Dyatlov Pass Incident Quotes

I don't remember Sherlock Holmes ever mentioning what you are supposed to do when you've eliminated everything improbable, and nothing is left.

only a few hours and was now struggling to stay alert on this first day of our trip. I left my companions for a moment to explore the station. Fifty-three winters ago, the Dyatlov hikers had nearly missed their evening train leaving

Across both doors was a splash of vandalism in the universal language of Fuck You.

Siberia,” historically, has been less a geographical designation than a state of mind, a looming threat—the frozen hell on earth to which czarist and Communist Russias sent their political undesirables. By this definition, Siberia is not so much a place as it is a hardship to endure, and perhaps that’s what Vladimir means when he says that we are in Siberia. I trudge on.

Good-bye, my friend, good-bye My love, you are in my heart. It was preordained we should part And be reunited by and by. Good-bye: no handshake to endure. Let’s have no sadness—furrowed brow. There’s nothing new in dying now Though living is no newer.

Infrasound had been used by Nazi Germany to stir up anger and strong emotions in crowds assembled to hear Hitler speak.

The hikers themselves would not have damaged their own tent in this way, even by accident, so this seems to suggest one thing: Someone from the outside knifed his way through the tent on that terrible night.

By spring, the suppositional winds were blowing in the direction of a military cover-up. One of the members of the search party who had been on the scene when the remaining bodies were found, had one such theory involving UFOs and temporary insanity.

In his 1973 “literary investigation,” The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: “If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

The 1959 tragedy on Holatchahl’s eastern slope has since become so famous that the area is officially referred to as Dyatlov Pass, in honor of the leader of the hiking group that perished there.

It wasn’t until the late ’90s that partial copies of the case—having been illegally smuggled out of the Sverdlovsk Regional State Archives—revived interest in the Dyatlov tragedy.

Anatoly Gushchin for his 2009 book Murder at the Mountain of the Dead,

While six of the nine had perished of hypothermia, the remaining three had died from brutal injuries, including a skull fracture. According to the case files, one of the victims was missing her tongue. And when the victims’ clothing was tested for contaminants, a radiologist determined certain articles to contain abnormal levels of radiation.

in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon—

Several days after their visit to the Mansi village, Karelin and his friends had witnessed what he called a “strange celestial phenomenon.

look at the damaged tarpaulin. After examining the threads along the mysterious cut, she confirms what investigators have already concluded: It is a deliberate slash made with a knife. The tailor hesitates to speculate beyond that, but for investigators, the meaning is clear. The hikers themselves

During World War II, rationing in Russia had made vinyl prohibitively expensive, and cheap X-ray film became the bootleg music industry’s substitute. After purchasing a used X-ray plate for a ruble or two from a medical facility, music lovers could cut the plate into a disk with scissors or a knife before having it etched with their favorite tunes. Students studying engineering, I was told, particularly excelled in this bootlegging process. But even a thawed Khrushchev regime had its standards to uphold, and in 1959 the government began a crackdown on this illicit music market. One government tactic was to flood record shops with unplayable records, many intended to damage record players. Some of these records included threatening vocals placed in the middle of a recording, which screamed at the unsuspecting listener, “You like rock and roll? Fuck you, anti-Soviet slime!” Eventually the use of bone records declined as replacement technologies, such as magnetic reel-to-reel tape, took over. But until then, bone-record makers were hunted down and sent to the Gulags. Particularly offensive to the Soviet government were bootleggers who reproduced American jazz records, music Stalin had declared a “threat to civilization.” Despite

the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre in which Soviet troops with machine guns mowed down a group of factory protesters—

Wunderkammer or “wonder room”—what the English would call a cabinet of curiosities.

Heiss Island, an island in the northern archipelago of Franz Josef Land, which was over 1,200 miles away from where the hikers had set up camp.

But then “Siberia,” historically, has been less a geographical designation than a state of mind, a looming threat—the frozen hell on earth to which czarist and Communist Russias sent their political undesirables. By this definition, Siberia is not so much a place as it is a hardship to endure, and perhaps that’s what Vladimir means when he says that we are in Siberia.

One government tactic was to flood record shops with unplayable records, many intended to damage record players. Some of these records included threatening vocals placed in the middle of a recording, which screamed at the unsuspecting listener, “You like rock and roll? Fuck you, anti-Soviet slime!

One of the young men stuffed food into a backpack, trying to find the most space-efficient configuration for multiple bags of oats and cans of meat. Nearby, his friend catalogued medicines. Another searched desperately for mislaid footwear.

The two-bedroom apartment Kuntsevich shared with his wife was cozy—the modest space of a couple making do—and they were generous to accommodate us during our stay. We put on rubber slippers at the door and, as the sun rose, Kuntsevich’s petite wife, Olga, set to work fixing an early breakfast. I watched her with an immediate fondness. Beneath her halo of dark hair, she had kind brown eyes and a sweet smile that reminded me of my late grandmother. The likeness made me feel close to this woman with whom I could barely communicate.

But on the morning of our fourth day, our host roused us from our foldout beds with news. In his now familiar patchwork of English, Russian and hand gestures, he explained that he had scheduled a meeting with Tatiana Dyatlov Dyatlova, Igor’s little sister. I was thrilled. At last my quest was starting to seem real.

When Tatiana began to take things into the kitchen, I sensed our time was up. I would later notice a pattern with my interviews. Everything was friendly until it was suddenly over. Before we said good-bye, Tatiana left me with a final thought: “My mother’s intuition was right. In 1994, before she died, all she remembered was that it was her fault.

maxim of Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.