Martin Antonenko
A Fixture
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The Mystery of the Djatlow Pass
On May 15, 1959, the authorities closed the files on the "Mystery of the Djatloqw Pass". This leaves one of the most spectacular criminal cases in the Soviet Union (and probably in the world too!) unsolved.
Nine ski hikers, seven men and two women, were killed in the northern Urals, in the area between the Komi Republic and Sverdlovsk Oblast, on the night of February 1 to February 2, 1959 - apparently violently.
Their names: Igor Djatlow, Sinaida Kolmogorowa, Ljudmila Dubinina, Aleksander Kolewatow, Rustam Slobodin, Jurij Kriwonitshenko, Jurij Doroshenko, Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolle and Semjon Solotarjow.
A tenth member, Jurij Judin...
... survived - but only because he had left the group days earlier due to health problems and was vice versa.
The incident occurred on the eastern slope of Mount Cholat Sjachl (peak: approx. 1100 m). The mountain pass on which the accident took place was later named "Dyatlov Pass" after the group leader Igor Djatlow.
The next photo was taken when the group left and shows Kolmogorowa and Dubinina in the front right. On the left is 23 year old Igor Djatlow ...:
On February 26, the search teams found the abandoned camp on Cholat Sjachl. The tent was badly damaged, but the equipment was obviously intact ...:
A trail of footprints led down the slope to the border of a nearby forest, but after 500 m they were covered by snow. At the edge of the forest - under a large pine tree - the search party found the remains of a fire and the bodies of two of the hikers.
Both were - at temperatures between minus 25 and minus 30 degrees! - barefoot and only had their underwear on. Three more corpses were found between the jaw and the camp, separated from each other at a distance of 300, 480 and 630 meters from the jaw.
Later, on May 4, 1959, the last four corpses were found - under four meters of snow further inside the forest.
Some wore only one shoe, while others wore none at all, just socks. Others carried rags cut off from the clothes of the dead.
In the cameras of the dead, exposed films were found and developed, including the picture of the group leaving above and this picture showing the construction of the tent on the afternoon of February 1st - i.e. immediately before the incidents ...:
During the investigation the following was found:
• Six of the group members died from hypothermia and three from fatal injuries
(Broken skull, broken ribs, extreme blunt violence).
• A female victim was missing her tongue.
• There was no evidence of any other people besides the nine hikers on Cholat Sjachl
or nearby.
• The tent was slit open from the inside and left in a hurry.
• The victims died six to eight hours after their last meal.
• Traces at the camp showed that everyone including those who were injured were found
left the camp on foot on their own.
• Regarding the assumption of an attack by a third party, a doctor stated that the fatal
Injuries to the three corpses could not be produced by human hands, “because
the force of the shocks was too strong and no soft tissues were injured ”.
• Forensic radiation tests showed extreme doses of radioactive radiation on the
Victims' clothing.
The further investigation showed that the hikers woke up abruptly in the middle of the night, probably slit open their tent from the inside, then left it barefoot, lightly dressed and apparently in a panic.
The one they were trying to flee from caught up with three of them, killed them by extreme blunt force, and mutilated a woman.
Six initially survived and then died of hypothermia, two people succeeding in starting a fire before they died and four people must have survived even longer because they ran deeper into the forest and managed to handle the remains of their underwear to be given makeshift clothing by others until they too died of hypothermia.
As if that alone weren't pretty mysterious enough - there were now further inconsistencies:
Despite everything, Soviet investigators recognized “force majeure” and “absence of a guilty party” and closed the files on May 15 - suspiciously quickly and only 11 days after the last four bodies had been found. They were hidden in a secret archive.
It seems obvious that something has been covered up here ...!
Copies of the files did not appear until the 1990s, but crucial pages are missing, so that even today a new investigation should not provide any clarity.
After all these contradictions, here's one thing: Access to the area was blocked for three years after the mysterious incidents.
