A clue that could reveal the secret of the death of Igor Dyatlov's tourist group in 1959 on the slope of Mount Otorten fell into the hands of the Sverdlovsk policemen. As it became known, the 72-year-old resident of Verkhoturye, formerly an avid hunter Anatoly Stepochkin, gave important testimony. He got to law enforcement officers because of a gun that surfaced in a criminal case of extortion. It turned out that this weapon used to belong to a possible participant in the massacre of tourists. And the motive for the murder was someone else's secret, which the Dyatlovites, willingly or unwillingly, revealed.
Anatoly Stepochkin.
The investigator of the police department No. 33 "Novolyalinsky" (stationed in Verkhoturye) Oleg Vasnin, unraveling the case of armed extortion (article 163 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), quite accidentally left on a trail that could shed light on perhaps the most terrible mystery of the Middle Urals in the second half of XX century. How and why in 1959, on the slope of Mount Otorten, in the very north of the region, the tourist group of Igor Dyatlov died?
Accidental find
Dealing with the TOZ-34 hunting rifle confiscated from the criminals, Vasnin found out that earlier it belonged to 72-year-old pensioner Anatoly Stepochkin. Several years ago, Stepochkin, having tied up with hunting for health reasons, sold it to a young colleague (re-registration is officially certified by the Ministry of Internal Affairs), and already the criminals took this gun away from him, using it for their own purposes. Stepochkin had nothing to do with the attack; nevertheless, he still needed to be interrogated. Imagine the policeman's surprise when this conversation led to the mysterious death of the Dyatlovites.
It turned out that Stepochkin was not the first owner of the TOZ-34 gun. In the winter of 1981 he traded it, along with a pair of sable skins and a hunting dog, for his German Sauer. It happened somewhere in the taiga on the border of the Sverdlovsk region and the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug. The second party in the exchange was a hunter-fisherman, whom the Sverdlovsk pensioner calls him briefly - “khant”. In addition to the deal, the hunt told Stepochkin the story of the horrific death of a tour group that encroached on an Aboriginal sanctuary. (It should be noted that in 1981 the history of the Dyatlovites was practically unknown).
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The Hunter's Tale
This is how this story sounds in Stepochkin's interview with Znak.com correspondents (the full version is on video):
Anatoly Sergeevich, how did you meet the hunt that you mentioned to the investigator?
- I worked in Karpinsk as the head of the transport department of an electrical machine building plant. And in December we were sent on a business trip to Saranpaul (a village on the Lyapin River in the Khanty-Mansiysk District - ed.).
What year is it?
- 1981. We also had Anatoly Bezigin [at the factory], he died now, however, [they went with him]. I'm on a KRAZ all-terrain vehicle, he's on a ZIL-131. In December, Anatoly and I were sent to fetch fish for the factory, six tons had to be brought. There was a fishing brigade in Saranpaul, and our representative made an agreement with them. He took off by plane, then there was an airfield in Karpinsk, and there was a landing site. We're in cars. We got to Ivdel, then to Burmantovo, to the gas station. We arrived at the gas station and refueled. We are told that only one "Kirovets" (heavy tractor K-700) passed, the road is bad. Let's go. Kilometers, probably 40 passed, the road is bad. We sat down to dinner, turned off the engines …
Photo from Stepochkin's personal archive (left), he still has a German gun in his hands.
That is, you did not stop by in Vizhay?
- We didn't go to Vizhay, we went straight to Saranpaul (the distance from Karpinsk is about 500 km, you can only get there by winter roads - ed.). And now we are having lunch, we hear - a hum. Three ATS tractors (artillery tractor ATS-59G - editor's note) are coming with a sled, carrying rock crystal. This crystal is used for submarines and satellites. Nechaev was with them, a former driver, but deprived of his rights. The guy is good, we got into a conversation. Says: "You will pass now!" They stomped the way for us. They went to Ivdel, we went there. Only, they say, don't go straight through Leplu, go through Nyaksymvol (a village on the Northern Sosva River, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug - ed.). We, he said, slipped through, and there the ice collapsed near the coast. You, he says, can fail. And through Nyaksimvol circle - 70 kilometers. We arrived in Nyaksymvol, they warned that there would be rivers a meter deep further, but the banks are steep,drive slowly, otherwise you will knock out the bridges. We got on the road, but it's too late. We spent the night. In the morning we drove up to the rivers. I had a winch at KRAZ, I went first … Tolya went down, sat down, I pulled him out.
