The Dyatlov Pass mystery: In the dead of winter, a group of students disappeared in the Ural Mountains. Their frozen bodies - with inexplicable injuries - were discovered in locations that compounded the puzzle of how they died.
Dyatlov Pass HomepageAccessibility linksSkip to contentAccessibility HelpSign inNotificationsHomeNewsSportWeatheriPlayerSoundsBitesizeCBeebiesCBBCFoodHomeNewsSportReelWorklifeTravelFutureCultureTVWeatherSoundsMore menu Search BBC Search BBC HomeNewsSportWeatheriPlayerSoundsBitesizeCBeebiesCBBCFoodHomeNewsSportReelWorklifeTravelFutureCultureTVWeatherSoundsClose menu MenuDyatlov PassSkiing tripSoviet golden ageDeath mountainWhy they diedLegacyThere were nine... In the dead of winter, a group of students set out on a trek into the Ural Mountains. Their frozen bodies - with inexplicable injuries - were discovered in locations that compounded the puzzle of how they died. The Dyatlov Pass mystery spawned dozens of conspiracy theories, which have endured for 60 years. Lucy Ash traces the group's journey and tells their story through their diaries, photographs and letters. Tatyana‘s mother was busy in the kitchen raising dough to make pies, when the phone rang. So, the 12-year-old schoolgirl picked up the receiver. An unfamiliar male voice asked if there were any adults at home.“I handed the phone to my elder brother,” Tatyana says, “and he was informed that Igor was dead. The next day my parents were summoned to the university and the nightmare began.”Today, Tatyana Perminova is a grandmother in her 70s, but she remembers that evening in 1959 as if it was yesterday. Tatyana’s mother had tried to stop her other brother Igor from going on a cross-country skiing trip with his friends, arguing that he was about to graduate and should get on with his thesis. “But he pleaded with her,” says Tatyana. “Just one last time Mama! Just one last time! And indeed, it was his last time.”Tatyana says that to her dying day, her mother never forgave herself for allowing her 23-year-old son to go on the expedition.“She couldn’t ever come to terms with his loss - especially since it was such a terrible and incomprehensible death.”At the height of the Cold War, in the dead of winter, the group of 10 students led by Igor Dyatlov set out on a trip into the Ural Mountains – the range which divides Europe and Asia. The skiers were all experienced, young sportsmen and women from the Urals Polytechnic Institute in Yekaterinburg, or Sverdlovsk as the city was called in Soviet times, but only one of them would survive.Nine bodies were eventually found on a remote mountain with horrific, inexplicable injuries. Some were semi-clothed, two had missing eyes, and one’s tongue was missing. The Dyatlov Pass mystery, as it’s become known, has spawned countless conspiracy theories over the past six decades. However, in February 2019, the Russian authorities made a surprise announcement - they were reopening the case in an attempt to get to the bottom of it once and for all. The students’ trip was supposed to take three weeks. Igor - who was leading the trip - had promised to send a message to the sports club in Sverdlovsk as soon as his group was safely back at their base around 12 February. At first nobody was surprised they didn’t return on time. They had been delayed before because of bad weather. But by 20 February, their families became worried and raised the alarm. The university sent out a search party of student volunteers. Now in his 80s, Mikhail Sharavin, was one of them.He was flown to the region by helicopter along with the other volunteers. They split into smaller groups and followed some ski tracks which came to an end at the edge of the forest before climbing up the pass.“We had gone about 500 metres when on the left I saw the tent,” says Sharavin. “Part of the canvas was poking out but the rest was covered in snow. I used an ice pick lying nearby to uncover the entrance.” Inside, he and another rescuer found a blanket and some rucksacks lined up neatly and a pile of boots in one corner. There was also the route map, official papers, money, and a flask of alcohol.Next to that, he spotted a plateful of salo - white pork fat - a Slavic delicacy and the sort of high-calorie food that hikers take with them into the mountains. “It was sliced up as if they were getting ready to have supper or something and didn’t have time,” says Sharavin. It was then that he noticed the tent had been slashed open from the inside with a knife. Maybe they were in a desperate hurry to get out, he thought, but why? Then he came across something even stranger.Just outside the tent, he saw frozen footprints made by eight or nine people who were wearing socks, a single boot or were barefoot. The tracks continued for five to 10 metres and then they disappeared. Sharavin and his friend were dumbfounded. They wondered what on earth could have made the students leave their shelter semi-clad when it was at least -20C outside.They immediately skied