January 24, 2025 • 46 mins
In the bleak Russian winter of 1959, nine experienced hikers led by Igor Dyatlov set out on an expedition. None of them made it back alive.
When their campsite was finally discovered, it told a chilling story: their tent was slashed open, bodies scattered across the snow. The hikers' injuries were as baffling as they were gruesome. One had had his head stoved in. Bits of bone had been driven into his brain. Others were missing their eyes and their tongues.
Had the hikers angered the local Mansi tribespeople? Had they witnessed a secret military experiment? Or had something even more strange and sinister unfolded on Dead Mountain?
For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Trust is at the center of so many cautionary tales.
I've told you about the people who trusted a man
in uniform and allowed him to steal from the city coffers,
and the woman who drove into the desert because she
trusted the sat now ahead of her instincts. Then there
(00:35):
was the celebrity author who trusted photographs of fairies as
proof of their existence. We've had people who trusted in
technology when they shouldn't, and those who didn't trust it
when they should and that's before we get to the doctors,
business leaders, and scammers who abuse the trust put in them.
I'm fascinated by questions of trust, and given that you're
(00:59):
a loyal listener to cautionary tales, I'm guessing you're quite
interested in them too, And that's why I've invited Rachel
Botsman to join me for a special edition of Cautionary Questions.
Rachel is the author of the new audiobook How to
Trust and Be Trusted, So do better to answer your
(01:20):
trust questions. Maybe you'd like to know why we naturally
trust some people but recoil from others. Maybe you're curious
about why so many people are taken in by particular
historical figures, there might be an episode of cautionary tales
that makes you tear your hair out at the gullibility
of those involved. Are we right to be suspicious whenever
(01:44):
a politician says, trust me? Can being too distrustful be
as dangerous as being too trusting? Whatever your query, you
can trust Rachel to have the answers, So send them
two tales at Pushkin dot FM. That's t a l
e s at Pushkin dot FM. To Soviet officials, it
(02:13):
was simply height one zero seventy nine. But the indigenous
people of the Urals knew the peak by a different name.
The Manse called it holat Seakle Dead Mountain. There's an
equally bleak mancy name for a ridge just to the
(02:34):
north mount or Tauton. Or Tauton means don't go there.
But engineering student igord Yatlov was going there, and in
the freezing depths of winter no less, he was cheerfully
planning to ski across two hundred miles of Mansei territory,
(02:56):
taking a route that even in January nineteen fifty nine,
no Russian had likely traversed before. He wouldn't be going
alone of course to accompany him on the sixteen day trek,
Dyatlov recruited friends from the Ural Polytechnic Institute, both current
students and recent graduates. They were a gleeful bunch. The
(03:20):
joker of the pack was Georgi Krivonishenko, newly employed at
a top secret nuclear facility. His real love was to
sing and play his mandolin. En route to the mountains,
his exuberance nearly landed him in a police cell. He
had burst into raucous song at a train station. Street performers,
(03:42):
it turns out, were not welcome. Senaida Kolmogorova might have
been glad of a cheery song, for she was nursing
a broken heart. We're not even talking, she explained, not
saying hello to each other. He's already going everywhere with
(04:04):
another girl. The object of her spurned affection was Yuri Doroshenko,
and he had signed up for the trek too. Her
plan was to stay as far from her former lover
as possible, no small feat in the cramped train carriages,
remote cabins, and the single tent that would be their
(04:28):
home for the duration of the trip. Zinaida was resigned
to arguments flaring, though not necessarily stemming from affairs of
the heart. We will quarrel, she predicted. After all, Kleevatov
is with us quarrelsome Alexander Kolevatov was a nuclear physicist
(04:52):
who just landed a plum job in far away Moscow.
Maybe it was this good fortune that caused him to
laud it over his university friends. He'd have found it
hard to pick a fight with Rustem Slobodin, of course,
them was a long distance runner and perhaps the epitome
(05:12):
of that lonely pursuit. He was a man of so
few words that he had even forgotten to bid farewell
to his family before heading off to the wilderness. Nikolai
t beau Brugnol was more outgoing in nature, often adopting
the role of mentor. On previous trips, he had taken
(05:33):
younger adventurers under his wing, teaching them to light fires
and allowing them glimpses of his copy of a titillating
but educational tome the sexual Question. The expedition members were
all achingly young, but at twenty Yurdmilla Dumina was the
(05:57):
baby of the group, and while she may have looked
like a child she certainly had an inner steel. She
had been accidentally shot on a recent hike, and yet
had hobbled home and undeterred, signed up to go out again.
