, all participants in the search for the Dyatlov group were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement for what they saw for 25 years.
The criminal case was closed on May 28, 1959 due to the absence of a crime. The resolution to terminate the criminal case states:
“Knowing the difficult terrain conditions of height 1079, where the ascent was supposed to be, Dyatlov, as the leader of the group, made a gross mistake, which resulted in the fact that the group began the ascent on 02/1/59 only at 15.00. Subsequently, along the ski track of tourists, which had been preserved at the time of the search, it was possible to establish that, moving towards the valley of the fourth tributary of the Lozva, the tourists took 500-600 m to the left and, instead of the pass formed by peaks 1079 and 880, came out onto the eastern slope of peak 1079. This was Dyatlov's second mistake.
Having used the rest of the daylight hours to climb to peak 1079 in conditions of strong wind, which is common in this area, and a low temperature of about 25 degrees, Dyatlov found himself in unfavorable overnight conditions and decided to pitch a tent on the slope of peak 1079 so that the next morning, losing heights, go to Mount Otorten, to which there were about 10 km in a straight line.”
It was concluded:
“Taking into account the absence of external bodily injuries and signs of struggle on the corpses, the presence of all the values of the group, and also taking into account the conclusion of the forensic medical examination on the causes of death of tourists, it should be considered that the cause of their death was a natural force, which people were not able to overcome "
After a check in Moscow by the Prosecutor's Office of the RSFSR, the case was returned on July 11, 1959, and by order of the Sverdlovsk prosecutor N. Klinov, it was kept in a secret archive for some time (sheets 370-377 of the “case”, containing the results of the radiological examination, were handed over to the Soviet secret archive) . But then it was declassified and handed over to the archives of the Sverdlovsk region. At the same time, the RSFSR prosecutor’s office, after checking the case, made no new information did not report or give any instructions to “classify the case.”
Autopsy results
On March 4, 1959, an expert from the regional Bureau of Forensic Medicine, Boris Alekseevich Vozrozhdenny, and a forensic expert from the city of Severouralsk, Ivan Ivanovich Laptev, examined four bodies of dead tourists taken to Ivdel. This work was carried out in the morgue of the Ivdel Correctional Complex. The following was recorded:
- Doroshenko - bodily injuries (bruises and abrasions) are classified as minor without health impairment; Numerous traces of frostbite on the extremities were revealed (“the terminal phalanges of the fingers and toes are dark purple in color”); internal organs are filled with blood; no bone or cartilage fractures were recorded;
- Krivonischenko - numerous abrasions, scratches, and bruises were identified; the tip of the nose was missing; two burns were recorded - a burn of the left leg 31×10 cm and a burn of the left foot 10×4 cm;
- Kolmogorov - frostbite of 3-4 degrees of the phalanges of the fingers; numerous abrasions ranging in size from 1.5*1.0 cm to 0.3*3.0 cm on the hands and palms; wound 3.0*3.2 cm with a scalped flap of skin on the hand right hand; skin encircling the right side, extending to the back, measuring 29.0*6.0 cm; swelling of the meninges;
- Dyatlov - numerous abrasions, scratches, and bruises were identified; on the palm of the left hand there was a superficial wound from the second to fifth fingers, up to 0.1 cm deep; internal organs are filled with blood.
For all the dead, the conclusion was drawn that death occurred from exposure to low temperature (freezing). Time of death is 6-8 hours after the last meal.
On March 8, 1959, B.A. Vozrozhdenny conducted a forensic medical examination of the corpse of Rustem Slobodin. Recorded: numerous abrasions, scratches, and bruises were identified; in the areas of the right and left temporal muscles, diffuse hemorrhages with penetration of soft tissues; from the anterior edge of the left temporal bone forward and upward there is a crack up to 6.0 cm long and with a divergence of the edges up to 0.1 cm, the crack is located from the sagittal suture at a distance of 1.5 cm; discrepancies of the temporoparietal suture of the skull bones on the left and right (defined as postmortem). But at the same time, the expert noted that the bones of the base of the skull were intact and there was no pronounced hemorrhage in the submental membranes.
Vozrozhdeniy specifically stated: “The indicated closed skull injury was caused by a blunt instrument. At the moment of its occurrence, it undoubtedly caused a state of short-term stunning for Slobodin and contributed to the rapid freezing of Slobodin. Taking into account the above bodily injuries, Slobodin was able to move and crawl in the first hours from the moment of their infliction. Slobodin’s death occurred as a result of his freezing.”
On May 9, 1959, forensic expert B.A. Vozrozhdenny, together with forensic expert Henrietta Eliseevna Churkina (conducted an examination of the tent sections), performed an autopsy and examination of the bodies of the last four members dead group Igor Dyatlov. The autopsy was also carried out in the morgue of the Ivdel Correctional Complex. The expert discovered and described the bodies of the victims in the following condition:
- Dubinina - on the right the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th ribs were broken, on the left the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th ribs were broken; absence of soft tissues in the area of the superciliary arches, bridge of the nose, orbits and the left temporo-zygomatic region. The bones of the facial part of the skull are partially exposed; in the area of the left parietal bone, a soft tissue defect measuring 4.0*4.0 cm, the bottom of which is the parietal bone; eyeballs absent; the nasal cartilage is flattened (but the bones of the nasal dorsum are intact); absence of soft tissue of the upper lip on the right with exposure of the upper jaw and teeth; there is no tongue in the oral cavity;
- Zolotarev - on the back of the head on the right there is a wound 8.0 * 6.0 cm with exposed bone, fractures of ribs 2,3,4,5 and 6 on the right; absence of eyeballs; absence of soft tissue in the area of the left eyebrow measuring 7.0*6.0 cm, the bone is exposed.
- Kolevatov - behind the right auricle in the area of the mastoid process of the temporal bone, a wound of indeterminate shape measuring 3.0 * 1.5 * 0.5 cm penetrating to the bone (that is, the mastoid process of the temporal bone); in the area of the eye sockets and brow ridges - absence of soft tissues with exposure of the skull bones, eyebrows are absent;
- Thibault Brignoles - diffuse hemorrhage in the right temporal muscle. Depressed fracture of the temporoparietal region measuring 9.0*7.0 cm (area of depression of the temporal bone 3.0*8.5*2.0 cm). A comminuted fracture of the right temporal bone with a transition of the bone crack into the anterior cranial fossa to the supraorbital region of the frontal bone. Another crack - with a divergence of edges from 0.1 cm to 0.4 cm - on the posterior surface of the sella turcica with a transition to the middle cranial fossa.
The expert concluded:
- Kolevatov’s death occurred from exposure to low temperature (freezing);
- Dubinina's death - as a result of extensive hemorrhage in the right ventricle of the heart, multiple bilateral fractures of the ribs, and heavy internal bleeding into the chest cavity. These injuries could have occurred as a result of exposure to great force, resulting in a severe closed fatal injury to the chest. Moreover, the injuries are intravital and are the result of exposure to great force followed by a fall, throw or bruise of the chest;
- Zolotarev's death - as a result of multiple bodily injuries;
- Thibault-Brignolle's death - as a result of a closed multi-fragmented depressed fracture in the area of the vault and base of the skull, with profuse hemorrhage under the meninges and into the substance of the brain in the presence of the surrounding low temperature.
In addition, B. A. Vozrozhdenny, in a conversation with L. N. Ivanov, explains the nature of Thibault-Brignolle’s bodily injuries:
- Question: “What force could have caused Thibault-Brignolle to receive such a wound?”
- Answer: “As a result of a throw, a fall, but, I believe, not from the height of my height, that is, I slipped, fell and hit my head. An extensive and very deep fracture of the vault and base of the skull was caused by a blow equal in force to being thrown by a car moving at high speed.”
- Question: “Can we assume that Thibault was hit with a stone that was in the man’s hand?”
- Answer: “In this case, soft tissue would have been damaged, but this was not detected.”
Publication of the case
25 years after the closure of the case of the death of the Dyatlov group, it could have been destroyed “in the usual manner” based on the storage period for documents. But the regional prosecutor, Vladislav Ivanovich Tuikov, gave instructions not to destroy the case as “socially significant.” That’s why it was preserved in the archives of the Sverdlovsk region, and preserved in full.
The full materials of the case have never been published. A small group of researchers became familiar with the materials directly; the rest had access to a few photographs scanned and posted on the Internet, and excerpts from inspection and interrogation reports. However, it is possible that the case contains additional materials that may change the understanding of the events that occurred.
In June 2012, the public foundation "In Memory of the Dyatlov Group" began collecting funds to copy the original criminal case from the archives of the State Civil Service of Yekaterinburg.
Investigation work
The search engines and the investigation had specific tasks: the first main thing was to find the group, alive or dead, and the investigation was to establish the presence or absence of a crime. The bodies of all the victims were found, and the collected information and examinations showed that there were no signs of a crime, and the case was closed. However, the investigation did not answer the question of how the people acted after they left the tent, under what circumstances the four tourists were injured, and how it happened that no one survived.
The consequence of the specific tasks of the search engines and the investigation was that the case materials are fundamentally incomplete, and they lack important information, which would allow us to understand the reasons for the events that occurred. There are many such gaps:
In other words, in essence, there is not much reliable information about what exactly the members of the group did in the last hours of their lives and in what sequence. Numerous gaps in information make it difficult to understand what happened completely and completely.
According to the results of the investigation, for shortcomings in the organization of tourism work and weak control of the bureau of the Sverdlovsk city committee of the CPSU, the CPSU punished in party order: the director of the UPI Siunov, the secretary of the party bureau Zaostrovsky, the chairman of the trade union committee of the Criminal Procedure Code Slobodin, the chairman of the city union of voluntary sports societies Kurochkin and the union inspector Ufimtsev. Chairman of the board of the UPI sports club Gordo has been dismissed from his job.
Versions
The conclusions of professional tourists and climbers, with some discrepancies in assessments, generally boil down to the fact that for some reason on the evening of February 1 or at night from February 1 to 2, while spending the night in a tent on a treeless mountainside, members of the group They left the tent in a hurry and moved down the slope towards the forest. Some people left without clothes, without shoes, without getting necessary things and equipment from the tent, and not wearing all their outer clothing. It is this fact - the reason for the group leaving the tent - that represents the main issue in this tragedy.
There have been many versions of the reasons that prompted the group to leave the tent, and each has its own weak spots. There are also a number of super unusual, unexplained features noted during the autopsies: for example, the subtle purple hue of clothing, Dubinina's missing tongue and the men's eyeballs, the strange skin color of the victims, or the fireballs that witnesses spoke of.
Evgeny Buyanov in his book “The Mystery of the Dyatlov Accident” gives the following classification of versions of what happened:
- Versions explaining the accident by the action of natural factors
- Man-made versions linking the accident with some kind of weapons testing, etc.
- Criminal versions explaining the death of the group as a crime committed by fugitives or government officials, or representatives of the opposition, for example, hiding saboteurs
- Other versions (UFO action, accidental poisoning, etc.)
Natural
Avalanche
The version suggests that an avalanche hit the tent, after which the tent collapsed under a load of snow; tourists, when evacuating from it, cut the wall, making it impossible to stay in the tent until the morning. Their further actions, due to the onset of hypothermia, were not entirely adequate, which ultimately led to death. It was also suggested that the severe injuries received by some of the tourists were caused by the avalanche.
As E.V. suggests Buyanov, one of the reasons for the avalanche was the cutting of the slope at the site of the tent. At the same time, the injuries of some tourists are explained by the load of a large mass of snow due to the compressive effect when resting on the hard bottom of the tent. Buyanov, referring to the book “The Feeling of Snow. Guidelines for assessing avalanche danger" (A. Rudneva, A. Adobesco and M. Pankova, M., 2008), notes that the site of the accident of the Dyatlov group is located in an area with a “weak” avalanche danger, where “avalanches occur in isolated places and descend in years with a lot of snow”: an area related to “inland continental regions with avalanches from recrystallized snow.”
Opponents of the avalanche version point out that experienced climbers from search groups did not find any traces of the avalanche. Neither the tent itself nor the guy ropes to which it was attached were moved, and the ski poles stuck in the snow were not knocked down. The accumulation of snow on the tent would inevitably lead to the collapse of the slope and would make it impossible to make the cuts that were made. The choice of a group to retreat downwards from an avalanche is not entirely clear, although all tourists know that it is necessary to go sideways, and retreating downwards is fatally wrong in the event of an avalanche. In addition, if severe bodily injuries to several tourists were caused by an avalanche, then the selectivity of the traumatic effect on Dubinina, Zolotarev and Thibault-Brignolle is completely incomprehensible, and the possibility of moving three such seriously injured people from the tent to the place where their bodies were found seems unlikely. In the published investigation documents, in particular, the expert directly rejects the possibility of Thibault-Brignolle moving independently, based on the injuries he received. The rescuers did not find the concentration of traces that would inevitably form when carrying the wounded. The selectivity of the avalanche, which mercilessly mutilated people, but very prudently did not affect thin-walled metal products such as mugs, flasks, buckets, and chimney pipes, looks strange.
Collapse of a tent by a relatively small pile of snow
According to some calculations, setting up a tent with digging up a layer of snow on a weak slope and the prevailing weather conditions - a temperature transition from zero to −30 °C in one night - together could have contributed to the fact that a layer of snow slid onto the tent and did not continue its movement beyond it . This version explains the abandonment of the tent and its condition, and the explanations for further events are similar to the avalanche version and have the same weaknesses: it is not clear why the tourists, instead of digging out equipment and clothes from under the snow, headed down the slope as a whole group .
Buyanov explains it this way - the tent was half-buried, it seemed very difficult to dig out anything from it in the dark in the cold and with a strong wind, loose snow fell down again when trying to dig it out, it is possible that the slope would collapse again - all this, not to mention received injuries and psychological shock, contributed to the realization that it was necessary to leave the mountain as soon as possible. In addition, being on the mountainside itself was dangerous - due to the possibility of a repeated avalanche in the event of attempts to dig out things. And again, with strong winds and frost, being there for poorly dressed people for any length of time was tantamount to suicide. It was necessary to immediately look for shelter, a place protected from the wind where one could light a fire and try to warm up. This is exactly what the guys from Dyatlov’s group tried to do, going down to the forest where they had a storehouse. However, a fatal mistake was made - they went down the wrong slope and the storage shed remained on the other side of the pass. The group realized this already at the very edge of the forest. After which, leaving the seriously wounded and giving them outer clothing, the strongest went back up to the tent.
Writer Boris Akunin adheres to a similar version:
I think that nothing mysterious happened there at the pass.
At night, when the group was getting ready for dinner and changing clothes for bed, a strong wind caused a layer of snow to move and the tent was half covered. Frightened that an avalanche was waking up, the guys rushed down the slope. We decided to make a fire at a safe distance and wait until morning to understand whether there was a danger of an avalanche or not.
They started to freeze. Obviously, there was a dispute between two leaders - the senior group Dyatlov and the instructor Zolotarev. The three went with Zolotarev into a ravine, where they dug a hole or hole in the snow, laying down cut trees. Five remained at the cedar, but after a while they realized that they would not hold out until the morning. We split up again. For some reason, two (perhaps they were afraid to return) did not move, but Dyatlov, Slobodin and Kolmogorova decided to take a risk and went back to the tent for warm clothes and skis. These five people froze.
One of the “Zolotarevites” returned to the cedar when Krivonischenko and Doroshenko had already died, and took off their warm clothes.
Having taken refuge in a ravine, the four, in principle, made the right decision, but a misfortune happened to them. Most likely, the buried snow fell and crushed three to death, and, say, stunned the fourth. In May, a flow of melt water carried the bodies several tens of meters from the flooring. The eyeballs and tongue had been pecked off by a bird or eaten away by some other living creature.
This is the general picture of what I think happened. There remain a number of unclarified questions, but each of them can be answered rationally without leaving the framework of this concept.
Exposure to sound
There are versions according to which the cause of the incident was a sound (or infrasound) impact of natural or man-made origin.
This version is not confirmed by anything and can only be considered as speculation, since there are no facts indicating the presence of infrasound radiation in that place. Just as there are no facts (experiments, evidence) confirming that such an effect is even possible. It should also be noted that a sound source of such power is a very powerful thing, it simply does not occur in nature, and an artificially created one is very expensive and costly.
Other versions
There are also a number of versions that explain what happened as a collision with wild animals (for example, bears, wolves, moose), poisoning of group members with methyl alcohol or drugs, or the consequences of a natural phenomenon (for example, ball lightning).
However, there were no other traces around the tent except those of the Dyatlovites themselves. On the other hand, a collision with wild animals (for example, bears, wolves, moose) could have occurred in the area where the last four dead were found in the spring. In this area, there were no traces of both people and animals, as they were covered with snow.
Criminal
Attack by escaped prisoners
The investigation asked nearby correctional facilities and received a response that no prisoner escapes were detected during the period of interest. In winter, escapes in the Northern Urals region are problematic due to the severity of natural conditions and the inability to move outside of permanent roads. In addition, this version is contradicted by the fact that the prisoners would hardly have left money, food and alcohol untouched.