At around the same time - that is on record and documented! - Another group of hikers observed unusual, orange-colored spheres in the northern sky 50 kilometers away.
Similar "bullets" were observed in the village of Iwdel and adjacent areas by various independent eyewitnesses, the meteorological service and the military between February and March 1959.
It later emerged that the "bullets" were the tail of R-7 ICBMs.
Since then, dozens of books and several films have been made about what might have happened at the Djatlov Pass.
In addition to the usual conspiracy theories (extraterrestrials, secret nuclear weapons tests, etc.), a number of explanatory attempts by solid scientists, journalists and forensic experts have also been published.
But only one theory is able to explain all curiosities conclusively and logically, namely the book "The Dead from the Dyatlov Pass" by the journalist Aleksej Rakitin (Moscow 2014) ...:
And what Rakitin writes sounds crazy enough:
A secret service operation planned by the KGB went terribly wrong at the Djatlow Pass!
Rakitin proves that at least one of the hikers, Solotarjow, was a KGB employee...
... and a second, Georgy (Yuri) Alekseevich Krwioshnitshenko, was a secret member of the KGB...:
Kriwoshnitschenko worked in a top-secret military nuclear plant "Tscheljabinsk-40" ...:
This Kriwoshnitshenko was to hand over radioactive isotope dust from "Tscheljabinsk-40" to agents sent by the CIA on behalf of the KGB as part of a so-called "controlled delivery".
The whole action served to expose a US network of agents in the USSR.
On the part of the KGB, the action went smoothly, the meeting of the two Chekists with the CIA people (at least two, probably three!) During the hike took place - but the Americans, who also feared the exposure of their agents, had sent killers!
The other dead in the group were "collateral damage" in the agents' war - they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and with the wrong companions ...
Whatever the case: What happened on the night of February 2, 1959 at the Djatlov Pass will probably never be cleared up ...
However, in his book, Rakitin succeeds in reconstructing an absolutely seamless sequence of events that demystifies and logically explains every mystery.
On May 15, 1959, the authorities closed the files on the "Mystery of the Djatloqw Pass". This leaves one of the most spectacular criminal cases in the Soviet Union (and probably in the world too!) unsolved.
Nine ski hikers, seven men and two women, were killed in the northern Urals, in the area between the Komi Republic and Sverdlovsk Oblast, on the night of February 1 to February 2, 1959 - apparently violently.
Their names: Igor Djatlow, Sinaida Kolmogorowa, Ljudmila Dubinina, Aleksander Kolewatow, Rustam Slobodin, Jurij Kriwonitshenko, Jurij Doroshenko, Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolle and Semjon Solotarjow.
A tenth member, Jurij Judin...
... survived - but only because he had left the group days earlier due to health problems and was vice versa.
The incident occurred on the eastern slope of Mount Cholat Sjachl (peak: approx. 1100 m). The mountain pass on which the accident took place was later named "Dyatlov Pass" after the group leader Igor Djatlow.
The next photo was taken when the group left and shows Kolmogorowa and Dubinina in the front right. On the left is 23 year old Igor Djatlow ...:
On February 26, the search teams found the abandoned camp on Cholat Sjachl. The tent was badly damaged, but the equipment was obviously intact ...:
A trail of footprints led down the slope to the border of a nearby forest, but after 500 m they were covered by snow. At the edge of the forest - under a large pine tree - the search party found the remains of a fire and the bodies of two of the hikers.
Both were - at temperatures between minus 25 and minus 30 degrees! - barefoot and only had their underwear on. Three more corpses were found between the jaw and the camp, separated from each other at a distance of 300, 480 and 630 meters from the jaw.
Later, on May 4, 1959, the last four corpses were found - under four meters of snow further inside the forest.
Some wore only one shoe, while others wore none at all, just socks. Others carried rags cut off from the clothes of the dead.
