On February 2, 1959, on the slopes of the Ural mountain Otorten, a group of nine tourists died under strange circumstances. The mountain pass where the tragedy occurred was later called the Dyatlov Pass - by the name of the group leader. Today there are many versions of what could have actually happened there …
Path to the Mountain of the Dead
Local Mansi called the mountain Otorten Holat Syakhyl - "Mountain of the Dead". Once upon a time, in very ancient times, nine local residents allegedly died on its top. And many years later, she again took nine lives …
In January 1959, a group of ten students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute gathered for a winter hike. It was headed by a fifth-year student Igor Dyatlov, who was considered an experienced leader. There were eight guys in the group - Igor Dyatlov, Yuri Doroshenko, Georgy Krivonischenko, Rustem Slobodin, Alexander Kolevatov, Semyon Zolotarev, Nikolai Thibault-Brignolle and Yuri Yudin, and two girls - Zinaida Kolmogorova and Lyudmila Dubinina.
The group left Sverdlovsk on 23 January. On January 27 we started the route. On the morning of January 28, Yuri Yudin left the group due to pain in his leg, and his comrades moved on without him, which saved his life.
The end point of the route was the village of Vizhay, from where on February 12 the students had to send a telegram to the sports club of their native institute. But they never got in touch.
The alarm was sounded only on February 16. Several search expeditions were sent on the trail of the group.
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Scary finds
On February 25, on the eastern slope of Mount Otorten, a tent with equipment and provisions belonging to the Dyatlov group was found. The tourists left almost all their shoes, outerwear and personal belongings in the tent (in 25-degree frost!) As the examination established, the leeward side of the tent was cut from the inside in two places, it seems, so that people could quickly get out of there.
The tracks descended into the valley and the forest at the foot of the mountain. On February 26, at a distance of one and a half kilometers from the tent, at the very border of the forest, the remains of a fire were found, near which the bodies of Doroshenko and Krivonischenko, stripped to their underwear, lay. Dyatlov's corpse was located 300 meters from the fire. He was lying on his back, with his head towards the tent, his hand clasped the trunk of a birch … On March 5, 180 meters from this place, Slobodin's corpse was found, and another 150 meters away was Kolmogorova's corpse. Slobodin and Kolmogorova were lying face down - apparently, they were trying to crawl towards the tent. Only part of the dead were dressed.
It was found that death occurred on the night of February 1 to 2 from freezing. The injuries were mostly post-mortem or received when people climbed the slope. Slobodin had a crack on his skull, but he also died of hypothermia.
Only on May 4, 75 meters from the fire pit, in the direction of the Lozva valley, were the bodies of the other members of the group discovered - Dubinina, Zolotarev, Thibault-Brenol and Kolevatov.
They fell for the Motherland?
The investigation has not come to a single proven version. Among the assumptions about the death of students were: poisoning; ball lightning; exposure to some gases or radiation; avalanche; attack by wild animals, poachers, or escaped prisoners; testing of unknown weapons …
The version put forward by the author of the book "Dyatlov Pass" Alexey Rakitin looks rather curious. He suggested that the "Dyatlovites" or some of them were … recruited KGB agents and died as a result of a failed special operation!
Rakitin claimed that “our” agents had a mission to meet with foreign intelligence officers, also “disguised” as a tourist group. Perhaps they should have pretended to be ardent opponents of the Soviet regime, ready to recruit, and passed on defensive disinformation to the spies. But they were revealed by them. Or the spies themselves somehow revealed themselves to witnesses who were not in the know …
As a result, in order to preserve their own safety, they could, under the threat of reprisals, force both the "agents" and the witnesses to undress and go away from the tent, dooming them to certain death.
True, the former Soviet intelligence officer Mikhail Lyubimov skeptically commented on this version, noting that, although in the 50s the Western special services were really actively interested in the secrets of the Ural defense industry, they worked with completely different methods.
Although the documents in this case were not officially classified as “secret”, they were ordered to be handed over to the special unit. Nevertheless, they were not destroyed after 25 years (statute of limitations), and to this day they are stored in the state archive of the Sverdlovsk region.