Death at the hands of Mansi
The places where the Dyatlov group died are actually mentioned in Mansi folklore. From the book by A.K. Matveev “Peaks of the Stone Belt. Names of the mountains of the Urals":
“Kholat-Syakhyl, mountain (1079 m) on the watershed ridge between the upper reaches of the Lozva and its tributary Auspiya, 15 km southeast of Otorten. Mansi “Kholat” - “dead people”, that is, Kholat-Syakhyl - mountain of the dead. There is a legend that nine Mansi once died on this peak. Sometimes they add that this happened during the Great Flood. According to another version, during the flood, hot water flooded everything around, except for a place on the top of the mountain, sufficient for a person to lie down. But Mansi, who found refuge here, died. Hence the name of the mountain..."
However, despite this, neither Mount Otorten nor Kholat-Syakhyl are sacred among the Mansi. According to the conclusion of forensic experts, the traumatic brain injuries of Thibault-Brignolle and Slobodin could not have been caused by a stone or other weapon - then external tissue would have inevitably been damaged. During the investigation, this version was one of the first to be worked out, but was later refuted.
From the resolution to terminate the criminal case:
The investigation did not establish the presence of other people other than Dyatlov’s group of tourists on February 1 or 2, 1959 in the area of Height 1079. It has also been established that the population of the Mansi people, living 80-100 km from this place, is friendly towards Russians - they provide tourists with overnight accommodation, provide them with assistance, etc. The place where the group died is considered unsuitable for hunting among the Mansi in winter and reindeer husbandry.
The resolution bears the signatures of the investigator who was in charge of the case, ml. Counselor of Justice (corresponding to the army rank - major) L. Ivanov and the beginning. Investigative Department of the Sverdlovsk Regional Prosecutor's Office, Counselor of Justice (corresponding to the army rank - lieutenant colonel) Lukin.
Quarrel between tourists
This version was not accepted as serious by any of the tourists who had experience close to the experience of the Dyatlov group, not to mention the greater one, which the overwhelming majority of tourists have above the 1st category according to the modern classification. Due to the specifics of training, in tourism as a sport, potential conflicts are eliminated already at the stage of preliminary training. The Dyatlov group was similar and well prepared by the standards of that time, so a conflict that led to an emergency development of events was extremely unlikely under any circumstances. Alexey Rakitin noted that, judging by the published photographs, at the very beginning of the journey everyone in the group was in excellent spirits, which makes it even more impossible to believe that their death could have been the result of a suddenly flared up internal conflict.
Domestic murder by IvdelLAG employees
The death of tourists occurred as a result of a conflict with local law enforcement officers involved in poaching. Employees of IvdelLAG, out of hooligan motives, attacked a tour group, which led to death from injuries and hypothermia. .
Conspiracy theories
There are a number of versions according to which the blame for the death of Dyatlov’s tour group lies with the military or special services:
Version about the impact of a certain weapon being tested
It has been suggested that the tourists were hit by some kind of test weapon, the impact of which provoked the flight, and perhaps directly contributed to the deaths. The damaging factors mentioned were vapors of rocket fuel components, a sodium cloud from a specially equipped rocket, and a blast wave, the action of which explains the injuries. As confirmation, the investigation records a slightly increased radioactivity in the clothing of some tourists compared to the natural background. The rumors about secret tests can be confirmed by a number of coincidences found in the history of missile development at the Uralmash plant. Since 1955, in particular, the MR-12 meteorological rocket and the Onega complex have been manufactured there. The missile unit was folded in 1963 - the same year the Otorten area was reopened to tourists.
The only clues that remain are a strange railway line near the village of Polunochnoye, running straight into the mountainside, fragments of rockets found by hunter Lednev a couple of years later in the Kholat-Syakhyl area, and old photos of clearings in the wilderness. In favor of this version are the messages from search engine Syunikaev about the cannonade in the first days of the search; prosecutor Ivdel Tempalov, a former artilleryman, who noticed suspicious craters from a helicopter on the opposite slope of Kholat-Syakhyl; and A.P. Kirilenko himself, who sent the relatives of the victims “to the military” for a pension.
But, on the other hand, how does a rocket have to fall to take away your eyes and tongue? In addition, a missile range includes roads, buildings, a village, an airfield, and a radar station. There were no traces of this.
Version about the tour group as witnesses to secret tests
It was suggested that the death occurred at the hands of the military, who removed unwanted witnesses to some secret exercises or tests.
Version about escaped prisoners and search party
Also, there is a hypothesis about the destruction of the tour group by a detachment of soldiers looking for escaped prisoners. However, there were no escapes during this period. No signs of a struggle were found near the tent. In addition, on the one hand, the guards had the right to immediately open fire on those who escaped (and there are no traces of the use of firearms); on the other hand, the assumption that the soldiers did not distinguish escaped prisoners from tourists and that the tourists became would resist government officials.
Version about “controlled delivery” (author Alexey Rakitin)
There is a version of A.I. Rakitin, according to which the group included undercover KGB officers: Semyon Zolotarev, Alexander Kolevatov and Yura Krivonischenko. One of them, portraying an anti-Soviet young man, was “recruited” by foreign intelligence some time before the hike and agreed, under the cover of a hike along the route, to meet with foreign spies disguised as another tour group and to hand over samples of radioactive materials in the form of items of clothing containing radioactive dust (in reality it was a “controlled delivery” under KGB supervision). However, the spies revealed the group’s connection with the KGB (possibly while trying to photograph them) or, on the contrary, they themselves made a mistake, which allowed uninitiated members of the group to suspect that they were not who they said they were (incorrectly used a Russian idiom, revealed ignorance of what was generally known to residents of the USSR fact, etc.). Having decided to eliminate the witnesses, the spies forced the tourists to undress in the cold and leave the tent, threatening with firearms, but not using them, so that the death looked natural (according to their calculations, the victims would inevitably die at night from the cold). Rustem Slobodin tried to resist the attackers and was beaten by them, as a result of which he lost consciousness while moving away from the tent. This was not immediately noticed by the others; Dyatlov, then Kolmogorov, went in search of Slobodin; they died from hypothermia. To make it easier for those who had left to find their way, a fire was lit by those who remained. Noticing the light of the fire, the agents realized that the tourists were able to organize themselves to survive and decided to finish them off. The survivors had dispersed by that time, and as they were discovered, agents used torture and hand-to-hand combat techniques to obtain information and eliminate them - this explains the bodily injuries, the torn out tongue and eye sockets. The bodies of the four tourists, discovered later than others, were thrown into a ravine in order to make their discovery more difficult. The saboteurs searched the tent and the bodies of the victims and seized the cameras with which they were photographed, as well as the tourists’ suicide notes.
Paranormal
This group of versions uses fantastic and mythological entities, such as yeti, to explain the incident. Most of these versions come from various types of paranormal researchers, ufologists, psychics, etc., who find in the circumstances of the death of Dyatlov’s tour group certain features similar to the alleged behavior of the phenomena or objects studied by these specialists. There are a number of fantastic versions of the reasons for the death of the Dyatlov group.
The incident in the context of the history of Russian tourism
The death of the Dyatlov group, for all its drama, is not a unique event either for that time or for sports tourism in general. The fame of this particular case is associated with the active work of relatives and friends of the victims, who made significant efforts to perpetuate the memory of the victims and publicize the circumstances of the tragedy. The unknown also plays an important role. main reason accident - the circumstances of leaving the tent. In many other cases they are well known. But to this day, similar incidents occur periodically, and their circumstances are not always clarified in full.
The death of the Dyatlovites occurred on last period the existence of the old system of supporting amateur tourism, which had organizational form commissions under Sports Committees and Unions of Sports Societies and Organizations (USSO) of territorial entities. There were tourist sections at enterprises and universities, but these were disparate organizations that interacted poorly with each other. With the increasing popularity of tourism, it became obvious that the existing system cannot cope with the preparation, provision and support of tourist groups and cannot provide a sufficient level of tourism safety. In 1959, when the Dyatlov group died, the number of dead tourists did not exceed 50 people per year throughout the country. The very next year, 1960, the number of dead tourists almost doubled. The first reaction of the authorities was an attempt to ban amateur tourism, which was done by decree of March 17, 1961. But it is impossible to prohibit people from voluntarily going on a hike in a completely accessible area - tourism has gone into a “wild” state, when no one controlled the preparation or equipment of the groups, the routes were not coordinated, and only friends and relatives monitored the deadlines. The effect was immediate: in 1961, the number of dead tourists exceeded 200 people. Since the groups did not document their composition and route, sometimes there was no information either about the number of missing people or where to look for them.
The death of Dyatlov's tour group in literature and art
Literature
Documentary prose
- Oleg Arkhipov."Death classified as 'Secret'." Reflections on the tragedy of Igor Dyatlov’s group, Istina Publishing House, Tyumen, 2012
Fiction
In mid-2005, the Ural magazine, in which Anna Matveeva’s story appeared four and a half years ago, published Anna Kiryanova’s mystical thriller “The Weed-Nay Hunt.” The novel was based on the story of the death of the Dyatlov group, but the novel itself was neither a documentary nor a fictional version of real events. Despite the fact that the surname of the main character of the novel was Dyatlov(but not Igor, A Egor; this was the only coincidence in the novel between the real surname and the character’s surname), the editors of the magazine and the author declared that “The Sorni-Nai Hunt” is an “aesthetic rethinking” of the “Ural myth” about the death of the tour group. However, the published magazine version of the novel was noticed not so much by literary critics as by friends and associates of the tourists who died almost half a century ago. Kiryanova talked about it this way in an interview:
After the publication of the book, a group of elderly friends of the Dyatlovites chased after me, accusing me of making a huge fortune by publishing this novel in the Ural magazine, and of insulting honor and dignity...<...>If the city is called “Sverdlovsk”, I cannot call it “Zhopinsk”. These academicians stood with posters under my windows, and since then I decided not to write anything like that. Apart from troubles, I gained nothing from the publication of this novel. Of course, I then came out and calmly told these friends of the Dyatlovites that they should have written denunciations, requests and demands in 1959, and not in 2005.
The authors express sincere gratitude for the cooperation and information provided to the Public Memory Fund of the “Dyatlov Group” and personally to Yuri Kuntsevich, as well as Vladimir Askinadzi, Vladimir Borzenkov, Natalya Varsegova, Anna Kiryanova and Ekaterinburg photo processing specialists.
INTRODUCTION .
In the early morning of February 2, 1959, on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl in the vicinity of Mount Otorten in the Northern Urals, dramatic events occurred that led to the death of a group of tourists from Sverdlovsk led by 23-year-old student of the Ural Polytechnic Institute Igor Dyatlov.
Many of the circumstances of this tragedy have not yet received a satisfactory explanation, giving rise to many rumors and conjectures, which gradually grew into legends and myths, based on which several books have been written and a number of feature films have been made. We think we succeededto restore the true development of these events, which puts an end to this protracted story. Our version is based on strictly documentary sources, namely on the materials of the Criminal Case of the history of the death and search of the Dyatlovites, as well as on some everyday and tourist experience. This is the version we offer to the attention of all interested persons and the organization, insisting on its authenticity, but not claiming a new coincidence in detail.
BACKGROUND
Before finding themselves at the site of a cold overnight on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl on the night of February 1–2, 1959, a number of events occurred with Dyatlov’s group.
So, the very idea of this trek III, the highest category of difficulty, came to Igor Dyatlov a long time ago and took shape in December 1958, as Igor’s senior tourism comrades spoke about. *
The composition of the participants in the planned hike changed during its preparation, reaching up to 13 people, but the core of the group, consisting of UPI students and graduates with experience in tourist hikes, including joint ones, remained unchanged. It included: Igor Dyatlov - 23-year-old leader of the campaign, 20-year-old Lyudmila Dubinina - supply manager, Yuri Doroshenko - 21 years old, 22-year-old Alexander Kolevatov, Zinaida Kolmogorova - 22 years old, 23-year-old Georgy Krivonischenko , 22-year-old Rustem Slobodin, Nikolai Thibault - 23 years old, 22-year-old Yuri Yudin. Two days before the hike, 37-year-old Semyon Zolotarev, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, a front-line soldier who graduated from the Institute of Physical Education, and a professional tourism instructor, joined the group.
At the beginning, the hike went according to plan, with the exception of one circumstance: on January 28, Yuri Yudin left the route due to illness. The group made the further journey with nine of them. Until January 31, the hike, according to the general diary of the hike, the diaries of individual participants, and the photos given in the File, was proceeding normally: difficulties were surmountable, and new places gave the young people new impressions. On January 31, Dyatlov’s group made an attempt to overcome the pass separating the valleys of the Auspiya and Lozva rivers, however, encountering strong winds at low temperatures (about -18) they were forced to retreat for the night to the forested part of the Auspiya river valley. On the morning of February 1, the group got up late, left some of their food and belongings in a specially equipped storehouse (this took a lot of time), had lunch, and at approximately 15:00 on February 1, set out on the route. The materials on the termination of the Criminal Case, apparently expressing the collective opinion of the investigation and interviewed specialists, say that such a late start on the route was first Igor Dyatlov's mistake. At the beginning, the group most likely followed its old trail, and then continued moving in the direction of Mount Otorten and at about 17 o’clock settled for a cold night on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl.
To facilitate the perception of information, we present a wonderfully compiled diagram of the scene of events given by Vadim Chernobrov (Ill. 1).
Ill. 1. Map of the scene.
The materials of the criminal case say that Dyatlov “came to the wrong place where he wanted”, making a mistake in the direction and taking much to the left than required to reach the pass between heights 1096 and 663. This, according to the compilers of the case, was the second mistake of Igor Dyatlov.
We do not agree with the investigation’s version and believe that Igor Dyatlov stopped the group not by mistake, by accident, but SPECIFICALLY in a place previously planned in the previous transition.
Our opinion is not alone - an experienced tourist student, Sogrin, who was part of one of the search and rescue groups that found Igor Dyatlov’s tent, stated the same during the investigation. Modern researcher Borzenkov also speaks about the planned stop in the book “Dyatlov Pass. Research and materials", Yekaterinburg 2016, p. 138. What prompted Igor Dyatlov to do this?
COLD NIGHT.
Arriving as we believe , to the point pre-designated by Dyatlov, the group began setting up a tent, according to all “tourist and mountaineering rules.” The question of a cold overnight stay baffles the most experienced specialists and is one of the main mysteries of the tragic campaign. Many different versions have been put forward, including the absurd, saying that this was done for “training.”
Only we managed to find a convincing version.
The question arises whether the participants in the campaign knew that Dyatlov plans cold night. We think that they didn’t know*, but they didn’t argue, knowing from previous campaigns and stories about them about the difficult behavior of their leader and forgiving him for it in advance.
*This is indicated by the fact that the fire accessories (an axe, a saw and a stove) were not left at the storage shed; moreover, a dry log of wood was even prepared for kindling.
Taking part in the general work on arranging an overnight stay, only one person expressed his protest, namely, 37-year-old Semyon Zolotarev, a professional tourism instructor who went through the war. This protest was expressed in a very peculiar form, indicating the high intellectual abilities of its applicant. Semyon Zolotarev created a very remarkable document, namely Combat leaflet No. 1 " Evening Otorten.
We consider Combat Leaflet No. 1 “Evening Otorten” to be the key to solving the tragedy.
The name itself speaks about the authorship of Zolotarev “ Combat leaf." Semyon Zolotarev was the only veteran of the Great Patriotic War among the participants in the campaign, and a very well-deserved one, having four military awards, including the medal “For Courage”. In addition, according to the tourist Axelrod, reflected in the Case, the handwriting of the handwritten “Evening Otorten” coincides with the handwriting of Zolotarev. So, at first“Combat leaflet”, it is said that “according to the latest scientific data Bigfoot people live in the vicinity of Mount Otorten.”
It must be said that at that time the whole world was gripped by the fever of searching for Bigfoot, which has not subsided to this day. Similar searches were also conducted in the Soviet Union. We think that Igor Dyatlov was aware of this “problem” and dreamed of meeting Bigfoot and for the first time in the world and take a photo of it. From the materials of the Case it is known that Igor Dyatlov met with old hunters in Vizhay, consulted with them on the upcoming campaign, perhaps they were talking about Bigfoot. Of course, experienced hunters* told the “young” the whole “truth” about Bigfoot, where he lives, what his behavior is, what he loves.
*The case file contains the testimony of Chargin, 85 years old, that in Vizhay a group of Dyatlov tourists approached him as a hunter.
Of course, everything that was said was in the spirit of traditional hunting tales, but Igor Dyatlov believed what was said and decided that the outskirts of Otorten were just the ideal place for Bigfoot to live and it was only a matter of small things - getting up for a cold night, exactly cold, since Bigfoot loves the cold and out of curiosity he himself will approach the tent. The place for a possible overnight stay was chosen by Igor in the previous transition on January 31, 1959, when the group actually reached the pass separating the basins of the Auspiya and Lozva rivers.
A photo of this moment was preserved, which allowed Borzenkov to accurately determine this point on the map. The picture shows that, obviously, Igor Dyatlov and Semyon Zolotarev are arguing very fiercely about the future route. It is obvious that Zolotarev is against logically difficult to explain Dyatlov’s decision to return back to Auspiya and offers to “take the pass,” which was a matter of about 30 minutes, and go down for the night into the Lozva River basin. Note that in this case the group would have camped for the night just about in the area of that same ill-fated cedar.
Everything becomes logically explainable if we assume that already at that moment Dyatlov was planning a cold overnight stay, right on the slope of Mountain 1096 *, which, if he spent the night in the Lozva basin, would have been on the sidelines.