In the cameras of the dead, exposed films were found and developed, including the picture of the group leaving above and this picture showing the construction of the tent on the afternoon of February 1st - i.e. immediately before the incidents ...:
During the investigation the following was found:
• Six of the group members died from hypothermia and three from fatal injuries
(Broken skull, broken ribs, extreme blunt violence).
• A female victim was missing her tongue.
• There was no evidence of any other people besides the nine hikers on Cholat Sjachl
or nearby.
• The tent was slit open from the inside and left in a hurry.
• The victims died six to eight hours after their last meal.
• Traces at the camp showed that everyone including those who were injured were found
left the camp on foot on their own.
• Regarding the assumption of an attack by a third party, a doctor stated that the fatal
Injuries to the three corpses could not be produced by human hands, “because
the force of the shocks was too strong and no soft tissues were injured ”.
• Forensic radiation tests showed extreme doses of radioactive radiation on the
Victims' clothing.
The further investigation showed that the hikers woke up abruptly in the middle of the night, probably slit open their tent from the inside, then left it barefoot, lightly dressed and apparently in a panic.
The one they were trying to flee from caught up with three of them, killed them by extreme blunt force, and mutilated a woman.
Six initially survived and then died of hypothermia, two people succeeding in starting a fire before they died and four people must have survived even longer because they ran deeper into the forest and managed to handle the remains of their underwear to be given makeshift clothing by others until they too died of hypothermia.
As if that alone weren't pretty mysterious enough - there were now further inconsistencies:
Despite everything, Soviet investigators recognized “force majeure” and “absence of a guilty party” and closed the files on May 15 - suspiciously quickly and only 11 days after the last four bodies had been found. They were hidden in a secret archive.
It seems obvious that something has been covered up here ...!
Copies of the files did not appear until the 1990s, but crucial pages are missing, so that even today a new investigation should not provide any clarity.
After all these contradictions, here's one thing: Access to the area was blocked for three years after the mysterious incidents.
At around the same time - that is on record and documented! - Another group of hikers observed unusual, orange-colored spheres in the northern sky 50 kilometers away.
Similar "bullets" were observed in the village of Iwdel and adjacent areas by various independent eyewitnesses, the meteorological service and the military between February and March 1959.
It later emerged that the "bullets" were the tail of R-7 ICBMs.
Since then, dozens of books and several films have been made about what might have happened at the Djatlov Pass.
In addition to the usual conspiracy theories (extraterrestrials, secret nuclear weapons tests, etc.), a number of explanatory attempts by solid scientists, journalists and forensic experts have also been published.
But only one theory is able to explain all curiosities conclusively and logically, namely the book "The Dead from the Dyatlov Pass" by the journalist Aleksej Rakitin (Moscow 2014) ...:
And what Rakitin writes sounds crazy enough:
A secret service operation planned by the KGB went terribly wrong at the Djatlow Pass!
Rakitin proves that at least one of the hikers, Solotarjow, was a KGB employee...
... and a second, Georgy (Yuri) Alekseevich Krwioshnitshenko, was a secret member of the KGB...:
Kriwoshnitschenko worked in a top-secret military nuclear plant "Tscheljabinsk-40" ...:
This Kriwoshnitshenko was to hand over radioactive isotope dust from "Tscheljabinsk-40" to agents sent by the CIA on behalf of the KGB as part of a so-called "controlled delivery".
The whole action served to expose a US network of agents in the USSR.
On the part of the KGB, the action went smoothly, the meeting of the two Chekists with the CIA people (at least two, probably three!) During the hike took place - but the Americans, who also feared the exposure of their agents, had sent killers!
The other dead in the group were "collateral damage" in the agents' war - they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and with the wrong companions ...
Whatever the case: What happened on the night of February 2, 1959 at the Djatlov Pass will probably never be cleared up ...
However, in his book, Rakitin succeeds in reconstructing an absolutely seamless sequence of events that demystifies and logically explains every mystery.