I say they were all young, but just before they
(06:17):
departed their university, the Ural Polytechnic Institute insisted on a
late addition. At thirty seven, Semyon Zola Tariov was far
older than Igor Yatlov and the rest, and for many
years had served in the Soviet Army. Now a civilian,
(06:38):
he was odd man out in the fresh Faced party,
a mustachioed interloper who threatened group cohesion and might challenge
Yatlov's leadership. At first, no one wanted him in the group,
because he's a complete stranger, wrote Yudmiller in her diary.
But then we got over it, and he's coming. We
(07:00):
couldn't just refuse to take him. So the party set
off with this stranger in tow. After the sleeper train,
they took a bus, then a truck, and finally piled
onto a horse drawn sleigh. Each leg of the journey
past grim prison goulags, abandoned mines, and remote logging camps
(07:26):
took them further from civilization and closer to Dead Mountain.
They promised the Polytechnic Institute they'd send a telegram the
moment they completed their trek and reached safety on the
other side. Of course, no telegram ever arrived. I'm Tim Harford,
(07:53):
and you're listening to another cautionary tale. When search parties
(08:22):
reached holat Seakle, tracks in the snow led them to
a tent just short of the summit. Mikhail Charavin was
among the student volunteers who had been sent to find
the Yatlov expedition. Part of the canvas was poking out,
Mikaiele said, but the rest was covered in snow. They
(08:43):
used an ice pit lying nearby to uncover the entrance.
Everything inside was neat and orderly. The skier's boots were
lined up, wood was stacked for the stove, and Mikail
saw that a plate of pork fat, a calorific treat,
had been prepared. It was sliced up, as if they
(09:05):
were getting ready to have supper. He said, but what
are the diners? Worryingly, there was a great slash in
the canvas shelter outside. Footprints stretched out, then disappeared. The
prince showed that one of Dyatlov's party had pulled on
(09:26):
a single boot, but the others had fled in just
their socks or, more horrifyingly, barefoot. Frostbite in such temperatures
would have taken hold in mere minutes. It dawned on
the student volunteers that they were unlikely to find their
(09:47):
comrades alive. The first bodies spotted belonged to mandolin playing
joker Georgi and Zeneida's ex boyfriend Yuri. They lay in
their underwear under a cedar tree on the edge of
a forest. Beside them was a burned out campfire. The
(10:10):
trunk of the tree told a piteous story. Branches a
dozen or so feet from the ground had been torn away,
and the bark was dotted with shreds of clothing and
human skin. The dead bodies bore the marks of multiple
injuries and burns. A hunk of flesh was discovered in
(10:33):
Georgi's mouth. It was part of his own hand. The
expedition leader, igord Yatlov, was found next, struck down, making
his way from the cedar tree back up towards their tent.
With him on this climb was Yuri's jilted girlfriends in ida.
(10:54):
These bodies were semi clad and pocked with injuries. Rescuer
Mikhail Sharavin later told the BBC he thought the bruises
resembled the results of a beating. The long distance runner
Rustam had made it closer to the tent before he'd died.
He was more warmly dressed than his compatriots, wearing a sweater,
(11:17):
two pairs of pants, and several layers of socks. But
another detail was more striking to the volunteers. Rustem had
a fractured skull. Of the remaining four skiers, there was
no trace. Though young, the adventurers were no novices in
(11:39):
the mountains, no strangers to the hazards, they would have
known that venturing out of their tent, especially barefoot and
in their underwear, would prove fatal. So what could have
prompted them to flee warmth and safety for the dark,
sub zero hell outside? And did they flee by choice?