*This mountain, called Mount Kholatchakhl in Mansi, is translated as “ Mountain of the 9 Dead". The Mansi consider this place “unclean” and avoid it. So from the Case, according to the testimony of student Slabtsov, who found the tent, the Mansi guide accompanying them flatly refused to go up this mountain. We think that Dyatlov decided that if it’s impossible, then he needs to prove to everyone that it’s possible and he’s not afraid of anything, and he also thought that if they say it’s impossible, that means exactlyhere The notorious Bigfoot lives.
So, at approximately 5 pm on February 1, Igor Dyatlov gives unexpected the team, a group that had rested for half a day, stood up for a cold night, explaining the reasons for this decision with the scientific task of finding Bigfoot. The group, with the exception of Semyon Zolotarev, reacted calmly to this decision. In the time remaining before bedtime, Semyon Zolotarev made his famous “Evening Otorten”, which is actually satirical work, sharply critical established order in the group.
In our opinion, there is a justified point of view on the further tactics of Igor Dyatlov. According to the experienced tourist Axelrod, who knew Igor Dyatlov well from joint hikes, Dyatlov planned to raise the group in the dark, at about 6 o’clock in the morning, then go to storm Mount Otorten. Most likely this is what happened. The group was getting ready to get dressed (more precisely, put on shoes, since people slept in clothes), while having breakfast with crackers and lard. According to numerous testimonies from participants in rescue operations, crackers were scattered throughout the tent; they fell out of crumpled blankets along with pieces of lard. The situation was calm, no one, except Dyatlov, was seriously upset that the Bigfoot did not come and that, in fact, the group had undergone such significant inconvenience in vain.
Only Semyon Zolotarev, who was located at the very entrance to the tent, was seriously outraged by what had happened. His discontent was fueled by the following circumstance. The fact is that February 2 was Semyon’s birthday. And it looks like he started “celebrating” it by drinking alcohol from the night before, and it looks like one, because According to Doctor Vozrozhdenny, no alcohol was found in the bodies of the first 5 tourists found. This is reflected in the official documents (Acts) given in the Case.
About a feast with chopped lard and empty flask with The smell of vodka or alcohol at the entrance to the tent where Semyon Zolotarev was located is directly indicated in the Case by the prosecutor of the city Indel Tempalov. A large flask of alcohol was seized from the discovered tent by student Boris Slobtsov. This alcohol, according to student Brusnitsyn, a participant in the events, was immediately drunk by the members of the search group who found the tent. That is, in addition to the flask with alcohol There was a flask with the same drink in the tent. We think that we are talking about alcohol, and not about vodka.
Warmed up by alcohol, Zolotarev, dissatisfied with the cold and hungry night, left the tent to go to the toilet (a trace of urine remained near the tent) and outside demanded an analysis of Dyatlov’s mistakes. Most likely, the amount of alcohol consumed was so significant that Zolotarev became very drunk and began to behave aggressively. Someone must have come out of the tent in response to this noise. At first glance, this should be the leader of the campaign, Igor Dyatlov, but we think that it was not he who came to the conversation. Dyatlov was located at the farthest end of the tent; it was inconvenient for him to climb over everyone and, most importantly, Dyatlov was significantly inferior in physical characteristics to Semyon Zolotarev. We believe that in response to the demand, Semyon came out tall (180 cm) and physically strong Yuri Doroshenko. This is also supported by the fact that ice ax, found near the tent, belonged to Yuri Doroshenko. So, in the materials of the Case there was a note made in his hand: “go to the trade union committee, take mine ice ax." Thus, Yuri Doroshenko, atthe only one from the whole group as it turned out later, it was time to put on my boots. The footprint of the only person wearing boots was documented in the Act by prosecutor Tempalov.
There is no data on the presence or absence of alcohol in the body of 4 people found later (in May), and, specifically, Semyon Zolotarev in the Acts of Doctor Vozrozhdeniy, because The bodies had already begun to decompose at the time of the study. That is, the answer to the question: “Was Semyon Zolotarev drunk or not?” There is no case in the materials.
So, Yuri Doroshenko, wearing ski boots, armed with an ice ax and taking with him a Dyatlov flashlight for illumination, because... it was still dark (it was light at 8-9 am, and the action took place around 7 am), he crawls out of the tent. A short, harsh and unpleasant conversation took place between Zolotarev and Doroshenko. It is obvious that Zolotarev expressed his opinion about Dyatlov and the Dyatlovites.
From Zolotarev’s point of view, Dyatlov makes serious mistakes. The first of these was Dyatlov’s passage of the mouth of the Auspiya River. As a result, the group had to make a detour. It was also incomprehensible to Zolotarev that the group’s retreat on January 31 to the bed of the Auspiya River instead of going down to the bed of Lozva and, finally, absurd, and, most importantly, ineffective cold night. The dissatisfaction hiddenly expressed by Zolotarev in the newspaper “Evening Otorten” spilled out.
We think that Zolotarev proposed to remove Dyatlov from the post of leader of the campaign, replacing him with someone else, meaning primarily himself. It is difficult to say now in what form Zolotarev proposed this to us. It is clear that after drinking alcohol the form should be sharp, but the degree of sharpness depends on the person’s specific reaction to alcohol. Zolotarev, who knew war in all its manifestations, of course had a disturbed psyche, and could simply become agitated to the point of alcoholic psychosis, bordering on delirium. Judging by the fact that Doroshenko left an ice ax and a flashlight and chose to hide in a tent, Zolotarev was very excited. The guys even blocked his way into the tent, throwing a stove, backpacks, and food at the entrance. This circumstance, including the term “barricading,” is repeatedly emphasized in the testimonies of participants in the rescue operation. Moreover, at the entrance to the tent there was an ax, absolutely unnecessary in this place.
It is obvious that the students decided to actively defend themselves.
Perhaps this circumstance infuriated the drunken Zolotarev even more (so in the tent at the entrance the canopy of the sheet was literally torn to pieces). Most likely, all these obstacles only infuriated Zolotarev, who was rushing into the tent to continue the showdown. And then Zolotarev remembered about the gap in the tent on the “mountain” side, which everyone had repaired together at the previous campsite. And he decided to get inside the tent through this gap, using “psychological weapons” so that he would not be hindered, as was done at the front.
Most likely he shouted something like "I'm throwing a grenade".
The fact is that the country in 1959 was still overflowing with weapons, despite all the Government Decrees on their surrender. Getting a grenade at that time was not a problem, especially in Sverdlovsk, where weapons were taken for melting down. So the threat was very real. And in general, it seems very likely that this was not just an imitation of a threat.
MAYBE THERE WAS A REAL COMBAT GRENADE.
Apparently, this is exactly what Investigator Ivanov had in mind when he spoke about a certain “piece of hardware” that he did not investigate. A grenade could be really useful on a hike, in particular, for killing fish under the ice, as was done during the war, since part of the route passed along rivers. And, quite possibly, front-line soldier Zolotarev decided to take such a “necessary” item on the campaign.
Zolotarev did not calculate the effect of his “weapon”. The students took the threat seriously and, in a panic, made two cuts in the tarpaulin and left the tent. This happened around 7 o'clock in the morning, as it was still dark, as evidenced by the flashlight in the lit condition, dropped by students and subsequently found by searchers 100 meters from the tent down the slope.
Zolotarev walked around the tent and, continuing to imitate a threat, decided to teach the “young people” while drunk. He lined up the people (as witnessed by all the people who observed the tracks) and commanded “Down,” giving the direction. He gave me one blanket with him, saying, keep warm with one blanket, as in that Armenian riddle from “Evening Otorten”. This is how the cold night of the Dyatlovites ended.
TRAGEDY IN THE URAL MOUNTAINS.
People went down, and Zolotarev climbed into the tent and apparently continued to drink, celebrating his birthday. The fact that someone remained in the tent is evidenced by the subtle observer student Sorgin, whose testimony is given in the Case.
Zolotarev settled down on two blankets. All the blankets in the tent were crumpled, with the exception of two, on which they found skins from the loin that Zolotarev had snacked on. It was already dawn, the wind had risen and passed through a hole in one part of the tent and cutouts in another. Zolotarev covered the hole with Dyatlov’s fur jacket, and had to deal with the cutouts in a different way, since the initial attempt to plug the cutouts with things, following the example of the hole, failed (so, according to Astenaki, several blankets and a quilted jacket were sticking out of the cutouts of the tent). Then Zolotarev decided to lower the far edge of the tent by cutting the stand - a ski pole.
Due to the severity of the snow that fell (the fact that there was snow at night is evidenced by the fact that Dyatlov’s flashlight was lying on the tent on a layer of snow about 10 cm thick), the stick was firmly fixed and it was not possible to pull it out immediately. The stick had to be cut with the long knife used to cut lard. They managed to pull out the cut stick, and parts of it were found cut from the top of the backpacks. The far edge of the tent sank and covered the cutouts, and Zolotarev positioned himself at the front pole of the tent and, apparently, fell asleep for a while, finishing off the alcohol from his flask.
Meanwhile, the group continued to move down in the direction indicated by Zolotarev. It is attested that the tracks were divided into two groups - to the left of 6 people, and to the right - two. Then the tracks converged. These groups apparently corresponded to the two openings through which the people had climbed out. The two on the right are Thibault and Dubinina, who were located closer to the exit. On the left are everyone else.
One man walked in boots(Yuri Doroshenko, we believe). Let us remind you that this is documented, in the Case, recorded by Prosecutor Tempalov. It also says that there were traces eight, What documented confirms our version that one person remained in the tent.
It was getting light, it was difficult to walk because of the snow that had fallen and, of course, it was desperately cold, because... the temperature was about -20 C with wind. At approximately 9 o'clock in the morning, a group of 8 tourists, already half-frozen, found themselves next to a tall cedar tree. Cedar was not chosen by chance as the point near which they decided to build a fire. In addition to the dry lower branches for the fire, which we managed to “obtain” with the help of cuts, an “observation post” was equipped with great difficulty to monitor the tent. For this purpose, Finnish woman Krivonischenko cut out several large branches that obstructed the view. Below, under the cedar tree, with great difficulty, a small fire was lit, which, according to the concurring estimates of various observers, burned for 1.5-2 hours. If you were at the cedar at 9 am, it took an hour to make a fire and plus two hours - it turns out that the fire went out around 12 noon.
Still taking Zolotarev’s threat seriously, the group decided not to return to the tent for now, but to try to “hold out” by building some kind of shelter, at least from the wind, for example, in the form of a cave. It turned out to be possible to do this in a ravine, near a stream that flowed towards the Lozva River. 10-12 poles were cut for this shelter. What exactly the poles were supposed to serve for is not clear, maybe they planned to build a “floor” out of them, throwing spruce branches on top.
Zolotarev, meanwhile, was “resting” in the tent, lost in an anxious drunken sleep. Having woken up and sobered up a little, at about 10-11 o’clock he saw that the situation was serious, the students had not returned, which meant they were “in trouble” somewhere, and he realized that he had “gone too far.” He followed the tracks downwards, realizing his guilt and already without a weapon (the ice ax remained at the tent, the knife in the tent). True, it remains unclear where the grenade was located, if indeed there was one. At about 12 o'clock he approached the cedar. He walked dressed and wearing felt boots. The footprint of one person in felt boots was recorded by observer Axelrod 10-15 meters from the tent. He walked down to Lozva.
The question arises: “Why is there no or not noticed ninth trail? The issue here is most likely the following. The students descended at 7 o'clock in the morning, and Zolotarev at about 11. By this time, at dawn, a strong wind arose, drifting snow, which partly blew away the snow that had fallen at night, and partly compacted it, pressing it to the ground. It turned out thinner, and most importantly, more dense layer of snow. In addition, felt boots are larger in area than boots, and even more so feet without shoes. The pressure from felt boots on the snow per unit area is several times less, so the traces of Zolotarev’s descent were barely noticeable and were not recorded by observers.
The people at the cedar, meanwhile, met him in a critical situation. Half-frozen, they unsuccessfully tried to warm themselves up by the fire, bringing their freezing hands, feet and faces close to the fire. Apparently from this combination of frostbite and mild burns, an unusual red skin coloration of the exposed parts of the body was observed in the five tourists found in the first phase of the search.
People placed all the blame for what happened on Zolotarev, so his appearance did not bring relief, but served to further escalate the situation. Moreover, the psyche of hungry and freezing people, of course, worked inadequately. Possible apologies from Zolotarev, or vice versa, his command orders, obviously, were not accepted. Lynching has begun. We think that at first Thibault demanded, as an initial measure of “retribution,” to remove his felt boots and then demanded that he give up the “Victory” watch, which reminded Zolotarev of his participation in the war, which, obviously, was a source of pride for him. This seemed extremely offensive to Zolotarev. In response, he hit Thibault with a camera, which he may have demanded to give up. And again he “didn’t calculate”, obviously there was still alcohol in the blood. I used the camera as sling* he pierced Thibault's head, effectively killing him.
* This is evidenced by the fact that the camera strap was wound around Zolotarev’s hand.
In the conclusion of Dr. Vozrozhdeniy it is said that Thibault’s skull is deformed in a rectangular area measuring 7x9 cm, which approximately corresponds to the size of a camera, and the torn hole in the center of the rectangle is 3x3.5x2 cm. This approximately corresponds to the size of the protruding lens. The camera, according to numerous witnesses, was found on Zolotarev’s corpse. The photo was saved.
After this, of course, everyone present attacked Zolotarev. Someone was holding hands, and Doroshenko, the only one with boots kicked him in the chest and in the ribs. Zolotarev desperately defended himself, hit Slobodin so that his skull cracked, and when Zolotarev was immobilized by collective efforts, he began to fight with his teeth, biting off the tip of Krivonischenko’s nose. This is apparently what they taught in front-line intelligence, where, according to some information, Zolotarev served.
During this fight, Lyudmila Dubinina for some reason she was counted among Zolotarev’s “supporters”. Perhaps at the beginning of the fight she sharply objected to lynching, and when Zolotarev actually killed Thibault, she fell into “disgrace.” But, most likely, the rage of those present turned to Dubinina for this reason. Everyone understood that the beginning of the tragedy, its trigger point, was Zolotarev’s intake of alcohol. The case contains evidence from Yuri Yudin that, in his opinion, one of the main shortcomings in organizing Dyatlov’s campaign was no alcohol, which it was he, Yudin, who failed to obtain in Sverdlovsk, but, as we already know, there was alcohol in the group after all. This means that the alcohol was bought on the road in Vizhay, in Indel, or, most likely, at the last moment before setting out on the route from the lumberjacks in the 41st forest area. Since Yudin did not know about the presence of alcohol, it was obviously kept secret. Dyatlov decided to use alcohol under some emergency circumstances - such as an assault on Mount Otorten, when his strength was running out, or to celebrate the successful completion of a campaign. But the supply manager and accountant Dubinin could not have known about the presence of alcohol in the group, since it was she who allocated public money to Dyatlov to buy alcohol on the road. People or Dyatlov personally decided that she was talking about it spilled the beans Zolotarev, who slept nearby and with whom she willingly communicated (photos have been preserved). In general, Dubinina actually received the same, even more severe injuries than Zolotarev (10 ribs were broken for Dubinina, 5 for Zolotarev). In addition, her “chatty” tongue was torn out.
Considering that the “opponents” were dead, one of the Dyatlovites, fearing responsibility, gouged out their eyes, because There was and still is a belief that the image of the killer remains in the pupil of a person who died a violent death. This version is supported by the fact that Thibault, who was mortally wounded by Zolotarev, had his eyes intact.
Let's not forget that people acted on the verge of life and death, in a state of extreme excitement, when animal instincts completely turn off acquired human qualities. Yuri Doroshenko was found with frozen foam at his mouth, which confirms our version of his extreme degree of excitement, reaching rabies.
It looks very much like Lyudmila Dubinina suffered without guilt. The fact is that with almost 100 percent probability Semyon Zolotarev was an alcoholic, like many of the direct participants in the fighting in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Fatal role here they played “People’s Commissar” 100 grams of vodka, which were issued at the front every day during the fighting. Any narcologist will say that if this continues for more than six months, then addiction of varying severity inevitably arises, depending on the physiology of a particular person. The only way to avoid the disease was to refuse the “People's Commissars”, which, of course, is something that a rare Russian person can do. So it’s unlikely that Semyon Zolotarev was such an exception. An indirect confirmation of this is an episode on the train on the way from Sverdlovsk, described in the diary of one of the participants in the campaign, which is given in the Case. A “young alcoholic” approached the tourists, demanding the return of a bottle of vodka that, in his opinion, had been stolen by one of them. The incident was hushed up, but most likely Dyatlov “figured out” Zolotarev and, when buying alcohol, strictly forbade Lyudmila Dubinina to tell Zolotarev about it. Since Zolotarev nevertheless took possession of Dyatlov’s alcohol, and then everyone else decided that Dubinin’s caretaker was to blame for this, who let it slip, spilled the beans. Most likely this was not the case. Students in their youth did not know that alcoholics develop a supernatural “sixth” sense for alcohol and they successfully and accurately find it in any conditions. Just by intuition. So Dubinina most likely had nothing to do with it.
The described bloody tragedy occurred at about 12 noon on February 2, 1959, next to the ravine where a shelter was being prepared.
