UFA, June 4 - RIA Novosti, Ramilya Salikhova. It was the ambulance doctors who had the main job of rescuing passengers from the Adler-Novosibirsk and Novosibirsk-Adler trains who were caught in a fire trap in the lowlands near Ufa on the night of June 4, 1989, where a gas pipeline exploded. There were no rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Russia at that time, and there was no state with that name either.
Fatal coincidence
The tragedy occurred on the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the Iglinsky district of Bashkiria on the stretch between the stations Asha (Chelyabinsk region) and Uglu-Telyak (Bashkiria). By the time the trains arrived, a huge cloud of gas had accumulated here, which leaked from a damaged gas pipeline." Western Siberia- Ural - Volga region", located 900 meters from railway. The terrain turned out to be such that the liquid gas that came out of the pipe, evaporating and accumulating at the surface of the earth, “stacked” precisely towards the railway track - into the lowland.
The explosion occurred at the moment when two trains, which had never met at this point before, entered the gas cloud at once.
The explosion occurred at 01.15 Bashkir time (23.15 Moscow time) and, according to experts, the explosion was only seven times weaker than the explosion of the American atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945.
The front of the rising flame was about 1.5-2 kilometers, the fire covered 250 hectares. According to rescuers, from a helicopter the crash site looked like a scorched circle with a diameter of about a kilometer. According to experts, a short-term rise in temperature in the area of the explosion exceeded 1 thousand degrees Celsius.
The explosion destroyed 37 cars and both electric locomotives, seven cars burned completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 were torn from the train and thrown off the tracks by the blast wave.
According to documents, both trains carried 1,284 passengers, including 383 children, and 86 members of train and locomotive crews. There were apparently more passengers, as the trains were crowded with holidaymakers. In addition, among the passengers there were children under 5 years old, for whom tickets were not issued. In cases where the entire family died, it was not possible to find out the exact number of dead family members.
According to official data, 258 dead were found at the scene of the accident, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals - as a result, the number of victims of the tragedy increased to 575. However, 675 names are engraved on the memorial at the site of the disaster, and according to According to unofficial data, about 780 people died.
Doctors' response saved hundreds of lives
The senior ambulance doctor in Ufa, 57-year-old Mikhail Kalinin, who is still working in this position, claims that he does not like to remember the events of those days, but made an exception for RIA Novosti.
Mikhail Kalinin remembers that the first call about this tragedy came at 01.45 from the dispatcher at the Ulu-Telyak station, 100 kilometers from Ufa. He reported that the train carriage was on fire.
“I immediately made an additional call to the dispatcher at the railway station of the city of Ufa, eight minutes later I sent 53 ambulance teams to the torch. Because there was no exact address of the scene of the incident. And I sent them one by one, and not all together. This was done so that doctors could keep in touch with each other and with me,” says Kalinin.
The radios at that time were weak, it was difficult to contact the doctors who went to the scene. It was especially difficult for the doctors who were the first to arrive at the scene of the disaster.
“The first to arrive were Yuri Furtsev, orderly Cherny and cardiologist Valery Sayfutdinov,” recalls the senior ambulance doctor.
Resuscitator Furtsev, who still works in the ambulance, remembers what he saw first at the scene of the disaster. “There was no road, and the rescuers made their way to the epicenter of the explosion on foot. And when they arrived, they saw torn cars, burnt forest and burned people,” he recalls.
Eyewitnesses told terrible things: when the explosion occurred, people burned like matches.
“It’s very difficult to remember this, I don’t know how, but then we apparently worked on automatic, immediately organized the delivery of people to the regional hospital. The first three ambulance teams from Ufa were like reconnaissance vehicles, a hundred ambulances immediately left for us help," says Furtsev.
According to him, if it were not for the immediate reaction of doctors and local residents, there would have been many more victims.
Everything was missing
Senior ambulance doctor Mikhail Kalinin recalls how there was a shortage of literally everything: people, cars, medicines.
“It was difficult to find people that night. It happened on the night from Saturday to Sunday, many were at their dachas,” says Kalinin.
All ambulance teams in the city were involved. Only seven cars were left for city calls. “On the night from 3 to 4, we refused 456 calls to the ambulance, we only responded to traffic accidents,” he recalls.
Kalinin notes that the doctors that night used their forces and means very rationally. This is what helped them cope with the difficult task of transporting the victims.
“Together with the Minister of Health Alfred Turyanov, we decided to involve a helicopter school for the fastest transportation of victims from the source of the accident. In order to deliver people as quickly as possible to hospitals, I proposed using the landing site for helicopters of the military school with the victims almost in the center of the city, behind Hotel "Arena". This place was not chosen by chance. It was from the square behind the hotel to all the hospitals where we took people. shortcut to everyone medical institutions, to one hospital forty seconds, to the second - one and a half minutes, and to the third - two and a half minutes drive. Thanks to the traffic police service, who helped organize unimpeded passage for ambulances and blocked the city highway for access to this organized helipad. Additional transport was brought in - taxis and buses," says Kalinin.
According to him, the medicines ran out almost immediately after receiving the first patients. “What saved us then was that it was summer and people were not freezing. workplace Deputy chief doctor of the ambulance Ramil Zainullin opened warehouses with strong drugs, and all victims received painkillers almost at the scene. It helped that they were in warehouses civil defense there was a sufficient number of stretchers and dressings," Kalinin said.
Doctor's alarm
“On the morning of June 4, the head of the health department of the city of Ufa, Dimi Chanyshev, addressed the city’s medical community on the radio with a request to go to work. It was Sunday, and only doctors and orderlies on duty remained in the hospitals,” recalls Kalinin.
According to him, everyone who could came out, even clinics. Each victim required the help of not one, but several specialists. Three days later it was decided to send certain number people to burn hospitals in other cities. Organized the flight of planes from Ufa to Moscow, Gorky ( Nizhny Novgorod), Samara, Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), Leningrad. The injured were accompanied by ambulance doctors on the road, even if they were already working outside of their shift.
Everyone was brought in alive. “Thanks to all the doctors. No one had to repeat requests and orders twice that night, everyone understood each other perfectly, everyone was overwhelmed by the thought - to save people, every person,” the doctor recalls with excitement.