downhill to tell the others in the search party what they had found. Later, when they sat around the campfire for their evening meal, Sharavin produced the flask of vodka that he’d found in the tent and proposed a toast to the health of the Dyatlov group. “We shared it out between us – there were 11 of us, including the guides,” he recalls. “We were about to drink it when one guy turned to me and said, ‘Best not drink to their health, but to their eternal peace.’” A cross-country skiing tripOn the evening of 23 January 1959, the group of students boarded the sleeper train from Sverdlovsk, just east of the Ural Mountains.To get a better idea of what might have happened to the students, I decide to trace their journey. Today, Yekaterinburg is Russia’s fourth-largest city and was a host city in the football World Cup.On the spot where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered in 1918 after the Revolution, there’s a shiny new Byzantine church. On the other side of the Iset River, a modernist shrine to one of the city’s most-famous sons - Russia’s first President, Boris Yeltsin.But the train to the north seems untouched by time. A grumpy, uniformed conductor peers at my ticket and waves me on board. At one end of our carriage, there’s a battered samovar providing water for much-needed hot tea. As I spread the sheets on my bunk bed, I imagine the students doing the same 60 years ago, and chatting excitedly about their trip. Listen: The Dyatlov Pass mysteryThe party consisted of eight men and two women. Igor, the leader, was a fifth-year radio engineering student and one of the most experienced athletes in the group. There was also Zinaida Kolmogorova, 22, from the same faculty, Yuri Doroshenko, 21, who was studying power economics, Alexander Kolevatov, 24, studying nuclear physics, Yuri Krivonischenko, 23, Rustem Slobodin, 23 and Nicolas Thibeaux-Brignolle 23 - all engineering students. Lyudmila Dubinina, 20, and Yuri Yudin, 22, were both studying economics. Semyon Zolotaryov, a 38-year-old sports instructor who had fought in World War Two, was the odd one out. We can trace the students’ journey, up to a certain point, through their diaries, photographs and letters.Lyudmila Dubinina, the youngest skier, had a reputation as a stern, somewhat humourless member of the Komsomol - the Young Communists. But reading her diary, it sounds as if she was enjoying the adventure and beginning to loosen her neat blonde plaits. “In the train we all sang songs accompanied by a mandolin,” she wrote. “Then out of the blue, this really drunk guy came up to our boys and accused them of stealing a bottle of vodka! He demanded it back and threatened to punch them in the teeth. But he couldn’t prove anything and eventually he got lost. We sang and sang, and no-one even noticed how we slipped into a discussion about love… and kisses in particular.”Zinaida Kolmogorova, outgoing, energetic and one of the university’s most popular students, wrote to her family from the city of Serov, a stop along the route. “We are going camping, ten of us and it’s a great bunch of people. I have all the warm clothes I need, so don’t worry about me. How are you? Has the cow calved yet? I love her milk!”She asked about her father’s health, her mother’s work and urged her younger sisters to study harder at school. Zinaida and Igor sent their last letters home from the post office in a small settlement further along the route called Vizhay.They spent the night there on 25 January, before getting a lift by truck to a logging base called the 41st settlement. The students enjoyed chatting to the lumberjacks around a warm stove and discussing their favourite films. Zina wrote another entry in her diary. “It turns out that this is our last day of civilisation and the last chance me and Lyuda had to sleep in beds. Tonight, we are going to be in a tent.” Since I’m following in the footsteps of the students, I should be on cross-country skis, but I’m taking the easy way out on a snowmobile. It’s an uncomfortable ride because the snow is heavy, and the track is rutted so we can only travel at about 8km (five miles) per hour. I think of the students who were weighed down with their rucksacks as they followed the river valley and the hunting tracks of the Mansi – the indigenous people who live in this area. The group hired a horse-drawn sled to carry their supplies for the last 15 miles to the abandoned North-2 mining settlement. The going was tough, and the strain became too much for one member of the group. “Yura Yudin is leaving us today,” wrote Zinaida in her diary. “His sciatic nerves have flared up again and he has decided to go home. Such a pity. We distributed his load in our backpacks.” The economics student felt so unwell that he returned on the sled. He was sorry to leave his friends but it was a decision that saved his life. The Soviet golden ageIgor Dyatlov and his fellow students belonged to a more optimistic generation than their parents who had suffered so much in the purges of the 1930s and then in WW2. There was a whiff of freedom in the air after decades of repression under Joseph Stalin. The students had access to some foreign literature, music, and films. Lyudmila Dubinina was thrilled to see a romantic Austrian musical about ice skating when the group stopped for the night in Vizhay.