This time of 12 noon is defined as follows. As we already wrote, tourists in panic left the tent through the cutouts at about 7 o’clock in the morning on February 2, 1959. The distance to the cedar is 1.5-2 km. Taking into account the “nakedness” and “barefoot” and the difficulties of orientation, the difficulties of orientation in the dark and at dawn, the group reached the cedar in an hour and a half or two. It turns out 8.5-9 o'clock in the morning. It's dawn. Another hour to prepare firewood, cut branches for the observation post, prepare poles for the flooring. It turns out that the fire was lit around 10 o'clock in the morning. According to numerous testimonies from search engines, the fire burned for 1.5-2 hours. It turns out that the fire went out when the group went to sort things out with Zolotarev to the ravine, i.e. at 11.30 - 12 o'clock. So it comes out around 12 noon. After the fight, having lowered the bodies of the dead into the cave (dropping them), a group of 6 people returned to the cedar.
And the fact that the fight took place near the ravine is proven by the fact that, according to the expert opinion of Dr. Vozrozhdeniy, Thibault himself could not move after the blow. They could only carry him. And it was difficult for dying, half-frozen people to carry even 70 meters from the cedar to the ravine. obviously I can't do it.
Those who retained their strength, Dyatlov, Slobodin, and Kolmogorov rushed to the tent, the path to which was now clear. Exhausted from the fight, Doroshenko, the fragile Krivonischenko and Kolevatov remained at the cedar and tried to rekindle the fire near the cedar, which had gone out during the fight in the ravine. So, Doroshenko was found fallen on dry branches, which he apparently carried to the fire. But it seems they were unable to rekindle the fire. After some time, perhaps very short, Doroshenko and Krivonischenko froze to death. Kolevatov lived longer than them, and having discovered that his comrades were dead, and it was not possible to re-light the fire, he decided to meet his fate in the cave, thinking that one of those who were in it might still be alive. He used a Finn to cut off some of the warm clothing of his dead comrades and carried them to the “hole in the ravine” where the rest were located. He also took off Yuri Doroshenko’s boots, but apparently decided that they were unlikely to be useful and threw them into a ravine. The boots were never found, as were a number of other things of the Dyatlovites, which is reflected in the Case. In the Kolevatov cave, Thibo,
Dubinina and Zolotarev met their death.
Igor Dyatlov, Rustem Slobodin and Zinaida Kolmogorova met their death on the difficult path to the tent, fighting for life to the last. This happened around 13 o'clock in the afternoon on February 2, 1959.
The time of death of the group, according to our version, 12-13 o'clock in the afternoon, coincides with the assessment of the remarkable forensic expert Dr. Vozrozhdenny, according to whom the death of all victims occurred 6-8 hours after the last meal. And this reception was breakfast after a cold night at approximately 6 am. 6-8 hours later gives 12-14 pm, which almost exactly coincides with the time we indicated.
A TRAGIC CONDITION HAS COME.
CONCLUSION .
It is difficult to find right and wrong in this story. Sorry for everyone. The greatest blame, as it was stated in the materials of the Case, lies with the head of the sports club UPI Gordo, it was he who should have checked the psychological stability of the group and only after that given the go-ahead to go out. I feel sorry for the perky Zina Kolmogorova, who loved life so much, the romantic, dreaming of love Luda Dubinin, the handsome foppish Kolya Thibault, the fragile Georgy Krivonischenko with the soul of a musician, the faithful comrade Sasha Kolevatov, the home boy of the mischievous Rustem Slobodin, sharp, strong, with his own concepts of justice, Yuri Doroshenko. I feel sorry for the talented radio engineer, but the naive and narrow-minded person and the useless leader of the campaign, the ambitious Igor Dyatlov. I feel sorry for the honored front-line soldier, intelligence officer Semyon Zolotarev, who did not find the right ways to make the campaign go as he probably wanted, as best as possible.
In principle, we agree with the conclusions of the investigation that “the group was faced with natural forces that they were unable to overcome.” Only we believe that these natural forces were not external, but internal. Some were unable to cope with their ambitions; Zolotarev did not make psychological allowances for the young age of the participants in the campaign and its leader. And of course, Violation of Prohibition played a huge role during the campaign, which apparently officially operated among UPI students.
We believe that the investigation ultimately came to a version close to the one we voiced. This is indicated by the fact that Semyon Zolotarev was buried separately from the main group of Dyatlovites. But the authorities considered it undesirable for political reasons to publicly voice this version in 1959. Thus, according to the memoirs of investigator Ivanov, “In the Urals, probably, there was not a person who did not talk about this tragedy in those days” (see the book “Dyatlov Pass” p. 247). Therefore, the investigation was limited to an abstract formulation of the reason for the death of the group, given above. Moreover, we believe that the materials of the Case contain indirect confirmation of the version of the presence of a combat grenade or grenades in the possession of one of the participants in the campaign. So in the Acts of Doctor Vozrozhdeniy it is said that multiple fractures of the ribs in Zolotarev and Dubinina could have occurred as a result of the action air shock wave, which is precisely generated by the explosion of a grenade. In addition, the prosecutor-criminologist, Ivanov, who conducted the investigation, as we already wrote about this, spoke about the “underinvestigation” of some piece of hardware found. Most likely we are talking about Zolotarev’s grenade, which could end up anywhere from a tent to a ravine. It is obvious that the people conducting the investigation exchanged information and, perhaps, the “grenade” version reached Doctor Vozrozhdeniy.
We also found direct evidence that already at the beginning of March, that is, in the initial phase of the search, the version of the explosion was considered. So investigator Ivanov writes in his memoirs: “There were no traces of the explosion wave. Maslennikov and I carefully considered this” (see in the book “Dyatlov Pass” the article by L.N. Ivanov “memories from the family archive” p. 255).
This means that there were grounds for searching for traces of the explosion, that is, it is possible that the grenade was found by sappers after all. Since the memoirs are about Maslennikov, this determines the time - the beginning of March, so Maslennikov subsequently left for Sverdlovsk.
This is evidence very significant, especially if we remember that at that time the main one was the “Mansi version”, that is, that the local residents of Mansi were involved in the tragedy. The Mansi version completely collapsed by the end of March 1959.
The fact that by the time the bodies of the last four tourists were discovered in early May, the investigation had come to certain conclusions is evidenced by the complete indifference of Prosecutor Ivanov, who was present when the bodies were dug up. The leader speaks about this in his memoirs last group search engines Askinadzi. So, most likely, the grenade was found not near the cave, but somewhere along the stretch from the tent to the cedar in February-March, when a group of sappers with mine detectors was working there. That is, by May, by the time the bodies of the last four dead were discovered, everything was already more or less clear to the prosecutor-criminologist Ivanov, who conducted the investigation.
Obviously, that this tragic incident should serve as a lesson for tourists of all generations.
And for this, the activities of the Dyatlov Foundation should, as we believe, be continued.
ADDITION. ABOUT FIREBALLS.
The monster is loud, mischievous, huge, yawning and barking
It is no coincidence that we cited this epigraph from the wonderful story of the enlightener A.N. Radishchev "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow." This epigraph is about the state. So how “evil” was the Soviet state in 1959 and how did it “bark” at tourists?
That's how. Organized a tourist section at the institute, where everyone studied for free and received a scholarship. Then this “evil one” allocated money in the amount of 1,300 rubles for the trip of his students, gave them free use of the most expensive equipment for the duration of the trip - a tent, skis, boots, windbreakers, sweaters. Helped with planning the trip and developing the route. And even arranged a paid business trip for the leader of the campaign, Igor Dyatlov. The height of cynicism in our opinion. This is how our country, in which we all grew up, barked at tourists.
When it became clear that something unexpected had happened to the students, they immediately organized an expensive and well-organized rescue and search operation involving aviation, military personnel, athletes, other tourists, as well as the local population of Mansi, who showed their best side.
What about the famous BALLS OF FIRE? Which tourists were allegedly so afraid of that they barricaded the entrance to the tent, and then cut it open in order to urgently get out of it?
We also found the answer to this question.
We were greatly helped in finding this answer by images that, using a unique technique, were obtained by processing film from Semyon Zolotarev’s camera, a group of researchers from Yekaterinburg. Recognizing the significant importance of this work, we would like to draw attention to the following easily verifiable and obvious data.
It is enough to simply rotate the resulting images to see that they do not depict mythical"fireballs" and real and quite understandable plots.
So if we rotate 180 degrees one of the images from the book “Dyatlov Pass” and called “Mushroom” by the authors, then we can easily see the dead face of one of the Dyatlovites who was the last to be found, namely Alexander Kolevatov. It was he who, according to eyewitnesses, was found with his tongue hanging out, which can be easily “read” in the photo. From this fact it is obvious that Zolotarev’s film, after the footage he shot during the campaign, filmed by the Askinadzi search group.
Ill. 3. “Mysterious” photo No. 7 *. Kolevatov's face.
This is the “Mushroom” object in Yakimenko’s terminology.
*Photos 6 and 7 are shown in the article by Valentin Yakimenko “Films of the Dyatlovites”: Searches, finds and new mysteries” in the book “Dyatlov Pass” p.424. This is also where the numbering of pictures comes from. This position is further proven by this frame called “Lynx” by the authors.
Let's rotate it 90 degrees clockwise. In the center of the frame, the face of a man from the Askinadzi search group is clearly visible. Here is a photo from his archive.
Ill.4 Asktinadzi group. By this point people already knew where the bodies are located and they made a special dam - the trap "in the photo" - to detain them in the event of a sudden flash flood. Photo from late April – early May 1959.
Ill. 5 “Mysterious” photo No. 6 (Lynx object) according to Yakimenko’s terminology and an enlarged image of the search engine.
We see that, in the center of the frame, from Zolotarev’s film, a man from the Askinadzi group.
We think that it was no coincidence that this man turned out to be in the center frame. Perhaps it was he who played the key, main, central role in the search - figured out where the bodies of the last Dyatlovites were. This is evidenced by the fact that even in the group photo of the search engines he feels like a winner and is positioned above everyone else.
We believe that All other photographs given in Yakimenko’s article are similar, purely earthly origin.
So, thanks to the joint efforts of specialists from Yekaterinburg, primarily Valentin Yakimenko and ours, the mystery of the “fireballs” was resolved by itself.
It simply never existed.
As well as the “fireballs” themselves in the vicinity of Mount Otorten on the night of February 1-2, 1959.
We respectfully present our work to all interested individuals and organizations.
Sergey Goldin, analyst, independent expert.
Yuri Ransmi, research engineer, specialist in image analysis.
The death of Dyatlov’s tour group is one of the most mysterious and terrible incidents of the 20th century, which happened on the night of February 1 to 2, 1959 in the Northern Urals, when a group of tourists led by Igor Dyatlov died under unclear circumstances. Here and below are photographs taken by the participants of the hike:
At the moment when, having set up a tent on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl (translated from Mansi - “Mountain of the Dead”), the tourists were getting ready for bed, something happened that forced them to leave the shelter in panic, running down the slope in whatever clothes they were wearing. Later, everyone was found dead, presumably from the cold. Several people had severe internal injuries, as if they had fallen from a height or been hit by a speeding car (no significant skin damage was found).
The group consisted of skiers from the tourist club of the Ural Polytechnic Institute (UPI, Sverdlovsk): five students, three UPI graduate engineers and a camp instructor, front-line soldier Semyon Zolotarev. The leader of the group was a fifth-year UPI student, an experienced tourist, Igor Dyatlov. The rest of the group were also no strangers to sports tourism, having experience in difficult hikes.
One of the participants in the hike, Yuri Yudin, dropped out of the group due to radiculitis when entering the active part of the route, thanks to which he was the only one of the entire group to survive. He was the first to identify the personal belongings of the victims, and he also identified the corpses of Slobodin and Dyatlov. In the 1990s, he was deputy head of Solikamsk for economics and forecasting, and chairman of the city tourist club “Polyus”. Lyudmila Dubinina says goodbye to Yudin. On the left is Igor Dyatlov with bamboo ski poles (there were no metal ones yet).
The first days of the hike along the active part of the route passed without any serious incidents. Tourists skied along the Lozva River, and then along its tributary Auspiya. On February 1, 1959, the group stopped for the night on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl (Kholat-Syahl, translated from Mansi - “Mountain of the Dead”) or peak “1079” (on later maps its height is given as 1096.7 m), not far from unnamed pass (later called Dyatlov Pass).
The first days of the hike along the active part of the route passed without any serious incidents. Tourists skied along the Lozva River, and then along its tributary Auspiya. On February 1, 1959, the group stopped for the night on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl or peak “1079” (on later maps its height is given as 1096.7 m), not far from an unnamed pass (later called Dyatlov Pass).
On February 12, the group was supposed to reach the final point of the route - the village of Vizhay, send a telegram to the institute sports club, and return to Sverdlovsk on February 15. The first to express concern was Yuri Blinov, the leader of a group of UPI tourists, who drove up with Dyatlov’s group from Sverdlovsk to the village of Vizhay and left from there to the west - to the Molebny Stone ridge and Mount Isherim (1331). Also, Sasha Kolevatov’s sister Rimma and parents Dubinina and Slobodina began to worry about the fate of their relatives. The head of the UPI sports club, Lev Semenovich Gordo, and the UPI physical education department, A. M. Vishnevsky, waited another day or two for the group to return, since there had previously been delays of groups on the route for various reasons. On February 16-17, they contacted Vizhay, trying to establish whether the group was returning from a hike. The answer was no.
Search and rescue operations began on February 22, and a detachment was sent along the route. There is not a single populated area for hundreds of kilometers around, completely deserted places. On February 26, a tent covered with snow was discovered on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl. The wall of the tent facing down the slope was cut. The tent was later excavated and examined. The entrance to the tent was open, but the slope of the tent facing the slope was torn in several places. A fur jacket was sticking out of one of the holes. Moreover, as the examination showed, the tent was cut from the inside.
At the entrance inside the tent there was a stove, buckets, and a little further on there were cameras. In the far corner of the tent there is a bag with maps and documents, Dyatlov’s camera, Kolmogorova’s diary, a jar of money. To the right of the entrance were food items. To the right, next to the entrance, lay two pairs of boots. The remaining six pairs of shoes lay against the wall opposite. The backpacks are laid out at the bottom, with quilted jackets and blankets on them. Some of the blankets were not laid out; there were warm clothes on top of the blankets. An ice ax was found near the entrance, and a flashlight was thrown on the slope of the tent. The tent turned out to be completely empty; there were no people in it.
During the hike, the group members took pictures with several cameras and also kept diaries. Neither photographs nor diaries, however, helped to establish the exact cause of the deaths of tourists.
Then the search engines began to discover a continuous series of terrible and cruel mysteries. Traces around the tent indicated that the entire Dyatlov group suddenly, for some unknown reason, left the tent, presumably not through the exit, but through the cuts. Moreover, people ran out of the tent into the extreme cold without shoes and partially dressed. The group ran about 20 meters in the direction opposite to the entrance to the tent. Then the Dyatlovites, in a dense group, almost in a line, walked down the slope in their socks in the snow and frost. The tracks indicate that they walked side by side without losing sight of each other. Moreover, they did not run away, but walked away down the slope at the usual pace.
After about 500 meters along the slope, the tracks were lost under the thickness of the snow. The next day, February 27, one and a half kilometers from the tent and 280 m down the slope, near a cedar tree, the bodies of Yuri Doroshenko and Yuri Krivonischenko were discovered. At the same time, it was recorded: Doroshenko’s foot and hair on his right temple were burned, Krivonischenko had a burn on his left shin and a burn on his left foot. A fire was discovered next to the corpses, which had sunk into the snow.
The rescuers were struck by the fact that both bodies were stripped down to their underwear. Doroshenko was lying on his stomach. Below him is a tree branch broken into pieces, on which he apparently fell. Krivonischenko was lying on his back. All sorts of small things were scattered around the bodies. There were numerous injuries on his hands (bruises and abrasions), his internal organs were filled with blood, and Krivonischenko had the tip of his nose missing.
On the cedar itself, at a height of up to 5 meters, branches were broken off (some of them lay around the bodies). Moreover, branches up to 5 cm thick, at a height, were first sawn with a knife, and then broken off with force, as if they were hanging on them with their whole body. There were traces of blood on the bark.
Nearby they found knife cuts with broken young fir trees and cuts on birch trees. The cut tops of the fir trees and the knife were not found. However, there was no suggestion that they were used for heating. Firstly, they do not burn well, and secondly, there was a relatively large amount of dry material around. Almost simultaneously with them, 300 meters from the cedar up the slope in the direction of the tent, the body of Igor Dyatlov was found.
He was slightly covered with snow, reclining on his back, with his head towards the tent, his hand wrapped around the trunk of a birch tree. Dyatlov was wearing ski trousers, long johns, a sweater, a cowboy jacket, and a fur vest. On the right foot there is a woolen sock, on the left - a cotton sock. The watch on my wrist showed 5 hours 31 minutes. There was an icy growth on his face, which meant that before his death he had breathed into the snow.
Numerous abrasions, scratches, and bruises were revealed on the body; a superficial wound from the second to fifth fingers was recorded on the palm of the left hand; internal organs are filled with blood. About 330 meters from Dyatlov, higher up the slope, under a 10 cm layer of dense snow, the body of Zina Kolmogorova was discovered.
She was dressed warmly, but without shoes. There were signs of nosebleeds on the face. There are numerous abrasions on the hands and palms; a wound with a scalped flap of skin on the right hand; skin encircling the right side, extending to the back; swelling of the meninges.