“I was 37 years old then. I went to work with fair hair and returned gray. Overnight, not only my head turned white. After the tragedy, we couldn’t talk about this catastrophe for some time, it was so scary. God forbid we see such human tragedy," he said.
And then what?
All participants in the rescue operation and ambulance doctors were awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples. 18 ambulance workers received the title "Excellent Health Worker of the USSR."
After the tragedy near Ufa, passenger cars began to be made from other, less flammable and more heat- and fire-resistant materials.
And in Ufa, in the 18th city hospital, there is a “department of medical disasters”. On it, as in others medical universities In Russia, future doctors are being taught a life-saving course using the “Kalinin method.” The course was based on his reaction to the tragedy - that he, without consulting anyone, decided to send a hundred ambulance crews to the scene of the tragedy.
There is still debate about the cause of the explosion. Perhaps it was an accidental electrical spark. Or maybe someone’s cigarette acted as a detonator, because one of the passengers could well have gone out at night to smoke...
But how did the gas leak occur? According to the official version, during construction in October 1985, the pipeline was damaged by an excavator bucket. At first it was just corrosion, but over time a crack appeared due to constant loads. It opened only 40 minutes before the accident, and by the time the trains passed through the lowland, a sufficient amount of gas had already accumulated.
In any case, it was the pipeline builders who were found guilty of the accident. Seven people were held responsible, including officials, foremen and workers.
But there is another version, according to which the leak occurred two to three weeks before the disaster. Apparently, under the influence of “stray currents” from the railway, an electrochemical reaction began in the pipe, which led to corrosion. First, a small hole formed through which gas began to leak. Gradually it expanded into a crack.
By the way, drivers of trains passing this section reported about gas pollution several days before the accident. A few hours before, the pressure in the pipeline dropped, but the problem was solved simply - they increased the gas supply, which further aggravated the situation.
So, most likely, the main cause of the tragedy was elementary negligence, the usual Russian hope for “maybe”...
They did not restore the pipeline. It was subsequently liquidated. And at the site of the Ashinsky disaster in 1992, a memorial was erected. Every year, relatives of the victims come here to honor their memory.
From the first days of its existence, the railway became a source of increased danger. Trains hit people, collide with each other and derail. However, on the night of June 3-4, 1989, a train accident occurred near Ufa, the likes of which had no analogues in either Russian or world history. However, then the cause of the accident was not the actions of railway workers, nor damage to the tracks, but something completely different, far from the railway - an explosion of gas leaking from a pipeline passing nearby.
Train accident near Ufa on the night of June 3-4, 1989
Object: 1710 kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway, section Asha - Ulu-Telyak, Kuibyshev Railway, 11 km from Asha station, Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. 900 meters from the Siberia-Ural-Volga region product pipeline (pipeline).
Victims: 575 people were killed (258 at the scene of the accident, 317 in hospitals), 623 people were injured. According to other sources, 645 people died
Causes of the disaster
We know exactly what caused the train accident near Ufa on June 4, 1989 - a massive explosion of gas that leaked from the pipeline through a 1.7-meter-long crack and accumulated in the lowland along which the Trans-Siberian Railway passes. However, no one will say why the gas mixture flared up, and there is still debate about what led to the formation of a crack in the pipe and a gas leak.
As for the immediate cause of the explosion, the gas could have flared up from an accidental spark that slipped between the pantograph and the contact wire, or in any other component of the electric locomotives. But it is possible that the gas exploded from a cigarette (after all, there were many smokers on the train with 1284 passengers, and some of them could have gone out to smoke at one in the morning), but most experts are inclined to the “spark” version.
As for the reasons for gas leaks from the pipeline, everything is much more complicated. According to the official version, the pipeline was a “time bomb” - it was damaged by an excavator bucket during construction in October 1985, and under the influence of constant loads, a crack appeared at the damage site. According to this version, a crack in the pipeline opened just 40 minutes before the accident, and during this time quite a lot of gas accumulated in the lowland.
Because this version became official, the pipeline builders were found guilty of the accident - several officials, foremen and workers (seven people in total).
According to another version, the gas leak began much earlier - two to three weeks before the disaster. First, a microfistula appeared in the pipe - a small hole through which gas began to leak. Gradually the hole widened and grew into a long crack. The appearance of the fistula is probably caused by corrosion resulting from an electrochemical reaction under the influence of “stray currents” from the railway.
It is impossible not to note several other factors that are in one way or another connected with the occurrence of an emergency. First of all, standards were violated during the construction and operation of the pipeline. Initially, it was conceived as an oil pipeline with a diameter of 750 mm, but later, when the pipeline was actually built, it was repurposed as a product pipeline for transporting liquefied gas-gasoline mixture. This could not be done, since the operation of product pipelines with a diameter of over 400 mm is prohibited by all regulations. However, this was ignored.
According to experts, this terrible accident could have been avoided. A few days later, drivers of locomotives passing along this stretch reported increased gas pollution, but these messages were ignored. Also, on this section of the pipeline, a few hours before the accident, the gas pressure dropped, but the problem was solved simply by increasing the gas supply, which, as is now clear, only worsened the situation. As a result, no one found out about the leak, and soon there was an explosion.
It’s interesting that there is also a conspiracy theory about the causes of the disaster (where would we be without it!). Some “experts” claim that the explosion was nothing more than a sabotage by American intelligence services. And this was one of the accidents that was part of the secret American program for the collapse of the USSR. This version does not stand up to criticism, but it turned out to be very “tenacious” and today it has many supporters.
A lot of shortcomings, ignoring technical problems, bureaucracy and basic negligence - that’s real reasons train accident near Ufa on the night of June 3-4, 1989.
Chronicle of events
The chronicle of events can begin from the moment when the driver of one of the trains passing along the Asha - Ulu-Telyak section reported increased gas pollution, which, in his opinion, posed a danger. It was approximately ten o'clock in the evening local time. However, the message was either ignored by dispatchers, or simply did not have time to reach the responsible officials.