Let's go further, there is a tent! We stopped, approached - two little dogs, six months old, the elk meat is covered, and there is no one. We drove on. We reached Saranpaul, loaded the fish, spent the night and drove back. We have reached this tent again. Time towards evening. I look, two big dogs, it means that someone is there. They stopped, the hunt came out: "Come in." He has an insulated tent, two bunks, a stove is a potbelly stove. We met. I always had "NZ" (emergency supply - ed.) With me: a couple of bottles of "Stolichnaya". I say, Tolya, bring them. Hunt pulled out the jelly. He was probably 40-45 years old. They were registered, Tolya went to bed. Hunt says: are you going to drink Mansi mash? I say, come on, they say. He pulls out a three-liter jar from under the bunks. We slapped half a jar and started talking. I tell him: “Well, they say, you only have two dogs,the meat lies … they can take them away. " He says: “Nobody touches here. If anyone takes it, we will still find out. " And he remembers that there were tourists …
He started telling you this story himself?
- Himself. “The owners,” he says, “we are here. If someone does something, we will punish them. We had tourists, they plundered our sacred place. " I ask him: "What is your sacred place?" He says: “There is a cave, there [local] sacrifices were offered, and gold, and platinum, and precious stones, and furs. They gathered there once a year. Well, tourists plundered this place."
- According to him, did they take something or just mischief somehow?
- They took away all sorts of valuables: gold there, platinum, furs. [Hunt] says: “When our people found out this, the shamans gathered, took the hunters with them and began to watch them. Here, they stopped for the night in a tent. Until darkness [the attackers] waited …”. Even then I thought, apparently, he himself participated in this, he told everything so clearly. Then he says: “At night they made a hole in the tent and the shamans put some kind of dope into it. And the hunters and I surrounded it all, and when they got sick there, they began to jump out of these tents. We caught them all and killed them all there."
Did you give any details?
- Nothing more.
Did you say when it was?
- He said that it used to be. I also asked him what it was necessary to say - people were killed. "What for? - he answers. - We are the owners here, we ourselves punish and have mercy. If they come to us with goodness, we are good to them - we deduce whoever gets lost. If they treat us this way, then we do the same."
Stepochkin proudly says: "He took nine bears in his life." In the photo he is with the skin of a lynx.
Weren't you afraid to sit in the same tent with such a person?
- How did we know? In addition, he told me that if they are with good, then they are with good. Then we got to talking with him. He says that his situation is not good now. "What's wrong?" - I ask. It turns out that he fell and broke the butt of the gun. Takes out TOZ-34, "vertical". “Listen,” I say to him, “I also have a gun, also a 12 gauge. Will you give me a doggy to boot”? “Go get it,” he says. He brought him his gun from the car, he only took it in his hands, and once - under the bunk. I agree. He gave me his gun, the dog. I also gave him a good hunting knife. In the morning we got up, but there are no dogs, and I have no hat. Where are the hats, I won't get the puppy? Says, "[The dogs] are coming now." We sat for an hour, they came. He gave me a beret, and I have already arrived here with this beret.
What takes?
- Such brown, shop.
And what was the name of this Khanty?
- I don't remember now.
He looked like?
- In a fur jacket like that, high fur boots on his legs.
"Shotgun" trail and "epiphany"
The story of how our interlocutor and his friend got out back through the taiga in trucks loaded with fish, we omit as less interesting. Two other points are much more important. The first is a gun traded in the taiga with a Khant. Like any other weapon, it is numbered, therefore, even now it is possible to establish who was its first owner. And, if luck comes along, find out the data of a hunt-fisherman who told about the death of tourists. According to an extract from Stepochkin's hunting license (now the original is kept in the materials of the criminal case), the number “21057” was preserved on TOZ-34. It is also known about the gun that its caliber is 12 by 70, on the front there is a marking "UI", on the metal plate of the butt - "U".
A picture taken by Dyatlov's group on the last trip.
Of course, the weapon to the interlocutor of Stepochkin could have gotten unofficially. The uncontrolled circulation of guns among the indigenous peoples is still a headache for Russian law enforcement officers. But in any case, the archives should contain information about the first owner of the barrel.
The second important point is the pensioner's explanation why he had never told anyone about what he heard in the Ural taiga 35 years ago. Stepochkin himself says that although he lived his whole life in the north of the Sverdlovsk region, he was not interested in tourism as such and did not hear anything about Dyatlov's group. There is nothing surprising in the latter. The materials of the investigation carried out in 1959 were classified and they tried not to speak aloud about the incident until the 90s. “When I turned on the TV three years ago, I see that the film is about them (Dyatlov's group - ed.), I think - so, this is the same story,” Stepochkin told about his insight. However, even after the "epiphany" about his conversation with the khant, the Verkhoturye pensioner told only a relatively narrow circle of friends and relatives. What an important witness he can be,he was told after being questioned by the police investigator.