A few days later, on March 5, 180 meters from the place where Dyatlov’s body was found and 150 meters from the location of Kolmogorova’s body, the corpse of Rustem Slobodin was found under a layer of snow of 15-20 cm. He was also dressed quite warmly, with a felt boot on his right foot, worn over 4 pairs of socks (the second felt boot was found in the tent). A watch was found on Slobodin’s left hand that showed 8 hours 45 minutes. There was an icy build-up on the face and there were signs of nosebleeds. A characteristic feature of the last three tourists found was their skin color: according to the recollections of rescuers - orange-red, in the documents of the forensic examination - reddish-purple.
The search for the remaining tourists took place in several stages from February to May. And only after the snow began to melt did objects begin to be discovered that pointed the rescuers in the right direction to search. Exposed branches and scraps of clothing led to a creek hollow about 70 m from the cedar, which was heavily covered with snow.
A large tent of the Dyatlov group, made from several small ones. Inside there was a portable stove designed by Dyatlov.
The excavation made it possible to find at a depth of more than 2.5 m a flooring of 14 trunks of small fir trees and one birch tree up to 2 m long. On the flooring lay spruce branches and several items of clothing. The position of these objects revealed four spots on the flooring, designed as “seats” for four people. The bodies were found under a four-meter layer of snow, in the bed of a stream that had already begun to melt, below and slightly to the side of the flooring. First they found Lyudmila Dubinina - she froze, kneeling with her face facing the slope near the waterfall of the stream.
Mansi "runes". Traditional system of Mansi individual “marking”. The signs are called “tamgas” (“tamga” in singular). Each Mansi has his own personal tamga. It’s like a family business card, a signature that is left in some memorable places - usually hunting or camping areas. Let's say a hunter caught an elk, butchered it and left it to be taken out later. He makes a stesh and marks it with his tamga.
The other three were found a little lower. Kolevatov and Zolotarev lay in an embrace “chest to back” at the edge of the stream, apparently warming each other to the end. Thibault Brignoles was the lowest, in the water of the stream. Clothes of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko - trousers, sweaters - were found on the corpses, as well as a few meters from them. All the clothes had traces of even cuts, as they had already been removed from the corpses of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko. The dead Thibault-Brignolles and Zolotarev were found well dressed, Dubinina was worse dressed - her faux fur jacket and hat were on Zolotarev, Dubinina's bare leg was wrapped in Krivonischenko's woolen trousers. Near the corpses, a Krivonischenko knife was found, which was used to cut young fir trees around the fires. Two watches were found on Thibault-Brignolle's hand - one showed 8 hours 14 minutes, the second - 8 hours 39 minutes.
Moreover, all the bodies had terrible injuries received while still alive. Dubinina and Zolotarev had fractures of 12 ribs, Dubinina - on both the right and left sides, Zolotarev - only on the right. Later, an examination determined that such injuries could only be caused by a strong impact, such as being hit by a car moving at high speed or falling from a great height. It is impossible to cause such injuries with a stone in a person’s hand. In addition, Dubinina and Zolotarev have no eyeballs - they are squeezed out or removed. And Dubinina’s tongue and part of her upper lip were torn out. Thibault-Brignolle has a depressed fracture of the temporal bone. It is very strange, but during the examination it was discovered that the clothes (sweater, trousers) contained radioactive substances with beta radiation.
According to experts, starting to climb the mountain in severe bad weather was Dyatlov’s mistake, which may have become the cause of the tragedy.
One of the last photos. Tourists clear a place for a tent on the mountainside.
The last and most mysterious photo. Some believe that this shot was taken by someone from Dyatlov’s group when danger began to approach. According to others, this shot was taken when the film was removed from the camera for development.
Here is a schematic picture of the hypothetical incident and the bodies found. Most of the group's bodies were found in a head-to-tent position, and all were located in a straight line from the cut side of the tent, for more than 1.5 kilometers. Kolmogorova, Slobodin and Dyatlov did not die while leaving the tent, but, on the contrary, on the way back to the tent.
The whole picture of the tragedy points to numerous mysteries and oddities in the behavior of the Dyatlovites, most of which are practically inexplicable.
- Why didn’t they run away from the tent, but walked away in a line, at a normal pace?
- Why did they need to light a fire near a tall cedar on a windy area?
— Why did they break cedar branches at a height of up to 5 meters, when there were many small trees around for a fire?
- How could they get such terrible injuries on level ground?
- Why didn’t those who reached the stream and built sunbeds there survive, because even in the cold they could hold out there until the morning?
- And finally, the most important thing - what made the group leave the tent at the same time and in such a hurry with practically no clothes, no shoes and no equipment?
Tent discovered by the search team:
Initially, the local population of the northern Urals - the Mansi - were suspected of the murder. Mansi Anyamov, Sanbindalov, Kurikov and their relatives came under suspicion. But none of them took the blame. They were rather scared themselves. Mansi said they saw strange “balls of fire” above the place where the tourists died. They not only described this phenomenon, but also drew it. Subsequently, the drawings from the case disappeared or are still classified. “Fireballs” were observed during the search period by the rescuers themselves, as well as other residents of the Northern Urals.
And on March 31, a very remarkable event occurred: all members of the search group who were in the camp in the Lozva valley saw a UFO. Valentin Yakimenko, a participant in those events, very succinctly described what happened in his memoirs: “Early in the morning it was still dark. The orderly Viktor Meshcheryakov came out of the tent and saw a luminous ball moving across the sky. Woke everyone up. We observed the movement of the ball (or disk) for about 20 minutes until it disappeared behind the mountainside. We saw him southeast of the tent. He was moving in a northerly direction. This phenomenon excited everyone. We were sure that the death of the Dyatlovites was somehow connected with him.” What was seen was reported to the headquarters of the search operation, located in Ivdel. The appearance of a UFO in the case gave the investigation an unexpected direction. Someone remembered that “fireballs” were observed in approximately the same area on February 17, 1959, about which there was even a publication in the Tagilsky Rabochiy newspaper. And the investigation, having decisively rejected the version of “malicious Mansi killers,” began to work in a new direction. Well-preserved traces of the Dyatlovites:
Mansi legends say that during the global flood on Mount Kholat-Syakhyl, 9 hunters previously disappeared - “died of hunger,” “cooked in boiling water,” “disappeared in an eerie radiance.” Hence the name of this mountain - Kholatchakhl, translated - Mountain of the Dead. The mountain is not sacred place For the Mansi, it’s rather the opposite - they always avoided this peak. The discovery of a storehouse made by the Dyatlovites with supplies that they left here so as not to drag extra cargo up the mountain. One of the strange circumstances of the case is that, fleeing from an unknown danger, the tourists did not go to the storehouse, where there was food and warm clothes, but in the other direction, as if something was blocking the path to the storehouse.
There are many versions of what happened, which can be divided into 4 groups: spontaneous (an avalanche fell on the tent, the tent collapsed under the weight of the attacking snow, the snow attacking the tent made it difficult for tourists to breathe, which forced them to leave the tent, etc., the impact of infrasound formed in the mountains , ball lightning, this also includes versions with attacks by wild animals and accidental poisoning), criminal (attacks by Mansi, fugitive prisoners, special services, military, foreign saboteurs, illegal gold miners, as well as a quarrel between tourists) and man-made (testing of secret weapons (for example , vacuum bomb), collision with a tent by a snowmobile or other equipment, etc.) and, finally, fantastic (evil mountain spirits, UFOs, Bigfoot, aerial electric discharge explosions of comet fragments, toroidal tornado, etc.).
There is a version by A.I. Rakitin, according to which the group included secret KGB officers: Semyon Zolotarev, Alexander Kolevatov and, possibly, Yura Krivonischenko. One of them (Kolevatov or Krivonischenko), portraying an anti-Soviet young man, was “recruited” by foreign intelligence some time before the campaign and agreed, under the cover of a campaign on the route, to meet with foreign spies disguised as another tour group, and to transfer samples of radioactive materials from his enterprises in the form of clothing items containing radioactive dust (in reality, this was a “controlled delivery” under the supervision of the KGB). However, the spies revealed the group’s connection with the KGB (possibly while trying to photograph them) or, on the contrary, they themselves made a mistake, which allowed uninitiated members of the group to suspect that they were not who they said they were (incorrectly used a Russian idiom, revealed ignorance of what was generally known to residents of the USSR fact, etc.). Having decided to eliminate the witnesses, the spies forced the tourists to undress in the cold and leave the tent, threatening with firearms, but not using them, so that the death looked natural (according to their calculations, the victims would inevitably die at night from the cold). The corpse of Igor Dyatlov in socks:
It is worth noting that at all times many tourists have died. Mainly from the cold. Thus, the death of a group of tourists in winter in itself was not something extraordinary. Various mysterious circumstances made her out of the ordinary. The peculiarity of the incident is that all “realistic” versions (such as the version about the avalanche) run into these inexplicable nuances and inconsistencies, which suggests that the group was faced with something from the category of “unknown”. The official version read: “Taking into account the absence of external bodily injuries and signs of struggle on the corpses, the presence of all the values of the group, and also taking into account the conclusion of the forensic medical examination on the causes of death of tourists, it should be considered that the cause of their death was a natural force that people had to overcome were unable to."
The death of the Dyatlovites occurred during the last period of the existence of the old system of supporting amateur tourism, which had the organizational form of commissions under the Sports Committees and Unions of Sports Societies and Organizations (USSO) of territorial entities. There were tourism sections at enterprises and universities, but these were disparate organizations that interacted poorly with each other. With the increasing popularity of tourism, it became obvious that the existing system cannot cope with the preparation, provision and support of tourist groups and cannot provide a sufficient level of tourism safety. In 1959, when the Dyatlov group died, the number of dead tourists did not exceed 50 people per year throughout the country. The very next year, 1960, the number of dead tourists almost doubled. The first reaction of the authorities was an attempt to ban amateur tourism, which was done by decree of March 17, 1961. But it is impossible to prohibit people from voluntarily going on a hike in a completely accessible area - tourism has gone into a “wild” state, when no one controlled the preparation or equipment of the groups, the routes were not coordinated, and only friends and relatives monitored the deadlines. The effect was immediate: in 1961, the number of dead tourists exceeded 200 people. Since the groups did not document their composition and route, sometimes there was no information either about the number of missing people or where to look for them. Dubinina's corpse by the stream:
By the Decree of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions of July 20, 1962, sports tourism again received official recognition, its structures were transferred to the jurisdiction of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (trade unions), tourism councils were created, commissions under the SSOO were abolished, and organizational work to support tourism was largely revised and reformed. The creation of tourist clubs began on a territorial basis, but the work in the organizations did not weaken, but intensified thanks to the widespread information support that emerged through the exchange of experience among amateur organizations. This made it possible to overcome the crisis and ensure the functioning of the sports tourism system for several decades. Body of Igor Dyatlov:
The special agencies suggested that the relatives of the victims bury them in the village closest to the pass, but they insisted that the bodies be brought home. All the children were buried in a mass grave at the Mikhailovskoye cemetery in Sverdlovsk. The first funeral took place on March 9, 1959, with a large crowd of people. According to eyewitnesses, the faces and skin of the dead boys had a purplish-bluish tint. The bodies of four students (Dyatlov, Slobodin, Doroshenko, Kolmogorova) were buried in Sverdlovsk at the Mikhailovskoye cemetery. Krivonischenko was buried by his parents at the Ivanovo cemetery in Sverdlovsk. The funeral of the tourists found in early May took place on May 12, 1959. Three of them - Dubinin, Kolevatov and Thibault-Brignolle - were buried next to the graves of their group comrades at the Mikhailovskoye cemetery. Zolotarev was buried at the Ivanovo cemetery, next to Krivonischenko’s grave. All four were buried in closed coffins. In the early 1960s, a memorial plaque with their names and the inscription “There were nine of them” was installed at the site where the tourists died. On a stone outcrop on the Dyatlov Pass, the 1963 expedition erected a memorial plaque in memory of the “Dyatlovites”, then in 1989 another memorial plaque was installed there. In the summer of 2012, 3 plates depicting pages of the Ural Pathfinder magazine with publications about the Dyatlov group were attached to the outcrop.
Later, a lot of articles and books were written on this topic, and several documentaries were made. In 2011, the British company Future Films began filming Alan K. Barker’s book “Dyatlov Pass” in the style of a “horror film”; in February 2013, Renny Harlin’s film “The Mystery of Dyatlov Pass” was released. Dyatlov Pass today:
(function(w, d, n, s, t) ( w[n] = w[n] || ; w[n].push(function() ( Ya.Context.AdvManager.render(( blockId: "R-A -347583-2", renderTo: "yandex_rtb_R-A-347583-2", async: true )); )); t = d.getElementsByTagName("script"); s = d.createElement("script"); s .type = "text/javascript"; s.src = "//an.yandex.ru/system/context.js"; s.async = true; , this.document, "yandexContextAsyncCallbacks");
On February 2, 1959, on an unnamed pass between the peak of Kholat-Syakhyl and height 880, a tourist group of the Ural Polytechnic Institute led by Igor Dyatlov died.
The circumstances surrounding the death of the tourists have not been fully clarified to this day.
In 1963, the pass where the tragedy took place was given the name "Dyatlov Group Pass"
Here are their names:
Igor Dyatlov
Zina Kolmogorova
Rustem Slobodin
Yuri Doroshenko
Yuri Krivonischenko
Nikolai Thibault - Brignoles
Lyudmila Dubinina
Alexander Zolotarev
We have been interested in this topic for a long time, and there is a lot of material on the Dyatlov group on the Internet. This article contains the most basic versions and chronology of the long-standing tragedy. I would also like to note that one tourist, Lyudmila Dubinina, is our fellow countrywoman; she lived for several years in our native village of Krasnogorsk, in the Mari El Republic. Her father was the director of school No. 1, and then their family moved to Sverdlovsk. Unfortunately, no archival materials related to this history of Krasnogorsk were found.
DYATLOV PASS IN SUMMER - NORTHERN URAL .jpg)
INFORMATION ABOUT DYATLOV PASS
The Dyatlov Pass tract is a pass in the Northern Urals between Mount Kholatchakhl (1096.7 m) and the unnamed height 905, standing somewhat apart to the east of the Main Ural Range. Located in the extreme north-west of the Sverdlovsk region. Connects the valley of the 4th right tributary of the Lozva River with the upper reaches of the Auspiya River (also a right tributary of the Lozva). The pass received its name because of an event that happened in February 1959, when not far from it, on the slope of Mount Kholatchakhl, a tourist group led by Igor Dyatlov died under mysterious circumstances. Kholatchakhl or Kholat-Syakhyl is a mountain in the north of the Urals, near the border of the Komi Republic and the Sverdlovsk region, slightly less than 1100 meters high. Between it and the neighboring unnamed height is the Dyatlov Pass. The name is translated from Mansi as “mountain of the dead.”
In Mansi folklore, Mount Kholatchakhl is considered sacred or, according to another version, simply revered. The question of whether, according to Mansi customs, other people, including women, can visit it, is interpreted differently by different scientists. The peak gained its greatest fame in historical times (excluding the time of the legends of the Mansi people associated with it) after 1959, when a tourist group, which later died completely, pitched a tent on its slope under the leadership of Igor Dyatlov, after whom the pass was named.
DYATLOV'S TEAM STUDYING THE MAP .jpg)
ARTICLE Legend of the Northern Urals(
The fifties in the Soviet Union were marked by an unprecedented rise in sports tourism, especially among students. Clubs and sections were created in almost every university, and after the end of the session at the stations, almost every day you could meet young guys in rain jackets and with backpacks, setting off on their next hike. The new sport quickly gained popularity because, along with good physical and technical preparation, it provided the opportunity to visit new places, interesting meetings, and, of course, easy communication with each other. Therefore, even today, among mature students of that time, the brightest and most joyful memories of their youth are mainly associated with hiking. There were also frequent tragedies. They happened, and often in the most absurd way, from little experience, from overestimating one’s strengths and underestimating external dangers. How can one not recall Vizborov’s lines:
“The stone swung forward slightly and rushed down towards the river. Twenty-one unlucky years hung on my right hand.”
In addition, the technique and tactics of passing difficult routes were still in their infancy. And to this day, on mountain passes and over river rapids you can see memorial plaques and engraved names - in memory of those who stayed here forever. However, gaining experience, tourist groups began to appear not only on traditional routes, but also in those places where a person had set foot before, but not every year. And then tourists, willy-nilly, became explorers who could encounter anything and whenever they wanted on their way. This is probably why some accidents and tragic incidents were not entirely understandable and even inexplicable. One of these stories is connected with the death in the north of the Sverdlovsk region in the winter of 1959 of a group of skiers from the Ural Polytechnic Institute under the leadership of Igor Dyatlov. The mysterious circumstances of the tragedy and subsequent secrecy gave rise to a lot of rumors, versions, and assumptions. But the truth has not yet been established. And today we can only talk about certain aspects of what happened, which are more or less obvious.
Dyatlov Pass.jpg)
About what happened
No Red roses, no mourning ribbons,
And it doesn't look like a monument
That stone that gave you peace...
(V. Vysotsky)
They went on a campaign on the twenty-third of January, ten of them. On the twenty-seventh, in the 2nd northern village, the group was left by Yuri Yudin, who, due to illness, was forced to leave the route. For the next four days, the skiers walked through a completely uninhabited area - sometimes along the Mansi trails, sometimes along the ice of frozen rivers. However, judging by the diary entries, the campaign took place without any special complications. On January thirty-first, the group reached the upper reaches of the Auspiya River. Further, according to the plan of the hike, it was supposed to leave some of the equipment and food in the storage shed, go lightly to Mount Otorten, which was located about ten kilometers to the north, return and continue the route to south direction. Forest zone it ended here - the further path to Otorten itself lay along treeless foothills. Almost at the border of the forest, the tourists stopped for the night. The next morning was spent setting up the storage shed. Only by 15 o'clock all preparations were completed, and the group began to climb the nameless pass between peaks “1079” and “880”.