IN 1:14 local time, two trains met in a lowland filled with a “gas lake” and an explosion occurred. It was not just an explosion, but a volumetric explosion, which, as is known, is the most destructive type of chemical explosion. The gas ignited in its entire volume at once, and in this fireball the temperature momentarily rose to 1000 degrees, and the length of the flame front reached almost 2 kilometers.
The disaster occurred in the taiga, far from large settlements and roads, so help could not come quickly. The first to come to the scene of the accident were the residents of the village of Asha, located 11 km away, the residents of Asha, and subsequently played a big role in rescuing the victims - they looked after the sick and generally provided all possible assistance.
A few hours later, rescuers began to arrive at the scene of the disaster - the first to begin work were the soldiers of the civil defense battalion, and then the rescue train crews joined them. The military evacuated the victims, cleared away the rubble, and restored the tracks. The work went quickly (fortunately, in early June the nights are light and dawn comes early), and by morning the only evidence of the accident was the scorched forest within a kilometer radius and scattered carriages. All the victims were taken to Ufa hospitals, and the remains of the victims were recovered during the day on June 4 and transported by car to Ufa morgues.
Complete work to restore the tracks (after all, this is the Trans-Siberian Railway, its stop is at long time fraught with the most serious problems) were completed in a few days. But for many more days and weeks, doctors fought for the lives of seriously wounded people, and relatives with tears in their eyes tried to identify their relatives and friends in the burned fragments of the bodies...
Consequences
By different estimates, the force of the explosion ranged from 250 - 300 (official version) to 12,000 tons of TNT equivalent (recall that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a power of 16 kilotons).
The glow of this monstrous explosion was visible at a distance of up to 100 km; the shock wave broke glass in many houses in the village of Asha at a distance of 11 km. The explosion destroyed about 350 meters of railway tracks and 3 km contact network(30 supports were destroyed and overturned), about 17 km of overhead communication lines were damaged.
Two locomotives and 37 cars were damaged, 11 cars were thrown off the tracks. Almost all the carriages were burned out, many of them were crushed, some of the carriages were missing their roofs and trim. And several carriages were bent like bananas - it is difficult to imagine how powerful the explosion was to throw multi-ton carriages off the road in an instant and thus cripple them.
The explosion started a fire that engulfed an area of over 250 hectares.
The ill-fated pipeline was also damaged. The decision was made not to restore it, and it was soon liquidated.
The explosion claimed 575 human lives, of which 181 were children. Another 623 people were seriously injured and left disabled various categories. 258 people died on the spot, but no one can claim that these are exact numbers: people were literally torn apart by the explosion, their bodies mixed with earth and twisted metal, and most of the remains discovered were not bodies, but only mutilated fragments of bodies. And no one knows how many dead remained under the hastily restored railway track.
Another 317 people died in hospitals in the days following the accident. Many people suffered burns over 100% of the body, fractures and other injuries (including traumatic amputation of limbs), and therefore simply had no chance of survival.
Current situation
Today, in the place where 24 years ago there was a monstrous explosion, there is taiga and silence, broken by passing freight and passenger trains. However, electric trains traveling from Ufa to Asha do not just pass by - they certainly stop at the “1710th kilometer” platform, built here a few years after the disaster.
In 1992, a memorial was erected next to the platform in memory of the victims of the disaster. At the foot of this eight-meter-tall monument you can see several road signs that were torn from the carriages during the explosion.
Warn and prevent
One of the causes of the disaster was a violation of operating standards for product pipelines - there were no leakage monitoring sensors on the pipe, and no visual inspection was carried out by linemen. But something else was more dangerous: along its length, the pipeline had 14 dangerous junctions (less than 1 kilometer) and intersections with railways and roads. The problematic pipeline was dismantled, but the problem was not solved - tens of thousands of kilometers of pipelines were laid in the country, and it is impossible to keep track of every meter of these pipes.
However, real steps to prevent similar disasters in the future were made 15 years after the accident: in 2004, on the instructions of OJSC Gazprom, a system for monitoring the crossings of main pipelines across roads (SKP 21) was developed, which has been implemented on the roads since 2005. pipelines of Russia.
And now we can only hope that modern automation will prevent a catastrophe like the Ufa one from happening again.
Two train accidents, united by the date June 4th and separated by a period of one year. None of them received an explanation of the exact cause of what happened.
The first claimed the lives of 91 people, including 17 children. About 800 people were injured. 1,500 people were affected, 823 of them were left homeless. In the second, 575 people died (according to other sources, 645), 181 of them were children, and more than 600 were injured. What was it? We have collected probable versions in one article, possible reasons and eyewitness accounts. As usually happened in the USSR, the leadership did everything to keep silent, misrepresent and confuse people.
Arzamas railway accident
Almost three decades have passed since the Arzamas tragedy, when, according to the official version, a train with explosives exploded almost in the center of the city, taking the lives of about a hundred people, leaving thousands of citizens homeless. The people of Arzamas survived, the destruction was eliminated, roads and houses were restored. But from the memory of eyewitnesses of the tragedy you cannot erase a single moment of that summer day.
Saturday morning, June 4, 1988, did not foretell anything bad. It was just hot - the temperature went over 40 degrees. The freight train was crossing the crossing at a low speed - 22 kilometers per hour. And suddenly - a powerful explosion. Three carriages flew into the air, containing 120 tons of explosives, as newspapers wrote then, intended for geologists, miners and builders.
What caused the explosion has not yet been established. There were attempts to place the blame on the railway workers: they say that the explosion occurred on the rails, which means the transport workers are to blame. However, experienced experts have not confirmed this. There are other versions left. Including spontaneous combustion of explosives due to violation of loading rules, gas leakage from a gas pipeline laid under the railway tracks. By technical specifications The gas pipeline pipe should lie under the tracks at a depth of at least five meters, but it turned out to be laid at a depth of only one and a half meters.
Ivan Sklyarov (who later became governor) then, in 1988, was the chairman of the Arzamas city executive committee, and it was he who was responsible for eliminating the consequences of the explosion. He said that the tragedy is primarily connected with politics. Those who eliminated the consequences of the disaster recall that there could have been much more victims then. This is evidenced by two facts. Firstly, a few minutes before the explosion, another train with ammunition left the station. Secondly, what everyone pays attention to is that there was an oil depot a kilometer from the crossing. Had the explosion occurred three minutes later, half the city would have been destroyed. This is how newspapers wrote about the tragedy in those days.