“We are extremely lucky!”, she wrote in her diary on 25 January. “Symphonie in Gold was showing at the village club. The image was a bit fuzzy, but that didn’t spoil our pleasure at all. Yurka Krivonischenko, sitting next to me, was smacking his lips and oohing with delight. This is real happiness, and it is hard to put into words. The music is just fabulous! The film really lifted our spirits. Igor was unrecognisable. He tried to dance, and even started singing: 'O Jackie Joe' [a song from the film].” What’s known as “the thaw” under Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev opened up the Soviet Union to some economic reforms, international culture and sports competitions. Above all though, it was the golden age of Soviet science. Tatyana was in awe of her brilliant older brother Igor. She tells me he was determined to get a place at the prestigious Urals Polytechnic Institute. Boris Yeltsin had studied engineering there and became Communist party boss of the region before he became Russia’s first post-Soviet president.Competition for a place was fierce, and on a hot summer day Igor was confronted by a three-man selection panel. As sweat trickled down his face, an unimpressed professor turned to Igor: “If you’re so clever,” he snapped, “why don’t you fix our broken fan?” Unperturbed, Igor asked for a screwdriver. “He took it apart, explained it just needing oiling from time to time and switched it on,” laughs Tatyana. “And of course, he got his place.” Igor was a skilled mechanic but set his sights much higher. It felt as if anything was possible after the USSR launched Sputnik in 1957 – the first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth. The taunting beeps from that tiny aluminium sphere sent a clear political signal - the Soviet Union was hurtling ahead in the space race. Although US President Dwight Eisenhower initially dismissed the Sputnik as “a small ball in the air”, it was soon clear the Americans were on the back-foot. Igor made his own telescope and would climb on the roof of his house with his younger sister and her friend to look at the satellite.“It was so magical,” she recalls. “Everyone believed that after he graduated, Igor would go into cosmonautics. It was a brand new industry, and he wanted to be part of it.“Imagine, the war had just ended, and the country was utterly devastated, everything had to be restored, specialists were needed,” Tatyana adds.“Igor and his friends wanted to study serious subjects – engineering, physics, complex technical topics. Everybody wanted to work hard for their homeland. They were real Soviet people, in the best sense of the word.” Death mountainAfter Yura Yudin left the group, the students continued towards their goal: Mount Ortorten. Our guide, Alexander, says that the mountain’s name means “don’t go there” in the language of the Mansi, the indigenous reindeer herders who have inhabited the region for hundreds of years.But in the 1950s, the Mansi weren’t the only people living here. After travelling for hours on our snowmobiles past icy swamps, fields and forests, we stop at a crossroads. Alexander takes us down a path to a series of badly dilapidated houses, half-buried in snow. It is not an abandoned village, but the remains of lodgings built for prison guards.There was once a network of prison camps in the north Urals known as Ivdel-lag, where 30,000 inmates built roads, cut and processed timber and laboured in makeshift factories. The camp had a reputation as one of the most atrocious and violent in the entire gulag system. Yet few tried to escape because of the remote location and the harsh climate. I stare at the gaping windows and missing roofs and feel a shiver down my spine. Igor Dyatlov’s group skied along the nearby Auspiya River before the final ascent.“There was sun in the morning, now it’s very cold,” Zinaida wrote in one of her last diary entries. “All day long we followed the river. At night we’ll camp on a Mansi trail. I burned my mittens and Yura’s jacket at the camp fire – he cursed me a lot!” Zinaida was once Yura Doroshenko’s girlfriend but he broke things off with her, and a letter to a friend discovered months later, revealed she was nervous about going on the trip with him. “I really don’t know how I’ll feel. It’s really hard, because we are together and yet we’re not together."She had fallen in love with him during a previous expedition when he chased off a brown bear with a geologist’s hammer. On the snow mobiles, we are now on the final leg of our journey, going on a steep track uphill. We pass pine trees and birch trees laden down with snow. I also