On the other side of the pass, one and a half kilometers away, the forest began again - the valley of the Lozva River. Why didn't tourists go down there? It is known that in the winter it is warmer in the forest than in treeless areas, the wind is weaker, and there is more fuel - you can build a full-fledged fire, rather than heating the tent with a stove. Perhaps Dyatlov was afraid that in this case he would have to set up camp in the dark, or he did not want to lose the height he had gained and climb the ridge again the next day. One way or another, at approximately 17:00 on February 1, 1959, the Dyatlovites began to set up a tent on the windswept slope of peak “1079” (aka Mount Kholat-Syakhyl). This was established later, after developing the film from the found camera. Judging by the diary entries and the published evening wall newspaper, the guys were in quite a fighting mood that day.
DYATLOV'S TEAM IN THE VILLAGE. VISIT.jpg)
They did not yet know that this was the last time they would be doing such familiar camp work. That tomorrow, during which they expected to reach Mount Otorten, would no longer come for them. And that the nameless pass will soon be named in memory of their group, and on all maps of the region it will be called by the name of their leader - Dyatlov Pass. ...On the twelfth of February, according to the plan of the hike, the group was supposed to arrive in the village of Vizhay and notify the institute sports club by telegram about the end of the route. There was no telegram, but at first no one was much worried about it - the Dyatlovites were considered experienced tourists. Only on February 20, the leadership of the institute sent the first search group along Dyatlov’s route, and then several more groups. Subsequently, the search work took on an even greater scope - soldiers and officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, planes and helicopters of civil and military aviation were involved in them.
And on February 26, a tent was found on the eastern slope of Peak 1079. Its leeward side, where the tourists placed their heads, turned out to be cut from the inside in two places, so that a person could freely exit through these cuts. Below it, for 500 meters, traces of people walking to the Lozva valley were preserved in the snow. Some of them were left with an almost bare foot, others had the characteristic display of a felt boot or a foot shod in a soft sock. Closer to the border of the forest, the tracks disappeared, covered with snow. There were no signs of a struggle or the presence of other people either in the tent or near it.
On the same day, the search group came across more terrible finds - one and a half kilometers from the tent, at the very border of the forest, near the remains of a fire, the corpses of two Yurievs, Doroshenko and Krivonischenko, stripped to their underwear, were found. The branches of the cedar tree near which they were lying were broken off. The body of the group leader was found 300 meters from the fire towards the tent. Dyatlov was lying on his back, with his head towards the tent, his hand clasping the trunk of a small birch tree. Another 180 meters from him they found the body of Rustem Slobodin, and 150 meters from Slobodin - Zina Kolmogorova. They lay face down in dynamic poses - the guys from last bit of strength tried to crawl to the abandoned tent...
Dyatlov's team.jpg)
A forensic medical examination established that Dyatlov, Doroshenko, Krivonischenko and Kolmogorova died from exposure to low temperatures - no damage was found on their bodies, with the exception of minor scratches and abrasions. Slobodin had a fractured skull, but experts determined that his death was also due to hypothermia. The search for the others continued for almost two more months. And only on the fourth of May, 75 meters from the fire, under a four-meter layer of snow, the corpses of Lyuda Dubinina, Sasha Zolotarev, Nikolai Thibault-Brignolle and Sasha Kolevatov were found. There were also no injuries on the latter's body. The rest had serious injuries. Dubinina had a symmetrical fracture of several ribs; death occurred from extensive hemorrhage in the heart. Zolotarev has broken ribs on the right along the perithoracic and midclavicular lines. Thibault-Brignolles had extensive hemorrhage in the right temporalis muscle and a depressed fracture of the skull.
IGOR DYATLOV
.jpg)
On the bodies found and next to them were the trousers and sweaters of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko who remained at the fire. All the clothes had even traces of cuts, as if they had been removed from corpses - the living were trying to warm themselves with the clothes of already dead comrades. The deceased Thibault-Brignolles and Zolotarev were dressed quite well, Dubinina worse - her faux fur jacket and hat ended up on Zolotarev, and her bare leg was wrapped in Krivonischenko’s woolen trousers. Nearby lay Krivonischenko’s knife, which, apparently, was used to cut young firs for flooring at the fire. Two watches on Thibault-Brignolle's wrist stopped at almost the same time - one showed 8 hours 14 minutes, the other - 8 hours 39 minutes...
The Mystery of the Dyatlov Pass.jpg)
About what couldn't happen
...And like flies, here and there,
There are rumors going around houses,
And the toothless old women
They are being blown away!
(V. Vysotsky)
“Taking into account the absence of external bodily injuries and signs of struggle on the corpses, the presence of all the group’s valuables, and also taking into account the conclusion of the forensic medical examination on the causes of death of tourists, it should be considered that the cause of death of tourists was a natural force, which the tourists were not able to overcome " With this wording, on May 28, 1959, the criminal case into the death of the Dyatlov group was discontinued.
The case was dropped, but the mystery remained. Over the following years, numerous attempts were made, based on available materials, to understand what happened on the slope of Mount Kholat-Syakhyl on the night of February 1-2, 1959. A wide variety of versions have been put forward - from quite plausible to unlikely and even delusional. But none of them could explain all the circumstances of this tragedy.
Mansi version.
Rumors about the violent death of tourists spread throughout Sverdlovsk immediately after the first finds at the pass. Assumptions about the involvement of the local Mansi population in the death of the Dyatlov group also arose among law enforcement agencies, moreover, they were among the first to be worked out. According to this version, tourists passed through places considered sacred by the Mansi, and the pagans brutally dealt with the “defilers.” A little later they even talked about their use of hypnosis and psychotronic methods of influence. What can you say about this? The places where the Dyatlov group died are actually mentioned in Mansi folklore. In the book by A.K. Matveev “Peaks of the Stone Belt. Names of the Mountains of the Urals" on this occasion the following is said: "Kholat-Syakhyl, a mountain (1079 m) on the watershed ridge between the upper reaches of the Lozva and its tributary Auspiya, 15 km southeast of Otorten. Mansi “Kholat” - “dead people”, that is, Kholat-Syakhyl - mountain of the dead. There is a legend that nine Mansi once died on this peak. Sometimes they add that this happened during the Great Flood. According to another version, during the flood, hot water flooded everything around, except for a place on the top of the mountain, sufficient for a person to lie down. But Mansi, who found refuge here, died. Hence the name of the mountain...”
However, despite this, neither Mount Otorten nor Kholat-Syakhyl are sacred among the Mansi. According to the conclusion of forensic experts, the traumatic brain injuries of Thibault-Brignolle and Slobodin could not have been caused by a stone or other weapon - then external tissue would have inevitably been damaged. And the investigators, having interrogated many local hunters and studied the circumstances of the case, eventually came to the following conclusion on this matter:
“...The investigation did not establish the presence of other people in the area of height 1079 on February 1 and 2, 1959, except for Dyatlov’s group of tourists. It has also been established that the population of the Mansi people, living 80-100 km from this place, is friendly towards Russians, provides tourists with overnight accommodation, provides them with assistance, etc. The place where the group died is considered unsuitable for hunting among the Mansi in winter and reindeer husbandry."
Perfume. Among those interested in the occult and magic, the Mansi version has a slightly different interpretation - the Dyatlovites came to an enchanted place and fell victim to some otherworldly entities. Comments here, as they say, are unnecessary. At approximately the same level of plausibility is the version about the involvement in the death of tourists of “descendants of the ancient Aryans” or the so-called “dwarfs of the Arctida” - a mythical northern people living in underground caves. By the way, it is she who is discussed in Sergei Alekseev’s novel “Treasures of the Valkyrie: Standing by the Sun.” A novel, exciting and fascinating in its own way, but nevertheless fantastic...
However, there is one circumstance that seems very interesting. In the Mansi language, the name Otorten literally means “don’t go there.” Since the folklore and toponymy of the northern peoples are created according to the principle “what I see is what I sing about,” the question naturally arises: is it by chance?
Cleaning up.
Unfortunately, there is a very large category of people in Russia who will never miss another opportunity to show what a “terrible” country we lived in. In any mysterious event of the last century, they first of all begin to look for (and, as a rule, find) the trace of the “almighty” military or “sadistic maniacs” from the NKVD. The story of the death of the Dyatlov group was no exception for them. In some publications, the “cleansing” version is considered almost as the main one. The most common are its two variants. According to the first, Ivdellag’s “death squad”, created to deal with prisoners who had escaped from the camps, came out to the Dyatlovites’ camp at night. Mistaking the tourists for fugitive "prisoners", the guards, with the butts (!) of their machine guns, inflict mortal wounds on the first four who came to hand, and then, convinced of their mistake, finish off the rest. In the second case, the Dyatlovites were allegedly eliminated as unwanted witnesses to an unsuccessful test of a rocket or some other type of weapon. Alternatively, they didn’t eliminate him, but simply let him die without providing the necessary assistance on the spot. It is clear that in our time such “versions” are very popular among not very literate ordinary people who have read the relevant literature. But any normal person with at least a little understanding of military affairs, rocketry and tourism, even after a quick glance, becomes aware of their complete inconsistency. First of all, a few thoughts about the “death squad”. Fact - morally, camp guards are not much different from those they protect. Their intellectual level is also low. But not so much as to prevent one from realizing: the fugitive “prisoners” could not have had a tourist tent! And it would be very difficult to hide the traces of the inevitable struggle near that very tent (seven strong guys, of course, would have resisted) in the event of an attack. And, most importantly, the guards had the right to immediately open fire on those who escaped. They say that the rumor about the “death squad” began to spread after a song allegedly written to Dyatlov’s poems appeared in one of the Ivdellag camps. But later it turned out that in fact Igor never wrote poetry... The version about a group of military men who flew to the crash site of an emergency rocket looks even more absurd (we’ll talk about how real the rocket version as such is a little later). They allegedly landed nearby by helicopter and, seeing the injured tourists, finished them off, then staged the installation of a tent in an unsafe place, and the bodies. .. scattered from a helicopter (!) to cover their tracks. At the same time, four corpses punched a two-meter hole in the snow, and the branches of the cedar were broken off by another of the falling bodies!
I’ll end the presentation here - I’m sad because in my country there are generally people who are capable of taking this nonsense seriously, and even publishing it on the pages of newspapers and books. Dear comrades, what sane person would organize such a performance? After all, even if we assume that someone really needed to hide the reason for the death of the group, then the solution lies on the surface - collect the corpses and remaining belongings, take them a hundred kilometers away, where no one will definitely look, and dump them in one of the many in those edges of the swamps. And then there would be no investigation at all, no need to involve new people in the case, from whom they would then take non-disclosure agreements - the group would simply disappear into the taiga. But, as you know, there is no trial! Do you think that in this case, in addition to the military and police, would volunteers and students of the same UPI be allowed to participate in the search work? And if, after almost a month of winds and snowfalls, it was possible to find traces of people running away from the tent, then the search group would not have missed marks from the landing gear of the helicopter. Finally, even if we assume that the Dyatlov group was really killed by a fallen rocket, it is clear that no one would fly to look for it at night! And the examination clearly established that the death of the children occurred approximately 6-8 hours after the last meal, that is, they did not live until dawn... For the same reason, talk about leaving them in a helpless state is meaningless. But even this is not the biggest absurdity. I had to hear that the military allegedly appeared at the scene of the tragedy immediately, because... they accompanied the missile on two planes flying on both sides of the Ural ridge. As an engineer, I note: an aircraft that is capable of “accompanying” a flying missile (though not a ballistic one, but a cruise one) is still not capable of landing in a mountainous area on half a meter of snow today!
Finally, about things found at the site of the death of the Dyatlovites and not identified by Yudin, which are often cited as indirect evidence of the presence of strangers at the pass. These include glasses with -4...-4.5 diopters, a soldier's winding, ebonite sheaths, mugs, spoons... Special mention is made of the tenth “extra” pair of skis found next to the tent. I have been on quite a lot of different hikes and expeditions. And if the contents of all the participants’ backpacks were laid out in front of me, down to the last handkerchief and spare glasses, and asked to determine who owned what, this would be a very non-trivial task for me. Moreover, if (God forbid!) I had to sort out the things of already dead comrades... By the way, about glasses. I remember the “killing” argument - among tourists there are rarely people with myopia “-4”! Probably, the author believes that in the army, especially in special units, such visual acuity is a common occurrence. As for the secrecy of the circumstances of the case, secrecy, especially in relation to such extraordinary incidents, was then the norm, not the exception. And if we remember that the tragic events occurred shortly before the opening of the World Speed Skating Championships in Sverdlovsk, it becomes clear that the authorities did not need unnecessary conversations on such topics. An “extra” pair of skis, and sometimes even more than one, is present in almost any serious winter hike, since wooden skis (and at that time there was no talk of others) have the unpleasant feature of breaking at the most inopportune moment. And it is unlikely that the mythical “special squad” would have left such noticeable traces at the place of its work.
The Mystery of the Dyatlov Pass.jpg)
Testing exotic weapons.
Most often, sources “from the general public” mention vacuum weapons, forgetting that the first samples of such ammunition appeared in the USSR only 10 years after the events described. In addition, even ordinary artillery shells are tested not in the remote taiga, but at a training ground, which always has its own very specific infrastructure - after all, it is important not just to “rip the piece of iron,” but also to observe the process. Especially if we are talking about creating fundamentally new weapons. And if such a training ground existed at that time, then it would have been guarded no worse than the Semipalatinsk one - Dyatlov would not have been allowed anywhere near it. As for the deliberate hidden testing of “something” on people, this version is from the same series as all the talk about “cleansing”. Because even if such a task were set, it is much easier to find victims among prisoners than to track them down winter forest lone tourist group.
Rocket version (part 1).
Things are different when testing only one type of weapon known today - missiles. In this case, the distance between the range from which the launch is carried out and the target range can be thousands of kilometers. And in the event of a failure in any of the product’s numerous systems, it may well fall “missing the target.” The emergence of the rocket version was undoubtedly facilitated by reports of the appearance of mysterious “luminous balls” in the vicinity of Otorten. Some of them were even recorded in the investigation materials, for example, the report of meteorological technician Tokareva, given in Katya Golovina’s article. The case also contains testimony from G. Atmanaka, the leader of a group of tourists - students of the Geography Faculty of the Pedagogical Institute, who were making a hike in the same area. Upon his return, he said that he observed a luminous ball over Mount Otorten at night from the first to the second of February - that is, just when the Dyatlov group died. Incomprehensible celestial phenomena continued and were observed even during search operations! That is why the rocket version is still the most popular among enthusiasts of the investigation into the death of the Dyatlov group. At the same time, they mainly talk about the testing of combat missiles and the failed space launch. But the latter disappears immediately. And the point is not even that at the indicated time no launches of space rockets were carried out, about which there is irrefutable data. And it’s not that the only flying rocket we had at that time was the Korolev’s “seven” - the product is not the smallest, the fall of an accelerator of any stage of which would have left quite noticeable marks on the ground. Launches from Baikonur along a trajectory that would pass over the specified area are simply not carried out - in this case, the rocket would launch in the direction opposite to the rotation of the Earth, which is a very energy-intensive operation. In Plesetsk, the construction of the first launcher for intercontinental ballistic missiles was completed only in December 1959, and the decision to use ICBM launch complexes for satellite launches was made only in 1963.
DISCOVERED TENT OF THE DYATLOV GROUP.jpg)
Now about combat missiles.
The only Soviet ICBM at that time was the same R-7. Flight design tests of the next one, the R-9A, began only on April 9, 1961. Among medium and short-range missiles, we can talk about the R-12 (maximum range - 2000 kilometers), R-5M (1200 km) and R-11M (300 km). Test launches of the MRBM were carried out from the Kapustin Yar test site at the Sary-Shagan test site in the vicinity of Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan. Thus, the flight path passed far enough from the area of interest to us, and theoretically only the R-12 could get there. Moreover, for this to happen, it had to deviate from the course so much that the very probability of such an event seems very small. It is known, however, that launches were also carried out at the test site on Novaya Zemlya, but this happened much later, in 1963. Could the rocket have been launched from some other point? The R-12 was put into service on March 4, 1958, but the deployment of units and formations equipped with such missile systems began only in mid-1959, in the border areas of the European part of the USSR. R-5M and R-11M have been in service since 1956, and in 1958, part of the R-11M complexes was transferred to the Ground Forces. But even in this case, the launches had to be carried out on a prepared site, and not “into white light”. True, some local residents claim that around that time there was a certain testing ground in the Tyumen region in the area of the sources of the Malaya and Bolshaya Sosva rivers, but information about it has not yet been confirmed. Launches of sea-based missiles were carried out from the Barents Sea at a training ground in the Arkhangelsk region, and the distance from the launch area to altitude “1079” far exceeds the maximum range of sea-based missiles then available. However, this is not the whole rocket version, but only its unreal and unlikely parts. More likely sides will be discussed a little later.
Nuclear explosion.