From the official: On June 4, 1988 at 9.32, when approaching the Arzamas-1 station of a freight train traveling from Dzerzhinsk to Kazakhstan, an explosion occurred in three cars with 18 tons of industrial explosives intended for mining enterprises in the south of the country. The tragedy claimed the lives of 91 people, including 17 children. About 800 people were injured. 1,500 families were affected, 823 of them were left homeless. 250 meters of the railway track, the railway station and station buildings, and nearby residential buildings were destroyed. The gas pipeline running under the railroad bed was seriously damaged. Electrical substations, high-voltage lines, distribution networks, and water supply systems are out of order. There were 160 industrial and economic facilities in the affected area. Two hospitals, 49 kindergartens, 69 shops, nine cultural facilities, 12 enterprises, five warehouses and bases, and 14 schools were damaged to varying degrees. The explosion destroyed and damaged 954 residential buildings, of which 180 were beyond repair.
Bang kids
At its epicenter they only worked strong people. On June 4, 1988, Arzamas resident Sasha Sukonkin was only two months old. He lost his father and mother overnight. They were left alone with their sister in the care of their grandmother, who worked as a postman. One thought never left the elderly woman: “If only I could raise my grandchildren, if only I could put them on their feet...” She raised, as they say, very good people, Sasha is studying at university, his sister too independent person, she already has her own family, in which a small child is growing up.
Maria Afanasyevna Shershakova is happy for them. Now she is retired, but then, 20 years ago, as the head of the letters and complaints department of the city committee of the CPSU, she found herself in the very epicenter of human pain and grief. She connected the grandmother with her grandchildren. She hugged a fifteen-year-old girl, who kept repeating: “Please call the hospital, maybe dad is there...” And she didn’t dare tell her that she had to look for dad at the morgue; it was already known that he was riding in a car with other builders to a country children's camp, he definitely died. At that time, the girl’s mother was suffering from a heart attack, and her older brother had to be called from the army to identify her father... She helped the Yamov family, which had lost both adults and children, to reunite...
There were many people like Maria Afanasyevna in Arzamas at the tragic moment in its history. By coincidence, an explosion occurred in Arzamas in 1988. But we will probably never be immune from such man-made disasters. Moreover, with the increasing deterioration of the country’s technical fleet, and, to be honest, with our irresponsibility, the danger is only increasing. This means that we need to remind you of the sad events in Russian history, although life still triumphs...
Train accident near Ufa
The largest railway accident in the history of Russia and the USSR occurred on June 4, 1989 in the Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, 11 km from the city of Asha (Chelyabinsk region) on the Asha - Ulu-Telyak section. At the moment of the oncoming passage of two passenger trains No. 211 “Novosibirsk - Adler” and No. 212 “Adler - Novosibirsk” a powerful explosion occurred. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), 181 of them were children, more than 600 were injured.
A train accident, the likes of which the world has never known, occurred in Bashkiria on the night of June 3-4, 1989. Fast trains No. 211 and No. 212 18 years ago should not have met at the ill-fated 1710th kilometer, where a gas leak occurred on the product pipeline. The train from Novosibirsk was late. Train No. 212 Adler - Novosibirsk was rushing towards us at full speed.
The official version goes like this. The weather was calm. The gas flowing from above filled the entire lowland. The driver of a freight train, which had passed the 1710th kilometer shortly before the explosion, reported via communication that there was heavy gas pollution in this place. They promised to figure it out...
On the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak at Zmeinaya Gorka, the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another. Everything around was filled with flames. The air itself became fire. By inertia, the trains rolled out of the intense burning zone. The tail cars of both trains were thrown off the track. The roof of the trailed “zero” car was torn off by the blast wave, and those who were lying on the upper shelves were thrown onto an embankment.
The clock found in the ashes showed 1.10 local time. The giant flash was seen tens of kilometers away. Until now, the mystery of this terrible catastrophe worries astrologers, scientists, and experts. How did it happen that two late twin trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk met in a dangerous place where a product pipeline leaked? Why did the spark occur? Why did the trains, which were the most crowded with people in the summer, end up in the inferno, and not, for example, freight trains? And why did the gas explode a kilometer away from the leak? The number of deaths is still not known for certain - in the carriages in Soviet times, when they didn’t put names on the tickets, it could have been huge amount“hares” traveling to the blessed south and returning back.
“Flames shot up into the sky, it became as bright as day, we thought, we dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a local police officer at the Iglinsky Department of Internal Affairs, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. “We rushed to the fire in cars and tractors. The equipment could not climb the steep slope. They began to climb the slope - there were pine trees all around like burnt matches. Below we saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies... One woman was hanging on a birch tree with her stomach ripped open. An old man crawled along the slope from the fiery mess, coughing. How many years have passed, and he still stands before my eyes. Then I saw that the man was burning like gas with a blue flame.
At one o'clock in the morning, teenagers who were returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves, amid the hissing metal, helped along with the adults.
They tried to carry the children out first,” says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. “The adults were simply dragged away from the fire. And they moan, cry, and ask to be covered with something. What will you cover it with? They took off their clothes.
The wounded, in a state of shock, crawled into the windfall and were searched for by moans and screams.
“They took a man by the hands, by the legs, and his skin remained in his hands...” said Ural driver Viktor Titlin, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. “All night, until the morning, they took the victims to the hospital in Asha.
The driver of the state farm bus, Marat Sharifullin, made three trips, and then began shouting: “I won’t go anymore, I’m bringing only corpses!” Along the way, children screamed and asked for something to drink, burnt skin stuck to the seats, and many did not survive the journey.
“The cars didn’t go up the mountain, we had to carry the wounded on ourselves,” says Marat Yusupov, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - They were carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he, such a healthy man, carried about thirty people. Covered in blood, but did not stop.