notice some animal footprints. There are reindeer, wolverines and lynx in these forests. The sky is blue, but our guide warns that the weather is unpredictable and can change at any minute. Further on, we rise above the forest where there are just a few dwarf pines and flinty rocks poking through the snow. We are on the eastern slope of Kholat Syakhyl, which (I’m told) means Mountain of Death. The swirling winds sting our faces and clouds descend quickly, limiting vision to only a few metres.Yet on the night of 1 February, for some inexplicable reason, the students pitched their tent here. Our guide Alexander agrees that it seems like a strangely exposed place to camp. “Maybe they had climbed up this far and didn’t want to lose any height,” he says. He adds that their tent was erected in a shallow pit, which had presumably been dug to shelter the group from the wind.When Mikhail Sharavin from the search party eventually stumbled on the tent, nearly a month later, it was 300 metres from the top of the mountain. Today, Sharavin is an 83-year-old widower living in an isolated, ramshackle house an hour’s drive outside Yekaterinburg. He is skinny, bald, and hollow cheeked but his eyes light up with pride when he tells me how he found the tent.One tent pole was sticking up above the snow and there was a flashlight resting on top of the canvas which remarkably still worked when he switched it on. The following day on 27 February, his worst fears were confirmed when he and some others in the rescue party found the first of the bodies. “We approached a cedar tree,” says Sharavin, “and when we were 20 metres away, we saw a brown spot – it was towards the right of the trunk. And when we got closer we saw two corpses lying there. The hands and the feet were reddish-brown.” One of the two bodies was Yura Doroshenko. Next to him was Yuri Krivonischenko, who played the mandolin and loved telling jokes. He had bitten off a piece of his own knuckle. Both men were stripped to their underwear. Closer to the tree, the search party saw the remains of a camp fire and thought it looked as if somebody had climbed the tree to break off the lower branches to use as kindling.Igor was found next. He was dressed but shoeless and lying face down in the snow, hugging a birch branch. Zinaida Kolmogorova lay nearby and from the position of her body it seemed as if she had been desperately trying to scramble back uphill towards the tent. There was a long bright red bruise on the right-side of her torso, which looked as if it was made by a baton.My guide Alexander tells me, officially, it was stated that the skiers had died of hypothermia and frostbite, but some of the other bodies had serious injuries that had nothing to do with them being too cold.Rustem Slobodin, a long-distance runner and one of the shyest in the group, was found on 5 March with a fractured skull. His body was better dressed than the others found so far. He wore a long sleeve undershirt and sweater, two pairs of trousers, four pairs of socks, and one felt boot on his right foot. His watch had stopped at 08:45. The mystery deepened when the remaining four bodies were found in a ravine in May, nearly three months later, once the snow had melted. Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolle, the son of a French communist repressed by Stalin, had a fractured skull. Aleksandr Kolevatov, the nuclear physics student who had worked at a secret institute in Moscow, had a wound behind his ear and an oddly twisted neck. Lyudmila Dubinina, the ardent young communist and Semyon Zolotaryov, the oldest member of the group, had suffered multiple broken ribs. He had an open wound on the right side of his skull, which exposed the bone. There was another gruesome detail - both had empty eye sockets, and Lyudmila's tongue was missing.Back in Sverdlovsk, Tatyana did not attend her brother Igor’s funeral – her parents thought it would be too traumatic for her.“But I saw a photo of him in the coffin afterwards,” she says. “It was just terrible. He looked completely different to what he looked like before. My mum said that she only recognised him from the gap between his teeth. His hair was grey.”She says that the students’ parents believed that the deaths were somehow related to the military.“What went on up there is hard to say. The families were told, ‘You will never know the truth, so stop asking questions.’ So what could we do? Don’t forget, in those days if they told you to shut up, you would be silent.” Why they diedSince the students’ bodies were found with strange injuries, people could not accept that they had simply perished from hypothermia and immediately questioned what – or who – was responsible. At the time of the deaths, accusing fingers were initially pointed at the only other people living in the region, the Mansi. One of 45 indigenous peoples living in Russia, the Mansi have survived over the centuries by hunting, fishi… truncated (19,183 more characters in archive)