As one of my friends says, “anti-science fiction.” And if anyone still doubts that he would certainly have been noticed in the nearest villages, that he would certainly have left very characteristic traces on the ground, then let him at least try to clearly explain how they survived the flow of radioactive radiation films in Dyatlovites’ cameras. However, radiation in this whole story is the topic of a special long conversation. The fact is that the clothes and fabrics (I don’t want to use the word “remains”) of Kolevatov, Zolotarev, Thibault-Brignolle and Dubinina were subsequently subjected to examination in the radiological laboratory of the Sverdlovsk city SES. And dosimetric measurements revealed increased radioactivity, almost twice the norm. And the criminal prosecutor Lev Nikitich Ivanov, who led the investigation into the Dyatlov case, later recalled that he took a Geiger counter to the scene of the incident, and “it caused such a fraction there”...
But the latter, in fact, is not surprising - after all, it was in 1958 and early 1959 that the peak of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing occurred throughout the world. And from Mount Kholyat-Syakhyl to the test site on Novaya Zemlya there are only one and a half thousand kilometers. As for the question of where the radioactive dust on the clothes came from, there is no answer to it in the case materials. However, there is information that physics student Alexander Kolevatov dealt with radioactive substances, and engineer Yuri Krivonischenko worked in Chelyabinsk-40 and was near Kyshtym during the radioactive release in 1957. Unfortunately, then, in 1959, only four tourists’ clothes were examined (it is possible that all of them were “phony”), and, moreover, it was not determined which isotope was carried on them. This would certainly clear things up. However, one thing is clear: this radioactivity could not have been the cause of the death of the Dyatlovites - the “symptoms” were slightly wrong.
Big Foot.
Strange as it may seem, the version of the appearance of a relict hominoid near the tent, at first glance, explains a lot. And the stampede of tourists - it is difficult to maintain calm at the sight of a three-meter "miracle-yuda", in addition, in a number of cases this creature showed the ability to remotely influence the human psyche. And the nature of the injuries - according to Mikhail Trakhtengerts, a member of the board of the Russian association of cryptozoologists, “as if someone had hugged them very tightly.” Why were no traces of the creature found at the scene? So, the traces of the guys themselves were difficult to read - the winds and snowfalls had worked. And the huge paw prints of the “Bigfoot,” the edges of which, of course, were already fuzzy a month later, could simply be mistaken for blows or protruding stones sprinkled with snow. In addition, the search group was looking for traces of people, and such atypical prints could simply not have been noticed. But this version is destroyed by at least two circumstances. The first of them is known to everyone who was interested in the problem of the relict hominoid as such. The fact is that for the sustainable existence of a biological population it is necessary that its number does not fall below a certain number - at least 100 - 200 individuals. And in the conditions of the north of the Sverdlovsk region - a region that in the recent past was very rich in “corrective labor” institutions, and is now covered by a network of tourist routes, it is difficult to imagine that such a population would go unnoticed to this day. And second. Even if an ordinary wolf or bear approached the tent at night and forced tourists to flee, the latter, without weapons, would never return to the tent in the dark, when it is impossible to determine from a distance whether the animal has left or is still hanging around somewhere nearby . Moreover, being wounded. In this case, it is much safer to spend the night near a fire, which will scare away the uninvited guest. And as I already mentioned, the guys didn’t see the dawn...
the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass.jpg)
About what could have been
These lines of a well-known song in tourist circles do not speak at all about changeability and inconstancy. “Then - as it turns out” - this is because if you, either of your own free will or fulfilling your professional duty, challenge the wild nature, then anything can await you around the corner. Including death, sometimes mysterious and even inexplicable.
The mystery of the Dyatlov Pass
Avalanche.
This version was put forward by Moses Abramovich Axelrod, a participant in the search and a long-term companion of Igor Dyatlov. He sees the last hours of the group something like this (an excerpt taken from the book of the famous tourist N. Rundqvist “One Hundred Days in the Urals”): “...The strongest and most experienced Dyatlov and Zolotarev lie down, as always, from the edges, in the coldest and most uncomfortable places . Dyatlov is at the far end of the four-meter tent, Zolotarev is at the entrance. I think Lyuda Dubinina was lying next to Zolotarev, then Kolya Thibault-Brignolle, Rustik Slobodin. I don’t know who was in the center and beyond, but the four guys at the entrance, in my opinion, were lying exactly like that. Everyone fell asleep. And then, late at night, when only a quiet snowstorm was slightly shaking the slopes of the tent, Something happened. Rumble, noise and a sudden impact of an avalanche on the part of the tent adjacent to the entrance. The other part of the tent, which found itself under the cover of a large snow ledge, was not damaged; the avalanche flew over it and rushed down. The four outer guys take the blow. The head of the ascetic Thibault-Brignolle is pressed into the lens of the camera, which, for lack of anything better, Kolya often placed under his head. The differences in the fractures of the ribs of Dubinina and Zolotarev are explained by their different provisions while sleeping - on your back and side. Darkness, groans of injured comrades. It is impossible to exit through the entrance. Someone pulls out a knife, cuts the tent and helps everyone get out. Igor decides to immediately return to the storehouse, where there is a first aid kit, warm clothes, and shelter in the forest. And off they went. A blizzard howls, before the guys there is white silence, shrouded in darkness. They can’t really get their bearings, and the guys go down to the forest, but not to the one where the storage shed is, but, alas, to another one. At the spreading cedar, Igor realizes that they went down the wrong way. Tourists break spruce branches and lay their wounded friends in a ravine, sheltered from the wind. They give them all the warm clothes and make a fire. Kolya Thibault-Brignolle dies. Depressed Igor Dyatlov, Zina Kolmogorova and Rustik Slobodin want to return to the tent to bring some things from there, and maybe try to reach the storage shed. It is unknown whether they reached the tent or their strength left them on the rise.” Why wasn't the tent swept away by the avalanche? Moses Abramovich suggests that it was very loosely stretched and, having taken the blow, remained in place. By the way, my fellow climbers with whom I talked about this topic confirm this possibility. As well as the fact that avalanches do not always represent a snow bank that sweeps away everything and everyone in its path - there have been cases when an avalanche came down like a “river”, while having clear boundaries. But two circumstances remain unclear. First, why did many of the Dyatlovites leave without shoes? Axelrod explains this by the fact that it is difficult to go down a steep slope in complete darkness in slippery ski boots, and the guys walked to the storehouse where the shoes were. With all due respect to an experienced tourist and authoritative person, it’s hard to believe. And second. The geographical literature says that Northern Urals refers to areas of medium avalanche danger. And on slopes with an angle of 15-20 degrees, a spontaneous avalanche is possible in two cases: with a sharp increase in temperature and with the sudden fall of a large amount of snow. The conclusion suggests itself: if it was an avalanche, then it did not go down on its own - something helped it...
Rocket version(part 2).
Thoughts of their own accord return to her - after all, the rocket explosion could well have served as the “detonator”. And here, after everything that has already been said, the time has come to voice the only, in our opinion, possible option for this version - testing an air-to-surface cruise missile. Of course, such products are also tested at an equipped testing site. But the launch is carried out from a bomber aircraft, which could deviate quite significantly from the course. And when the missile’s departure from the designated trajectory was detected, it could have been detonated by command from the ground... In the early 90s, a resident of Polunochny A. Epanechnikov reported to the editors of the Ural Worker that he had found it in the upper reaches of the Khozya River, near the place of death tourists, metal fragment. The sketch they sent showed a piece of duralumin with rows of square grooves - how similar it is to the waffle design of a fuel tank! Unfortunately, he later threw away the fragment itself as unnecessary. So whether this piece of duralumin really is an element of a rocket structure, what time it dates back to and whether it has anything to do with the death of the guys remains unknown.
the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass.jpg)
Oddly enough, this version appeared not in the perestroika era, when this topic simply filled the pages of all kinds of publications, but... in 1959, when the case of the death of the group was not even closed yet! And the first to put it forward was... the already mentioned L.N. Ivanov, prosecutor-criminologist. Already in our time, in one of the interviews, he said the following:
“...Then I assumed it, but now I’m sure. I don’t presume to say what kind of balls these are—were they some kind of weapon, aliens or something else, but I’m sure that this has a direct bearing on the death of the guys. Pilots and geologists who have traveled and flown around these regions unanimously repeat: there are no traces of an explosion near Otorten and the surrounding area. But it didn’t happen in the usual sense for us - like the explosion of a shell, a bomb. It was different, it was like a balloon had burst. The fact is that at the edge of the forest, where the tourists so hastily fled from the tent, the branches of the trees seemed to be scorched. Not burned, not broken, but scorched. I guess it happened like this. The guys had dinner and went to bed. One of them went out of necessity (there were footprints) and saw something that made everyone leave the tent and run downstairs. I think it was a glowing ball. And he finally overtook them, or it happened by chance, at the edge of the forest. Explosion! Three are seriously injured. Well, then... The struggle for survival began.”
This version, just like the rocket version, stems mainly from observations of luminous balls. They behaved very strangely. I will give one of the observations of the real member Geographical Society USSR, nature researcher O. Strauch: “03/31/59. At 4 hours 10 minutes the following phenomenon was observed: a spherical luminous body passed quite quickly from the southwest to the northeast over the village (Polunochnoye - I.S.). A luminous disk, almost the size of a full moon, bluish-white in color, was surrounded by a large bluish halo. At times this halo flashed brightly, resembling flashes of distant lightning. When the body disappeared beyond the horizon, the sky in this place was illuminated with light for several minutes.”
Clearly unlike any known earthly aircraft. But if this version is ever unambiguously confirmed or refuted, it will not be very, very soon - we still know too little about the worlds around us.
Infrasound.
The well-known version associated with the appearance of the “flying Dutchmen” in the oceans suggests that the state of panic that forced the crew to hastily abandon the ship can be caused by low-frequency sound waves. The impact of infrasound on the human psyche has been repeatedly reproduced in laboratory conditions; there have even been proposals to use this effect in the creation of so-called non-lethal weapons. But in the sea, oscillations of this frequency (5-7 Hz) under certain conditions can be generated at the tops of the waves. How could they have arisen on land? Meanwhile, reports from some tourist groups note a strange feeling of anxiety that arises at the Dyatlov Pass in windy weather. In the already mentioned book by N. Rundqvist it is said that “the rocks on the Dyatlov Pass, like parts of an ominous musical instrument, create strange sound effects - the noise of a car engine, the roar of a waterfall, and finally, an incomprehensible vibrating sound that spreads anxiety.” And here are the lines from a letter from Sverdlovsk resident V. Sergeev to the editor of the newspaper “Uralsky Rabochiy” in 1990: “According to rumors and stories of Mansi hunters, in the areas of the Otorten and Chistop mountains there are very strong winds, accompanied by fantastic sounds. In the summer of 1966, southeast of Mount Chistop, I saw a strange picture in the forest: pine trees were twisted in several pieces, torn out by their roots and scattered throughout the forest. The person accompanying me explained that recently a strange roar was suddenly heard here, similar to the roar of a giant angry bull. And then powerful air whirlwinds appeared, which twisted the trees together, tore them out of the ground and lowered them back nearby. If people find themselves in this hotbed of disaster..."
The version seems to explain both the sudden escape of the Dyatlovites and possible bodily injuries. But why were no traces of such a riot of elements found in the area?
Questions, questions, questions...
And now, after listing the main versions that have already been put forward, I would like to express some thoughts myself. Common to all previously discussed versions was the assumption that, being frightened by something, the tourists cut the roof of the tent and left it in panic. As far as I know, no one has ever even tried to doubt this. In my opinion, this is very possible, but not at all a fact! And that's why. Most likely, at the moment “X” at least one person was outside the tent - this is evidenced by traces of urine in the snow and a flashlight found on the canopy. Of course, he could not help but notice “The Thing.” And it probably gave a signal of danger. The Dyatlovites’ tent, made from two four-person tents, was narrow and long. Now imagine - you are lying in the middle of it or at the edge opposite the entrance. And suddenly you hear a short alarm command, something like “Everyone out of the tent, quickly!”, moreover, possibly reinforced by increasing noise or a bright flash (and most likely, both). In order to get to the exit, you need to climb over several of your comrades. Your actions? Will you rush to the exit in fear, pushing others away, or will you still grab a knife and rip open the curtain? The cut tent does not at all indicate the horror that gripped the tourists, but, on the contrary, good self-control - in an extreme situation, the only right decision was made. In addition, in a state of panic, when the psyche is no longer controlled by the mind and the instinct of self-preservation comes to the fore, a person usually runs wherever he can, as long as he is away from a dangerous place. This happened in 1973 in Yakutia, in the area of Mount Alaktit, when a group of geologists died under equally mysterious circumstances. Two or three kilometers from the hastily abandoned tent, their corpses were later found without any signs of violent death. Everyone was lightly dressed, some even without shoes - how similar! Only in that case, people scattered like a fan, each in his own direction. The Dyatlovites left in one direction in a completely organized manner. And not in a maddened crowd, but almost in a trail, one after another, just like you need to move through deep snow! The varying degrees of damage caused to people indicate that not the entire group was affected by some damaging factor. The thought arises that at that moment part of her had already taken refuge in the forest, and someone else was on the slope. 37-year-old Alexander Zolotarev and not the most hardy Lyuda Dubinina could easily lag behind the leaving group. And Nikolai Thibault-Brignolle and, possibly, Rustem Slobodin, noticing the lag of their comrades, stayed with them. ..
There is another very interesting point.
Why did the tourists hastily leave the tent and run to the northeast to the Lozva tributary, and not southeast to the storage shed? After all, there were warm clothes, food, equipment, an old fire pit left there?.. And the distance from the tent to the storage shed and to the place where the bodies were found was approximately the same. Axelrod explains this by saying that the guys, confused, mixed up the direction and discovered their mistake only when they were at the bottom. Maybe you are right. But the following fact is interesting - according to the weather service, the wind that night at the pass was blowing from the northwest, which, by the way, almost coincides with the prevailing wind direction in this place. That is, the guys left perpendicular to the direction of the wind! This is how they escape from the same nuclear explosion or from a poisonous cloud - such recommendations were already present in the civil defense manuals of that time and the Dyatlovites were probably familiar with them. So the luminous ball that was seen over the mountains that night most likely has a direct connection to the death of the group. But, whatever its nature, one thing is certain - the Ural students, who later became tourist legends, courageously accepted an unequal battle with the Unknown on the eastern slope of Mount Kholat-Syakhyl. And they showed their best human qualities in this battle.
Today, a rare tourist group hiking in the described places passes by the Dyatlov Pass. Already a new generation of tourists is laying flowers at memorial plaque, installed at the site of the death of their peers. The new guys, sitting by their fires and peering into the light of the stars hanging above the Ural ridge, are trying to figure out what really happened in this place forty years ago. The death of Igor Dyatlov’s group is one of the mysteries of our planet. The same as the mystery of “Mary Celeste” and “St. Anne”, the planes of Sigismund Levanevsky and Amelia Earhart, the expeditions of Fossett and Rusanov... The list goes on. Will they ever be revealed? As we have already seen, there is still not a single consistent version that could explain and link together all the known circumstances and facts. This happens in two cases - either some of the “facts” are fictitious, or we still don’t know something...
COSMOPOOISK REPORT:
Ural stalkers: escape from the "Mountain of the Dead"
After our plans to go to the now infamous Mountain of the Dead were published in Komsomolskaya Pravda, and we were just thinking about which version of the death of people on its slopes to consider as a working hypothesis and which thread of the investigation to pull, the editorial office received a call from Yekaterinburg: “Are you and Kosmopoisk looking for the causes of all these deaths? It seems we discovered them by chance!” We agree with the caller, Lyudmila Alekseevna Zhvanko, when, how and on what we will go to the Mountain with a frighteningly scary name. There is no disagreement about the timing. Almost all of the deaths there occurred at the very end of winter, and from a scientific point of view it would be more interesting to postpone the trip for several months, but the general opinion is that we will not wait, we will go immediately after the disappearance of the midges and mosquitoes during the Indian summer, in the period of the calmest weather in these parts... Our task was not to add to the list of those killed on the mountain slopes, but as it turned out later, the choice of timing of the trip turned out to be almost fatal...
Complete mysticism
By a strange coincidence, groups of 9 people died several times on the Mountain of the Dead. According to legend, 9 Mansi were once killed here. So, in the winter of 1959, ten tourists gathered to climb the Mountain. But soon one of them, an experienced hiker, felt unwell (his legs hurt) and he left the route. Nine of us went to the last assault... You may not believe in mysticism, but after exactly 40 years, we didn’t really want to go there with nine of us. When they counted it at the Sverdlovsk station, it turned out to be nine. True, three of us almost immediately announced that they would not be able to go, and with the six of us left, we breathed a sigh of relief. And taking advantage of a few hours of time, we went to the city to meet with those who knew the victims... One of the first to be found was Valeria Patrusheva, the widow of the pilot who was the first to notice the bodies of the dead tourists from the air. “And you know, my husband Gennady knew them well while they were still alive. We met at a hotel in the village of Vizhay, where the pilots lived and the guys stayed there before the climb. Gennady was a lot interested in local legends and therefore began to dissuade them - go to other mountains, but these peaks don’t touch them, they are translated from the Mansi language as “Don’t go there” and “Mountain of 9 dead people” But there were not 9, but 10 guys, they were all experienced tourists, they walked a lot in the Arctic, they didn’t believe in mysticism. the leader Igor Dyatlov is such a strong-willed person - Gennady even called him “hard-headed”, no matter how much he tried to persuade him, he did not change the route..."