Sergei Stolyarov made three trips on an electric locomotive with wounded people. At the Ulu-Telyak station, he, a driver with two months of experience, missed the 212th ambulance and went on a freight train after it. A few kilometers later I saw a huge flame. Having unhooked the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned cars. On the embankment, the overhead wires of the contact network, torn off by the blast wave, curled like snakes. Having taken the burned people into the cabin, Stolyarov moved to the siding and returned to the scene of the disaster with the platform already attached. He picked up children, women, men who had become helpless and loaded, loaded... He returned home - his shirt was like a stake from the clotted blood of someone else.
“All the village equipment arrived, they were transported on tractors,” recalled the chairman of the Krasny Voskhod collective farm, Sergei Kosmakov. - The wounded were sent to a rural boarding school, where their children bandaged them...
Specialized help came much later - after one and a half to two hours.
“At 1.45 a.m. the control panel received a call that a carriage was burning near Ulu-Telyak,” says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor on the ambulance shift in the city of Ufa. — Ten minutes later they clarified that the entire train had burned out. All duty ambulances were removed from the line and equipped with gas masks. No one knew where to go, Ulu-Telyak is 90 km from Ufa. The cars just went to the torch...
“We got out of the car into the ashes, the first thing we saw was a doll and a severed leg...” said the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. “I can’t imagine how many painkilling injections I had to give.” When we set off with the wounded children, a woman ran up to me with a girl in her arms: “Doctor, take it. Both the baby’s mother and father died.” There were no seats in the car, so I sat the girl on my lap. She was wrapped up to her chin in a sheet, her head was all burned, her hair was curled into baked rings - like a lamb’s, and she smelled like a roasted lamb... I still can’t forget this little girl. On the way, she told me that her name was Zhanna and that she was three years old. My daughter was the same age then.
We found Zhanna, who was being taken out of the affected area by the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. In the book of memory. Zhanna Floridovna Akhmadeeva, born in 1986, was not destined to become a bride. At the age of three she died at the Ufa Children's Republican Hospital.
Trees fell as if in a vacuum. At the scene of the tragedy there was a strong smell of corpses. The carriages, for some reason rusty in color, lay a few meters from the tracks, flattened and bent. It’s hard to even imagine what temperature could make iron wriggle like that. It’s amazing that in this fire, on the ground that had turned to coke, where electrical poles and sleepers were uprooted, people could still remain alive!
“The military later determined: the power of the explosion was 20 megatons, which corresponds to half the atomic bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima,” said Sergei Kosmakov, chairman of the “Red Sunrise” village council.
“We ran to the scene of the explosion—the trees were falling as if in a vacuum—to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so powerful that glass was broken in all houses within a 12-kilometer radius. We found pieces from the carriages at a distance of six kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.
“Patients were brought in on dump trucks, on trucks side by side: alive, unconscious, already dead...,” recalls resuscitator Vladislav Zagrebenko. — They loaded in the dark. They were sorted according to the principle of military medicine. The seriously wounded - with one hundred percent burns - are placed on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one, you will lose twenty. When we walked through the floors of the hospital, it felt like we were at war. In the wards, in the corridors, in the hall there were black people with severe burns. I have never seen anything like this, even though I worked in intensive care.
In Chelyabinsk, children from school No. 107 boarded the ill-fated train, heading to Moldova to work in a labor camp in the vineyards. It is interesting that the head teacher of the school, Tatyana Viktorovna Filatova, even before departure, ran to the station manager to convince her that, due to safety regulations, the carriage with the children should be placed at the beginning of the train. I wasn’t convinced... Their “zero” carriage was attached to the very end.
“In the morning we found out that only one platform remained from our trailer car,” says Irina Konstantinova, director of school No. 107 in Chelyabinsk. - Out of 54 people, 9 survived. Head teacher - Tatyana Viktorovna was lying on the bottom shelf with her 5-year-old son. So the two of them died. Neither our military instructor Yuri Gerasimovich Tulupov nor the children’s favorite teacher Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova were found. One high school student was identified only by his watch, another by the net in which his parents put food for his journey.
“My heart sank when the train arrived with the relatives of the victims,” said Anatoly Bezrukov. “They peered with hope into the carriages, crumpled like pieces of paper. Elderly women crawled with plastic bags in their hands, hoping to find at least something left of their relatives.
After the wounded were taken away, the burnt and mangled pieces of their bodies were collected - arms, legs, shoulders were collected throughout the forest, removed from the trees and placed on stretchers. By the evening, when the refrigerators arrived, there were about 20 such stretchers filled with human remains. But even in the evening, civil defense soldiers continued to remove the remains of flesh fused into the iron from the cars with cutters. In a separate pile they put things found in the area - children's toys and books, bags and suitcases, blouses and trousers, for some reason whole and unharmed, not even singed.
Salavat Abdulin, the father of the deceased high school student Irina, found her hair clip in the ashes, which he himself repaired before the trip, and her shirt.
“The daughter was not on the lists of survivors,” he will recall later. “We searched for her in hospitals for three days. No traces. And then my wife and I went to the refrigerators... There was one girl there. She is similar in age to our daughter. There was no head. Black as a frying pan. I thought I’d recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs either...
And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently released. To bring the wounded from the Asha and Iglino hospitals to Ufa, a helicopter school was used. The cars landed in the city center in Gafuri Park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the “helipad” to this day. The cars took off every three minutes. By 11 am, all the victims were taken to city hospitals.
“The first patient was admitted to us at 6:58 a.m.,” said the head of the burn center in Ufa, Radik Medykhatovich Zinatullin. — From eight in the morning until lunch, there was a massive flow of victims. The burns were deep, almost all of them had burns of the upper respiratory tract. Half of the victims had more than 70% of their bodies burned. Our center had just opened; there were enough antibiotics, blood products, and fibrin film in stock, which is applied to the burned surface. By lunchtime, teams of doctors from Leningrad and Moscow arrived.
There were many children among the victims. I remember one boy had two mothers, each of whom was sure that her son was in the crib... Two mothers claimed one child at once.
An unbearable situation reigned at the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, fainting right there. The father and young girl who arrived from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, unlike other relatives, were glowing with happiness. They came to see their son and husband, a young family with two children.