The press service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation for the Sverdlovsk Region confirmed the fact that there was a criminal case in the proceedings of the Novolyalinsky Police Department No. 33, in which a gun that belonged to Stepochkin since the 1980s appears. “On the circumstances of the acquisition of firearms within the framework of the criminal case under investigation by the police, the actions provided for by law will be carried out, including with persons who previously used these weapons,” the police said. And they added: “If, during the investigation, police officers establish that this weapon was related to a crime related to the jurisdiction of the Investigative Committee of Russia, then in this case, in accordance with the criminal procedure legislation, the issue of sending relevant information to the Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of Russia on Sverdlovsk region.
Shamans in the Soviet Urals
The version that it was representatives of the indigenous people who killed the tourists from the Dyatlov group was the main one for the investigation until the end of March 1959. It was believed that the travelers paid for the fact that they desecrated (perhaps only by their visit) a certain Mansi sanctuary. It is known, for example, that nine representatives of the Bakhtiyarov family were involved in the criminal case on the death on Mount Otorten: Nikita Vladimirovich (30 years old), Nikolai Yakimovich (29 years old), Pyotr Yakimovich (34 years old), Prokopiy Savelyevich (17 years old), Sergei Savelyevich (21 years old), Pavel Vasilievich (60 years old), Bakhtiyarov Timofey, Alexander, Kirill. Unlike other Mansi, they did not take part in the search for the missing tourists and were confused in the testimony, telling where they were at the time of the death of the Dyatlovites.
The rock was removed, in which the entrance to the cave is visible.
The Bakhtiyarovs, by the way, were considered a shamanic clan, respected on the western and eastern slopes of the Ural ridge. The sources mention a certain Nikita Yakovlevich Bakhtiyarov, who was born in 1873 and lived in the Ivdel region. In 1938 he was sentenced to five years in labor camps.
The information about the arrest of Bakhtiyarov reads: “He is accused of being an illegal shaman among the Mansi people, a large kulak with large herds of deer, unknown to the Soviet authorities, on whose pasture he exploits the poor Mansi. He leads an anti-Soviet agitation among the Mansi against the unification of the Mansi into collective farms, against settled life, incites hatred among the Mansi towards the Russians and the existing Soviet system, declaring that the Russians are only bringing death to the Mansi. Every year Bakhtiyarov gathers all the Mansi to one of the spurs of the Ural ridge, called Vizhay, where he heads and directs sacrifices on the occasion of a religious holiday lasting up to two weeks."
Nevertheless, by April 1959, all suspicions were cleared from the Mansi. And in May of the same year, the criminal case on the death of tourists on the slope of Mount Otorten was closed with the wording: "The cause of death was a spontaneous force, which they were not able to overcome." “Investigator [Vladimir] Korotaev [who initially conducted this case] recalled that they were inclined to torture the Mansi and even began these harsh actions. But the situation was saved by one of the dressmakers (a woman came to the Ivdel Department of Internal Affairs and accidentally saw the tent of the dead tourists drying there - ed.), Who said that the tent was cut from the inside. Therefore, if they (the Dyatlov group - ed.) Got out on their own, then there was no attack and no one interfered with them, "one of the main experts in the case, head of the" Memory of the Dyatlov Group "fund, Yuri Kuntsevich, explained to Znak.com.
Photo from 1959 by search engines from the slope of Mount Otorten. View of the Dyatlov group's tent.
Kuntsevich says that there is no evidence of Dyatlov residents visiting any Mansi sanctuaries. “From the diaries that were published in the criminal case, and those that we have in the fund, [about visiting the Mansi sanctuaries] nothing is said, not even a hint. What is this sanctuary? A warehouse, this is a warehouse - of course. They also met the Mansi storage facilities there,”says Kuntsevich. He is sure that the members of the Dyatlov group, simply for moral and ethical reasons, were not able to plunder the Mansi sanctuary. Kuntsevich recalls how, together with the "Dyatlovites", he went on agitation trips to remote villages of the Sverdlovsk region with concerts: “They were the progressive youth. Everything is for pure interest - spiritual and cultural."
The head of the fund also recalls that the members of the tour group "learned the Mansi language" - "each of them had several Mansi words written in their diaries to greet and communicate." “They did not have any aggression towards small peoples,” the source emphasizes. In addition, part of the group, including Dyatlov himself, had the experience of communicating with the Mansi. “They were there a year earlier at Chistop (the neighboring peak with Otorten - ed.),” Kuntsevich explained.