The hike was announced as a route of the third (at that time the highest) category of difficulty with ascents of low mountains. The route is quite difficult, but quite passable; nowadays many people take much more difficult routes. In general, in such cases they say that nothing foreshadowed trouble... Forty years later we are rowing along the Lozva River - the last way the Dyatlov group, along which they were approaching the top. Peaceful nature around, majestic landscapes “like from photo wallpapers” and complete silence all around. You need to constantly remind yourself that it only takes one mistake to die in the midst of all this soporific splendor...
The mistake of the Dyatlovites was that they ignored the warnings and went to a forbidden place...
What mistake our group made was explained to us later by the local aborigines. No, under no circumstances were we supposed to pass through the local Golden Gate - two powerful stone arches on top of one of the rocks. Even ardent materialists noticed a quick change in the attitude of the local deity or, if you like, simply nature towards us. Almost immediately, a powerful downpour began, which did not stop for a week (an unprecedented event, local old-timers will tell us), the rivers overflowed their banks to an incredible level for autumn, pieces of land under our tents began to melt catastrophically, and the raging Vladimir rapids located downstream forced our evacuation simply a deadly dangerous activity...
What scared them to death?
However, forty years ago everything was much worse. So, on February 1, 1959, Dyatlov’s group began climbing to the top of “1079,” which was unnamed at that time. Just now everyone knows it as the Mountain of the Dead (in the Mansi language “Kholat Syakhyl”) or - you can guess why - it is also called the Dyatlov Pass. It was here that on February 2 (according to other sources - February 1), under very mysterious circumstances, a tragedy occurred... They did not have time to rise before darkness, and decided to pitch a tent right on the slope. This alone confirms that the tourists were not afraid of difficulties: at a height, without the cover of the forest, it is much colder than at the foot. They put skis on the snow, set up a tent on them according to all tourist and mountaineering rules, ate... In the declassified criminal case, the conclusion was preserved that neither the installation of the tent, nor the gentle 15-18-degree slope itself posed a threat. Based on the location of the shadows in the last photograph, experts concluded that by 6 pm the tent was already up. We started to settle down for the night... And then something terrible happened!..
Later, investigators began to establish a picture of what happened. In panic horror, cutting the tent with knives, the tourists rushed to run down the slope. Who was wearing what - barefoot, wearing only felt boots, half naked. The chains of footprints walked in a strange zigzag, converged and diverged again, as if people wanted to run away, but some force drove them together again. No one approached the tent, there were no signs of a struggle or the presence of other people. There are no signs of any natural disaster: hurricane, tornado, avalanche. At the border of the forest, the tracks disappeared, covered with snow. The pilot G. Patrushev noticed two bodies from the air, made several circles over the guys, hoping that they would raise their heads. The search group that arrived in time (we even managed to find one of that group, now retired Sergei Antonovich Verkhovsky) tried to dig snow in this place, and soon terrible discoveries began. The two dead lay near a poorly lit fire, stripped down to their underwear. They were frozen, unable to move. 300 meters from them lay the body of I. Dyatlov: he crawled towards the tent and died, looking sadly in its direction. There were no injuries on the body... Another corpse was found closer to the tent. An autopsy revealed a crack in the skull; this terrible blow was inflicted without the slightest damage to the skin. He didn’t die from this, he also froze. The girl crawled closest to the tent. She lay face down, and the snow beneath her was stained with blood flowing from her throat. But there are no traces on the body.
An even greater mystery was presented by three corpses found to the side of the fire. They were dragged there by still living participants in the ill-fated campaign. They died from terrible injuries: broken ribs, pierced heads, hemorrhages. But how could internal damage occur without affecting the skin? By the way, there are no cliffs nearby from which you could fall. The last of the dead was found nearby. His death, according to the criminal case, “caused by exposure to low temperature.” In other words, he was frozen. (Gershtein M. "Tragedy in the Mountains" / "Centaur's Crossroads" 1997, N 3(8), p. 1-6). However, none of the put forward versions of the death is still considered generally accepted. Despite numerous attempts to find an explanation for the tragic incidents, they continue to remain a mystery both for researchers of anomalous phenomena and for law enforcement agencies...
We spent a long time looking for those who performed autopsies on the bodies. Surgeon Joseph Prutkov, the first to conduct the autopsy, had already died by now; the rest with whom we met (Prutkov’s relatives, doctors A.P. Taranova, P. Gel, Sharonin, members of the regional commission) could not remember the details. But unexpectedly (oh the wonders of Providence!) in the train compartment I met Prutkov’s former assistant, in fact the only living one of those who helped open those corpses, doctor Maria Ivanova Salter. She remembered those guys very well, moreover, she remembered them while still alive (she, young, then took a liking to the strong, stately conductor). But, according to her, “there were not 9, but 11 corpses, I don’t know where two more came from. I recognized them immediately, in these clothes I saw them for the last time at the bus stop. They brought everyone to us, to a closed military station, to autopsy hospital, but one body was not even shown; it was taken immediately to Sverdlovsk.
Some military man was present during the autopsy, pointed at me and said to Dr. Prutkov: “Why do you need her?” Prutkov was a very polite person, but at that time he immediately said: “Maria Ivanovna, you can go!” They still took a subscription from me “on non-disclosure and non-discussion of the incident.” They were taken from everyone, including drivers and pilots who carried the bodies..."
Other shocking details began to emerge. Former prosecutor-criminologist L.N. Lukin recalls: “In May, we examined the surroundings of the crime scene with E.P. Maslennikov and found that some young fir trees on the border of the forest had a burnt mark, but these marks did not have a concentric shape or any other system, not there was also an epicenter. This confirmed the direction of a heat ray or a strong, but completely unknown, at least to us, energy acting selectively, the snow was not melted, the trees were not damaged. It seemed that when the tourists walked on their feet for more than five hundred. meters down the mountain, then someone dealt with some of them in a targeted manner..."
Rocket version
Persistent rumors spread among researchers that the group of tourists was simply removed due to the fact that people became unwitting eyewitnesses to the testing of a secret weapon. The skin of the victims had, according to searchers, “an unnatural purple or orange color.” And criminologists seemed to be at a dead end because of this strange color: they knew that even a month of being under the snow could not color the skin like that... But, as we found out from M. Salter, in fact the skin “was just dark, like from ordinary corpses." Who “painted” the corpses in their stories and why? If the skin were orange, then it would not be excluded that the guys were poisoned by the rocket fuel asymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (orange heptyl). And the rocket, it seems, could well deviate from the course and fall (fly) nearby. New confirmation of the missile version appeared relatively recently, when a strange 30-centimeter ring was found in the area where the Dyatlov group died. As it turned out, it belonged to a Soviet military missile. Talk of secret tests has resurfaced. Local researcher Rimma Aleksandrovna Pechurkina, who works for the Yekaterinburg Regional Newspaper, recalled that search groups twice, on February 17 and March 31, 1959, observed “either rockets or UFOs” flying across the sky. In April 1999, she asked Kosmopoisk to find out whether these objects were missiles. And after studying the archives, it was possible to establish that in the USSR no launches of artificial satellites were carried out in those days. On February 17, 1959, the United States launched the solid-fuel Avangard-2, but this launch could not be observed in Siberia. On March 31, 1959, the R-7 was launched from Baikonur, but the launch was unsuccessful. Launches from Plesetsk have been carried out since 1960, construction has been carried out since 1957, theoretically, only test launches of the R-7 could be carried out from Plesetsk in 1959. But this rocket could not have toxic fuel components. There was one more fact in favor of the missile hypothesis - to the south of the Mountain, modern tourists came across several deep craters “obviously from missiles.” With great difficulty, we found two of them in the remote taiga and explored them as best we could. They obviously didn’t stand up to the rocket explosion of ’59; a birch tree 55 years old grew in the crater (counted by the rings), that is, the explosion occurred in the remote taiga rear no later than 1944. Remembering what year it was, one could attribute everything to practice bombing or something like that, but... a funnel, we made an unpleasant discovery with the help of a radiometer, a strong foil.
Radioactive bombs in 1944? What nonsense... And what about bombs?
Radioactive trace
Criminologist L.N. Lukin recalls what surprised him most in 1959: “When, together with the regional prosecutor, I reported the initial data to the 1st Secretary of the Regional Committee of the CPSU A.S. Kirilenko, he gave a clear command - to classify all the work. Kirilenko ordered to bury the tourists in nailed-down coffins and tell their relatives that everyone died from hypothermia. I conducted extensive studies of the clothes and individual organs of the victims “for radiation.” For comparison, we took the clothes and internal organs of people who died in car accidents or died of natural causes. amazing..."
From the expert opinion: “The examined clothing samples contain a slightly overestimated amount of radioactive substance caused by beta radiation. The detected radioactive substances are washed away when the samples are washed, that is, they are caused not by the neutron flux and induced radioactivity, but by radioactive contamination.”
Protocol of additional interrogation of an expert from the Sverdlovsk city SES:
Question: Can there be increased contamination of clothing with radioactive substances under normal conditions, without being in a radioactively contaminated area or place?
Answer: It shouldn't be completely...
Answer: Yes, the clothing is contaminated either by radioactive dust that has fallen from the atmosphere, or whether this clothing is contaminated when working with radioactive substances.
Where could radioactive dust have fallen on the dead? At that time, there were no nuclear tests in the atmosphere on the territory of Russia (probably the author still means the USSR - I.S.). The last explosion before this tragedy occurred on October 25, 1958 on Novaya Zemlya. Was this area really covered in radioactive dust from previous tests at that time? This is not excluded either. Moreover, Lukin took a Geiger counter to the place of death of tourists, and it “caused such a fraction” there... Or maybe traces of radioactivity have nothing to do with the death of tourists? After all, radiation will not kill in a few hours, and certainly will not drive people out of the tent! But then what? In attempts to explain the death of nine experienced hikers, a wide variety of versions have been put forward - from ball lightning that flew into a tent to the harmful effects of a man-made factor. One of the assumptions is that the guys entered the area where secret tests of “vacuum weapons” were being carried out (local historian Oleg Viktorovich Shtraukh told us about this version). From this, the victims were noted (allegedly existing) to have a strange reddish tint to the skin, the presence of internal injuries and bleeding. The same symptoms should be observed when affected" vacuum bomb", creating a strong vacuum of air over a large area. At the periphery of such a zone, a person’s blood vessels burst from internal pressure, and at the epicenter the body is torn into pieces. For some time, local Mansi were under suspicion, who once in the 1930s They had already killed a female geologist who dared to enter a sacred mountain closed to mere mortals. Many taiga hunters were arrested, but... all were released for lack of proof of guilt. Moreover, the mysterious incidents in the forbidden zone continued...
The harvest of death continues
Very soon after the death of the Dyatlov group under mysterious circumstances (which speaks in favor of the version of the involvement of the special services in the incident), photographer Yuri Yarovoy, who was photographing the bodies of the victims, died in a car accident along with his wife... A security officer shot himself in a bathhouse, who, at the request of his friend, G. Patrushev, unwittingly got involved in the study of this whole story... In February 1961, in the area of the same Mount of the Dead, in an anomalous place and again under similar more than strange circumstances, another group of tourist-researchers from Leningrad died. And again, allegedly, there were the same signs of incomprehensible fear: tents cut open from the inside, thrown things, people running to the sides, and again all 9 dead with grimaces of horror on their faces, only this time the corpses lay in a neat circle in the center of which the tent... However, so the rumor goes, but no matter how much we specifically asked the locals about that incident, no one remembered. There was no confirmation from official bodies either. That is, either the St. Petersburg group was “cleaned up” more thoroughly than the Sverdlovsk group, or it was originally invented only on paper. Just like another group of three people who allegedly died here... At least once again in the history of the Mountain, an indication of 9 corpses pops up, which is confirmed by documents. In 1960-61, in the ill-fated region, one after another, a total of 9 pilots and geologists died in three plane crashes. Strange coincidences at a place named in memory of 9 dead Mansi. The last living pilot of those who searched for the Dyatlovites was G. Patrushev. Both he and his young wife were sure that very soon he would not return from the flight. “He was very nervous,” V. Patrusheva tells us, “He was an absolute teetotaler, but one day I saw him pale from everything he had experienced, drank a bottle of vodka in one gulp and didn’t even get drunk. When he flew away for the last time, we both knew , that this was the last time. I began to be afraid to fly, but every time - if there was enough fuel - I persistently flew to the Mountain of the Dead ... " However, other people who died under strange circumstances were here. Local authorities remember how long in the 1970s they searched and did not find the missing young geologist, since he was the son of an important ministerial rank, they searched for him with special passion. Although it would be possible not to do this - he actually disappeared practically in front of his colleagues, literally out of the blue... There have been many missing people since then. When we ourselves were in the regional center of Ivdel in September 1999, they had already been looking for a missing married couple for a month. ..
Footprints lead to the sky
Even then, in the 1950s, the investigation also looked into a version connected, as they would say now, with the UFO problem. The fact is that during the search for the dead, colorful pictures unfolded over the heads of the rescuers, fireballs and shining clouds flew by. No one understood what it was, and therefore the fantastic celestial phenomena seemed scary...
Telephone message to the Sverdlovsk City Party Committee: “March 31, 59, 9.30 local time. On March 31, at 04.00, in the south-east direction, the duty officer Meshcheryakov noticed a large ring of fire, which moved towards us for 20 minutes, then disappearing behind height 880. Before that, how to disappear behind the horizon, a star appeared from the center of the ring, which gradually increased to the size of the Moon, began to fall down, separating from the ring. An unusual phenomenon was observed by many people who raised the alarm. Please explain this phenomenon and its safety, because in ours. conditions this makes an alarming impression.
L.N. Lukin says: “While the investigation was going on, a tiny note appeared in the Tagilsky Rabochiy newspaper that a fireball, or, as they now say, a UFO, was seen in the sky of Nizhny Tagil. This luminous object was moving silently towards the northern peaks of the Ural Mountains The editor of the newspaper was punished for publishing such a note, and the regional committee suggested that I not develop this topic."
To be honest, we ourselves did not see anything mysterious in the sky in the sky above the Mountain, as well as along the way near Vizhay and Ivdel. Perhaps because the sky was just covered with impenetrable clouds. Both the rain and the regional flood stopped only when we barely got out through the rapids on a catamaran bursting at the seams. Then, when we are already at Perm region we made our way through the taiga, the God of the Golden Gate made us understand that he finally forgives and lets us go - the local bear simply led us to his watering hole, just at the moment when our own water supplies ran out... Probably, all this is nothing more than accidents. And all the terrible incidents on the Mountain of the Dead are just a chain of accidents. We never revealed the reason for the death of the tourists, although we realized that missile launches had absolutely nothing to do with this... Already from Moscow I called the pilot’s widow to understand why Patrushev voluntarily set a course towards the Mountain even When were you afraid to fly?
"He said that something seemed to beckon him. He often saw luminous balls in the air, and then the plane began to shake, the instruments danced like crazy, and his head just pounded. Then he turned to the side. Then he flew again. He told me that he is not afraid of stopping the engine if something lands the car even on a pole."... According to the official version, pilot G. Patrushev died 65 km north of Ivdel when he made an emergency landing...
Tourists could find themselves at the pass on the day of testing of neutron weapons, says paranormal researcher Valentin Degterev.
Not far from the site of the death of tourists on the Dyatlov Pass, a mysterious object was discovered that may have a connection with the tragedy. Radio amateur and paranormal researcher Valentin Degterev from Nizhny Tagil wrote about this on his blog.
While studying satellite images, Degterev noticed an abandoned structure ten kilometers south of the place where the group died - 25-30 meters long and 10-15 meters wide. According to the researcher, this is the above-ground part of a bunker built during the Cold War in the Ural Mountains.
This is a fortified structure made of concrete. Apparently covered with sheets of iron with remains of green protective paint. It appears on a satellite photograph from 2004 and is archived on the Google Erath website. The lack of access roads to the site proves the fact that the site has long been abandoned.
I think that this is the above-ground part of a bunker built during the Cold War in the Ural Mountains. Its coordinates are as follows: 61°40"13.75"N,59°21"32.30"E. This does not look like a defect in the photograph, since the object has a clear shape. In addition, it is on the adjacent layer made at a different time. Which means there is something in this place.
Degterev notes that the tourists may have ended up at the pass on the day of the neutron weapon test. This explains the presence of radioactivity on the clothing of one of the dead people.
After this, according to the researcher, the base and tests had to be closed. The underground structure was either mothballed or blown up. The upper part of the bunker has been preserved and is visible on the satellite image.
The Dyatlov Pass remains one of the most mysterious points tourist route in the Urals. In February 1959, under unclear circumstances, in the vicinity of Mount Otorten, nine skiers from the tourist club of the Ural Polytechnic Institute from Sverdlovsk died there.
The group was led by Igor Dyatlov. The found bodies of the dead tourists shocked forensic experts: most of the people froze, but there were also those whose death, judging by their wounds, was clearly violent.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
SOURCE OF INFORMATION AND PHOTO:
Team Nomads.
http://pereval1959.narod.ru/
Article from the magazine "Technology for Youth" No. 11/2003
Wikipedia website.
http://kosmopoisk.org/
http://www.mountain.ru/
| The attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| 96.32 KB | |
| 36.77 KB | |
| 40.44 KB | |
| 77.63 KB | |
| 41.08 KB | |
| 44.81 KB | |
| 48.71 KB | |
| 130.69 KB | |
| 75.55 KB | |
| 36.78 KB | |
| 84.75 KB | |
| 282.25 KB |