“We don’t need lists,” they wave it off. “We know he survived.” Pravda wrote on the front page that he saved children. We know what lies in Hospital No. 21.
Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of burning carriages. But the publication stated that the hero had 98% burns. The wife and father shift from foot to foot, they want to quickly leave the mournful headquarters, where people are crying.
“Pick it up, at the morgue,” says the phone number of Hospital No. 21.
Nadya Shugaeva, a milkmaid from the Novosibirsk region, suddenly begins to laugh hysterically.
- Found it, found it!
The attendants try to smile forcefully. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found it... on the lists of the dead.
The switchmen were responsible for the disaster. When the wind was still carrying the ashes of those burned alive, powerful equipment was driven to the site of the disaster. Fearing an epidemic due to unburied fragments of bodies smeared on the ground and beginning to decompose, they hastened to raze the scorched lowland of 200 hectares to the ground. The builders were responsible for the death of people, for the terrible burns and injuries that more than a thousand people received.
From the very beginning, the investigation turned on very important people: the leaders of the industry design institute, who approved the project with violations. Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry Dongaryan was also charged, who, by his order, in order to save money, canceled telemetry - instruments that monitor the operation of the entire pipeline. There was a helicopter that flew around the entire route, it was canceled, there was a lineman - the lineman was also removed.
On December 26, 1992, the trial took place. It turned out that the gas leak from the overpass was due to a crack caused to it four years before the disaster, in October 1985, by an excavator bucket during construction work. The product pipeline was backfilled with mechanical damage. The case was sent for further investigation. Six years later, the Supreme Court of Bashkortostan handed down a sentence - all defendants were sentenced to two years in a penal settlement. In the dock were the site manager, foreman, foremen, and builders. “Switchmen.”
In 1989, such a structure as the Ministry of Emergency Situations did not exist. Typewritten lists of the dead, deceased and survivors at the headquarters were updated hourly (!), although no computers existed, and over a thousand victims were scattered throughout all the hospitals of the republic. Death from burns occurs within a few days, and a real pestilence began in clinics in the first week after the tragedy. The mother could call from the airport and receive information that her son was alive, and, upon reaching the headquarters, find the name already on the list of the dead. It was necessary not only to record the death of a person who often could not even say his name, but also to organize the sending of the coffin to his homeland, having found out all the data of the deceased.
Meanwhile, planes from all over the then huge country with relatives of the victims landed at the Ufa airport; they needed to be accommodated somewhere and soldered with valerian. All the surrounding sanatoriums were filled with unhappy parents who searched for their children in the morgue for several days. Those who were “luckier” and their relatives were identified were met by doctors at the stations and after a few hours they flew to hometown on a plane specially arranged for them.
The internationalist soldiers took on the hardest work. Afghans volunteered to help the special services where even experienced doctors could not stand it. The corpses of the dead did not fit in the Ufa morgue on Tsvetochnaya and human remains were stored in refrigerated vehicles. Considering that it was incredibly hot outside, the smell around the makeshift glaciers was unbearable, and flies flocked from all over the area. This work required stamina and physical strength from the volunteers; all arriving dead had to be placed on hastily put together shelves, tagged, and sorted. Many could not stand it, shuddering and vomiting.
Relatives, distraught with grief, looking for their children, did not notice anything around, peering intently at the charred fragments of bodies. Moms and dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles, had wild dialogues:
Isn't this our Lenochka? - they said, crowding around a black piece of meat.
No, our Lenochka had folds on her arms...
How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.
In order not to traumatize relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, with pictures from different angles fragments of unidentified bodies. This terrible collection of death had pages stamped “identified.” However, many still went to the refrigerators, hoping that the photographs lie. And the guys who recently came from real war, suffering fell upon them that they had not seen while fighting with the dushmans. Often the guys provided first aid to those who fainted and were on the verge of madness from grief, or with impassive faces they helped turn over the charred bodies of their relatives.
You can’t revive the dead; despair came when the living began to arrive,” the Afghans later said, talking about the most difficult experiences.
There were also funny cases.
“In the morning, a man came to the village council from the Novosibirsk train, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch,” said district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. “He doesn’t remember how he got out of the train that caught fire.” I lost my way in the forest at night, unconscious. Those who were left behind from the train showed up at headquarters.
Looking for me? - asked the guy who looked into the mournful place at the railway station.
Why should we look for you? - they were surprised there, but looked at the lists by rote.
Eat! - the young man was delighted when he found his name in the column of missing persons.
Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, but he doesn’t remember how the ill-fated train left. I spent a day at the stop, and only when I had sobered up did I learn about what had happened. I got to Ufa and reported that I was alive. At this time, the young man’s mother methodically walked around the morgues, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son went home together.
Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine how much metal and burnt human flesh they had to shovel. 11 cars were thrown off the tracks, 7 of them were completely burned. People worked fiercely, not paying attention to the heat, the stench and the almost physical horror of death hovering in this sticky syrup.
What the heck did you eat? - a young soldier with an autogenous gun shouts to an elderly man in uniform. Colonel General Civil Defense carefully lifts his foot from the human jaw.
Sorry,” he mutters in confusion and disappears into the headquarters located in the nearest tent.
In this episode, all the contradictory emotions that those present experienced: anger at human weakness in the face of the elements, and embarrassment - a quiet joy that it is not their remains that are being collected, and horror mixed with dullness - when there is a lot of death - it no longer causes violent despair.
Chelyabinsk has lost its hockey hope. The 107th school in Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, sports club“Traktor” is a youth hockey team, two-time national champions. Only goalkeeper Borya Tortunov was forced to stay at home: his grandmother broke her arm.
Of the ten hockey players who were champions of the Union among regional national teams, only one survived, Alexander Sychev, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - striker Artem Masalov, defenders Seryozha Generalgard, Andrei Kulazhenkin, and goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andrei Shevchenko, lived the longest of the burned guys, five days. On June 15 he would have celebrated his sixteenth birthday.