Ushminskaya cave
However, the participants in the tour could unwittingly desecrate the sanctuary. There was at least one such place on the route of the Dyatlov group. This is the so-called Ushminskaya cave, also known as Lozvinskaya and Shaitan-yama. Here is what the book "Cult Monuments of the Mountain-Forest Urals" (edition of 2004, compiled by the staff of the Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences) says about it: "Located on the eastern slope of the Northern Urals in the territory of the municipality of Ivdel. The cave was developed in a relatively low limestone rock on the right bank of the river. Lozva, about 20 km. downstream from the village. Ushma (now the national settlement of Mansi - editor's note)”.
Photos from the place where the bodies of the dead tourists were found.
Further: “The first information about the use of this cave by the Mansi in cult practice was collected by V. N. Chernetsov (a well-known archaeologist and ethnographer in the Urals - ed.), Traveling in 1937 in the Middle and Northern Urals. The guides told him that the ancestral sanctuary of the Bakhtiyar family was located here. This object was brought into scientific circulation later, after the first excavations were carried out here by a detachment of the Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Sergei Chairkin in 1991. According to the findings of the researchers, the sanctuary complex functioned here almost since the Paleolithic, that is, at least for the last 10 thousand years.
Dyatlovites could have been near the Ushminskaya cave on January 26 or 27, 1959. Judging by the available descriptions, not far from the sanctuary in 1959 there was a logging village, referred to as the "41st quarter". Dyatlov's group arrived there on a ride from Ivdel on the evening of January 26, 1959. The next day, they made the first trek up the Lozva through the village of Ushma to the abandoned village of gold miners Second Severny, up Lozva. The head of the forest area, Razhev, even gave the tourists a guide and a cart with a horse, so as not to carry backpacks.
In the publication "Cult Monuments of the Mountain-Forest Urals" there are at least two more remarkable moments concerning the Ushminskaya Cave. First of all, women were strictly prohibited from entering there. “Mansi, traveling through Lozva past this sanctuary, dropped all women and children 2 km to the rock. They had to bypass the sacred place with a swampy, densely forested opposite bank, it was forbidden even to look towards the temple,”the book says. There were two girls in Dyatlov's group: Zinaida Kolmogorova (she froze on the slope of Otorten near the place where Dyatlov's body was found) and Lyudmila Dubinina. The injuries recorded on the body of the latter, back in 1959, suggested a ritual murder. The forensic report of the examination of the corpse lists: the eyeballs are absent, the cartilage of the nose is flattened,there are no soft tissues of the upper lip on the right with exposure of the upper jaw and teeth, there is no tongue in the oral cavity.
Igor Dyatlov.
The second curious aspect concerns the structure of the Ushminskaya cave. It is two-tier, the lower tier is separated from the upper tier by a well filled with water with a siphon. According to local residents, it is possible to get there without special equipment only in winter, when the water level drops (coincides with the time of the Dyatlov group's hike). It was in this grotto (as of 1978) that there were objects of the sacrificial Mansi cult. In 2000, archaeologists found here three bear skulls with holes punched in the back, which also testifies to the ritual use of the site.
Difficult Mansi
We add that the image of peace-loving hunters, as the Mansi opponents of the version about their participation in the massacre of tourists in 1959, do not correspond to reality. Back in the 15th century, the Mansi principalities successfully fought against the Russians, attacking their settlements in the Perm Territory. This is from a distant history, but in the 20th century, relations with the northern peoples are not easy to develop. So, among the researchers of the circumstances of the death of the Dyatlov group, a reference to the statement of the then secretary of the Ivdel City Party Committee Prodanov is often mentioned. It is alleged that he reminded the investigation of the case of 1939, when the Mansi drowned a woman-geologist under the Otorten Mountain, tying her hands and feet. Her execution was allegedly also ritual - for violating the boundaries forbidden for women.
It is possible, however, that this is an invention. What can not be said about the so-called Kazym uprisings of 1931-1934 of the Khanty and Nenets against the Soviet regime (they took place on the territory of the current Berezovsky district of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug). Who can guarantee that the investigation into the Mansi in 1959, especially if their sacred places were affected, would not have led to widespread unrest among the nationals on the border of the Sverdlovsk Region and the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug? In this case, the decision to stop the investigation in this direction, provided there is no clear evidence, looks quite logical.
Mansi signs - "Katposy".
However, all of the above is nothing more than a version that needs careful verification. One of many.
“The assumptions that it was not the Mansi who did this are, of course, somewhat strained. What you tell, it all fits together, Kuntsevich admitted at the end of the conversation. And he asked us on February 2 to make a report at the annual conference of researchers of the death of the Dyatlov group.
PS: The editorial staff of Znak.com and the author would like to thank the lawyer of the Verkhoturye law firm Yuri Stepanovich Molvinskikh for the help in preparing the material.
Author: Igor Pushkarev. Photo: Igor Grom