“My husband and I managed to see him,” says Andrei’s mother Natalya Antonovna. — We found him according to the lists in the intensive care unit of the 21st hospital in Ufa. “He was lying like a mummy, covered in bandages, his face was gray-brown, his neck was all swollen. On the plane, when we were taking him to Moscow, he kept asking: “Where are the guys?”
The Traktor club organized a tournament a year after the tragedy, dedicated to memory dead hockey players, which has become traditional. The goalkeeper of the deceased Traktor-73 team, Boris Tortunov, who then stayed at home because of his grandmother, became a two-time champion of the country and the European Cup. On his initiative, pupils of the Traktor school raised money for prizes for the tournament participants, which are traditionally awarded to the mothers and fathers of the dead children.
575 (according to other sources 645) people died, 657 received burns and injuries. The bodies and ashes of those burned alive were taken to 45 regions of Russia and 9 republics of the former Union.
On the night of June 3–4, 1989, the largest train accident in the history of the USSR and Russia occurred at the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The explosion and fire, which killed over 600 people, are known as the Ashinskaya disaster or the tragedy near Ufa. “AiF-Chelyabinsk” collected stories from people who, 29 years later, still remember what happened as clearly as if it happened yesterday.
“We thought a war had started”
Those who happened to go through the fiery hell and survive remember the terrible moments in detail. For many, these pictures are deeply etched in their memory, even despite their young age. Since 2011, they have been sharing their stories on a page dedicated to the memory of the victims of the disaster.
“When this tragedy happened, I was five years old,” says Tatyana S. “My parents and two brothers and I went to the south to relax, but we didn’t get there. Even though I was little, I remember everything as it is now: the explosion, the flames, the screams, the fear... Thank God, everyone in my family survived, but it’s impossible to forget. We were traveling in the third carriage of train 211, it was night... my dad was in another carriage (he was in the video salon). When the explosion occurred, we thought that a war had begun. Dad somehow ended up on the street and walked, not knowing where - his consciousness became clouded from the explosion - but, as it turned out later, he was walking towards us. We stood in the middle of the compartment and couldn’t get out, everything was dripping (plastic) and everything was burning, we couldn’t break the glass, but then it broke on its own due to the temperature. We saw dad and started shouting to him, he came up, mom threw us (the children) out his window, it was very high, and that’s how we got out. It was very cold, my feet stuck to the ground. Mom took the blanket with her teeth, since her hands were burned, wrapped me up and we walked for several kilometers along the rails, along the bridge on which only trains travel, it was terribly dark. In general, if dad had gone in the other direction, everything would have turned out differently.
We got to some station, locomotives rushed past us at breakneck speed, everyone was in shock, but then we were all evacuated to hospitals. Mom was taken to Kuibyshev, dad to Moscow, brothers to Ufa, and me to Nizhny Novgorod. I have a 20% burn, my mom and dad have my hands, and my brothers are lucky, they have superficial burns. Rehabilitation took a very long time, several years, especially in psychologically, because watching people burn alive is not just scary, but horror... And this Novosibirsk-Adler route has haunted me all my life, it so happened that my brother went to live in the south and I have to travel on this train and only one God knows how my soul turns inside me when I ride it.”
Among others, a man shared his story, who then went south, to the sea, with his wife and little daughter.
“We were traveling in a compartment, a young mother with a boy of 6-8 months and her mother were traveling with us. Neither I nor my daughter heard the explosion; she and I probably shouldn’t have woken up. My wife and daughter slept on the bottom bunk, I on the top. A grandmother with her grandson is on the bottom, a young mother is on the top. I was sleeping on my stomach, and then, as if from a cellar: “Valera, Valera...” I opened my eyes: the compartment was on fire. “Mother of God, where is Olesya?” There are no partitions, I began to scatter the remains of the partitions, the skin on my fingers immediately turned out like on boiled sausages. “Dad, dad...” Found it! Out the window, mom! “Dad, is this war? Are these Germans? Let’s go home quickly...” Grandmother and grandson out the window. "Save Natasha!" The top shelf was torn off along with her, she is sitting in the corner, the shelf is on her head. The chiffon dress melted on her, covered in bubbles. It hurt my hands, I tried with my back, and it burned me on the melting leatherette. Lifts with shelf. He tore out the shelf with his hands, his head was broken, his brain was visible. Somehow through her window and there too.
We walked. I was at the 20th anniversary of the accident, I walked that path again, two km. It was the right decision Then. Some climbed into the river, into the water, and died there; some fled into the forest. A wife with a broken ankle was carrying her daughter on her back. She didn’t cry, didn’t scream, she had 4th degree burns, her nerve endings were burned out. At the stop - two or three barracks - about 30 people gathered. Wild screams of the survivors, as if all the dead in the world had woken up at once. After some time, a fire train approached, distraught people rushed to it, the firefighters had no choice but to pick up the people and return them to Ulu-Telyak. “Dad, why are you so scary? Dad, do I have candy in my hands (burn blisters)?” - the last thing I heard from her. At the Ulu-Telyak hospital they euthanized her with injections. By bus to Asha. “I won’t go anywhere without my wife and child.” In Asha, my wife is in the ward with her daughter, I am with them: “Nowhere without me.”
After some time on the helicopter to Ufa, I begin to “float” from the injections. To the operating room only with my daughter. I started crying. "What are you doing?" "Everything is fine". “What time is it? 12? God, I've been on my feet for 12 hours. Put me to sleep! I have no strength." After anesthesia, a person is such a vegetable... Mom, father-in-law, wife's brother... Where? A compassionate woman in Ulu-Telyak sent a telegram, I bow to her. “Where is Olesya? Allah? "In this hospital." Fell asleep. I woke up, they were dragging me somewhere, my mother was nearby. "Where?" “To Moscow” “Olesya?” "With you". The four young soldiers were somehow on a stretcher. “Drop it, I’ll get up on my own now!” “Where, you can’t!” “Black Tulip” (An-12 plane - editor's note) - an old friend, a two-story stretcher. And everyone: “Drink! Mom, drink!” In Moscow I woke up in Sklif, my hands looked like boxing gloves. “Will you cut it?” “No, boy, hold on...”
My daughter died on June 19, fully conscious in terrible agony, her kidneys were failing... They told me about this, having previously pumped me full of morphine, on the ninth day. He tore the bandages, howled like a wolf... A thunderstorm, such as I had never heard before or since, a hurricane of rain that day. These are the tears of the departed. A year later, to the same day, on June 19, a son was born..."
"The pain doesn't go away"
The explosion of the gas mixture was so powerful that the bodies of some passengers were never found later. Some died immediately, others unsuccessfully tried to get out, and those who managed to leave the hot cars died later from burns. The burned adults tried to save the children - there were many schoolchildren on the train who were going on vacation.
“My friend Andrei Dolgachev fell into this “hell” when he was traveling home from the army to the city of Novoanninsky, Volgograd Region, train No. 211, car 9,” writes Vladimir B. “The car did not overturn, but it burned out completely. That night, Andrei pulled a burnt pregnant woman out of the carriage; her fate is unknown to me. He didn’t have very many burns (about 28%), although they were deep. Andrei died two weeks after the disaster at the Sverdlovsk Burn Center. He was 18 years old. The family was poor, they were buried by the whole city. Eternal memory to everyone who died there!”
“My uncle, Kirtava Rezo Razhdenovich, 19 years old, after training he was going to another military unit. That night, he pulled more than ten children from the burning train who were traveling from the camp, says Tamara B. He received burns incompatible with life (80%), the burns were received just during the rescue of the children. He died on the fourth day after the disaster. Posthumously awarded... A street in the village where he was born and raised was named in his honor: the village of Leselidze (Kingisepp), Abkhazian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Georgia.”
“My employee’s relatives died in this disaster: his brother’s wife and two sons,” Galina D. shares her story. “My brother was a military man, so in search of his family he had the opportunity to fly over the scene of the disaster by helicopter. What he saw shocked him. Unfortunately, his relatives were traveling in one of the last carriages, the same ones that were at the epicenter of the explosion. All that was left of the carriage itself was the wheeled platform, everything burned to the ground. He never found his beloved and dear wife and children; they buried earth and ashes in coffins. A few years later, this man married again and had a son. But according to his sister (my employee), this nightmare still does not leave him, he does not feel truly happy, despite the fact that his son and heir are growing up. He lives with pain that does not go away, despite time.”
“The whole body is a complete burn”
The news of the disaster spread quickly, and within half an hour first aid arrived at the scene of the explosion - local residents They began to help the wounded and take people to hospitals. Hundreds of people worked at the scene of the tragedy - young cadets cleared the rubble, railway workers restored the tracks, doctors and volunteer assistants evacuated the victims. Doctors recall that there were queues of people wishing to donate blood for the wounded at the hospitals in Asha, Chelyabinsk, Ufa and Novosibirsk.
“I was 8 years old, we were vacationing with relatives in Iglino,” recalls Evgenia M. “My aunt worked in the hospital as a nurse, a colleague came running for her in the morning, and they called the entire medical staff. During the day we went outside - there was a roar in the sky from helicopters, it was scary. A group of children went to the hospital. The picture still remains in my memory - a little girl is being carried from the ambulance, three years old, she’s crying, she has no clothes and her whole body is completely burnt... It was terrible.”
“I was there. From the Ufa Air Force training on Karl Marx, - writes Dmitry G. - Wake up on alarm in the morning, take your lunch and take the Ikarus to the place. They collected the dead, there were not enough mittens, they tore some rags and wrapped their hands. I don’t remember the stretchers, they were carried on raincoats and laid out with them. The fires were then extinguished further, further away, where the forest was smoldering. Gorbachev flew in, Yazov, helicopters flew before their arrival, we were placed in a cordon around their deliberative tent. There were not only ours, there were other soldiers, railway workers, like, or construction battalion workers... Cadets, I don’t remember where exactly.”
Birthday disaster
Almost always, after major disasters, there are people on transport who were saved by chance from death - they were late and decided to return their tickets. Similar story said Yulia M. from the Chelyabinsk region, at the time of the Ashinsky tragedy she was very young.
“This disaster happened on my birthday, I was about to turn three years old, and my parents decided to give me a gift - a trip to my grandmother. Since I grew up in the military town of DOS (city of Chebarkul), we had to leave from this station. Every year, tickets were purchased directly a few hours before the train (such were the circumstances), and always safely. But this time the following happened: dad periodically ran to the box office to inquire about tickets, the cashier told him every time, don’t worry, you will have tickets five hours before arrival. Closer to that time, dad comes up to find out again, and they tell him: come back in an hour. Me, mom and dad spent the whole day at the station. The older brother was already with his grandmother (they wanted to go to Tambov). As a result, upon the arrival of the train, the cashier says: the tickets are not working out, but they will be there tomorrow. Dad quarreled with her, mom and dad quarreled among themselves out of nerves, I’m crying... And since the transport was no longer running, we went home with our suitcases through the forest, nervous and upset. And in the morning we found out that such a tragedy had occurred... So my birthday is double and on the same date.”
"Almost no one knows"
The investigation lasted several years, and the official version states that the cause of the explosion was the leak of hydrocarbons from the main pipeline and the subsequent detonation of the gas-air mixture from an accidental spark in the place where two oncoming trains Adler-Novosibirsk and Novosibirsk-Adler were passing simultaneously. It is known that a few hours before the tragedy, the driver of a passing train reported the smell of gas, but they decided to deal with this problem later. It turned out that the pipeline itself ran too close to the railway.
“I remember about the disaster from the age of 6, my parents talked about two trains with which something happened, I learned the details at the age of 16, I remember exactly, because it was just 10 years since the disaster,” says Yulia K., “I studied I watched all the materials I found and watched all the films. I tell my students and am very surprised that almost no one knows anything about the disaster. It is clear that today’s students were born much later than 1989, but we live in Chelyabinsk, many of them are from the region, this is, among other things, the history of our region.”
At the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway there is a memorial to the victims of the Ashinsky disaster; every year those whose lives that night divided into “before” and “after” come to see it. It would seem that such a tragedy should have become a cruel lesson about what happens due to human negligence. Both the participants in those events and the relatives of the victims really want that no one else has to experience the pain they experienced.