(12:03):
Or were they driven from the shelter? Had a violent
internal dispute broken out amongst the group, or were intruders
to blame? Such foul play could not be ruled out,
so the corpses were gathered up and their belongings were
packed into a helicopter and flown to a police station
(12:25):
for careful examination. In spring, Hollat Searcle gave up the
last of its dead. A man sea hunter and his
dog made the grizzly find. Receding snow revealed scraps of clothing,
(12:48):
torn pants and half a sweater. It was the entrance
to a den, dug into a snow drift. Inside with
the four missing skiers. Nikolai, the owner of the risque
sex guide, had had his head stoved in. Bits of
(13:09):
were driven into his brain. The others, too, were smashed
and battered. There were broken ribs and awful internal injuries. Semyon,
the army veteran and last minute addition to the party,
was there, and so was lud Miller, the young woman
who had been so opposed to his inclusion on the trip. Chillingly,
(13:32):
the eye sockets of Semyon's corpse were empty. Lud Miller's
eyes were missing too, as was her tongue. Something had
removed them, something or someone. Cautionary tales will return in
(13:54):
a moment. How had the Dyatlov expedition gone so disastrously wrong?
How had such a joyous, lusty band of explorers ended
up naked, burned, and broken in the snow. No simple
(14:16):
explanation was forthcoming, so to some Russians the Yatlov saga
became as rich a seam of speculation as the assassination
of JFK was in the West. In fact, the conspiracy
theories are far weirder and far wilder than those surrounding JFK.
(14:37):
How they sprang up and multiplied is instructive. It has
echoes of the conspiratorial thinking that seems increasingly common today.
Outlandish theories seem to thrive at times of unsettling change,
for instance, following assassinations or terrorist attacks. The distrust deepens
(14:59):
when governments have been found to have misled or failed citizens,
and conspiracy theories could be supercharged by those seeking to
benefit from the suspicion and the cynicism they spread. There's
money to be made by media personalities, influencers, even podcasters
who trade in wild stories. But as we'll see, it
(15:23):
can be the politicians themselves, sometimes at the fringe and
sometimes at the center of power, who use conspiracy thinking
to bolster their position. This isn't just a story about
the destruction of the Diatlov expedition in nineteen fifty nine.
It's a story about the world we live in right now.
(15:45):
So to unpick the many conspiracies about the deaths on
Dead Mountain, let's start with one root cause, the politics
of the time. While the temperatures dropped far below freezing
on hollat Siakle in the winter of nineteen fifty nine, metaphorically,
(16:07):
the Soviet Union was enjoying us thor. The prison camps
that Dyatlov's party passed on the way to the mountains
were being emptied of dissidents and other politically inconvenient citizens.
Under Stalin's rule, the Gulag population had swelled. He saw
traitors everywhere and ordered them rounded up, along with their families, friends,
(16:31):
friends of friends, neighbours. Cold malnutrition and the executioner's bullet
carried off millions. But then Stalin suffered a cerebral hemorrhage,
lay for three days on a sofa, and died, with
(16:51):
his iron grip loosened. A reckoning took place. Stalin was
a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious, so said Nikita Khrushchev,
an underling of the Soviet dictator, now angling to replace him.
Everywhere and in everything, he saw enemies, two faces and spies.
(17:17):
Khrushchev was addressing a closed meeting of the elite of
the Communist Party when Stalin said that one or another
should be arrested. It was necessary to accept on faith
that he was an enemy of the people. Khrushchev now
said this faith was misplaced and that evidence had been
largely falsified. He painted a picture of Stalin as a
(17:41):
ruler as deluded as he was cruel. Stalin was reluctant
to consider life's realities, complained Khrushchev. Did Stalin's position rest
on data of any sort whatever, of course, not facts
and figures did not interest him. If Stalin said anything,
(18:02):
it meant it was so to our modern ears, leader,
peddling in conspiracies, blaming their own failings on plotters, and
making up alternative facts doesn't sound that far fetched. But
to delegates listening to Comrad Khrushchev, the revelations about Stalin's
(18:24):
rule came with thunderclap surprise. Some audience members were taken ill,
others just held their head in their hands. Distraught, it said,
two delegates went home and killed themselves. Soviet citizens suddenly
(18:45):
had to make sense of a past very different to
the one they'd believed in, where the innocent had been
found guilty, where Stalin had been an abuser rather than
a protector, Where the clocks could indeed be made to
strike thirteen. A top seed turvy world where nothing was
as it seemed, a world where the strange deaths of
(19:08):
nine experienced adventurers just couldn't have an innocent explanation, could it?
To call Holat seacle dead mountain probably misses The mark
Holat can also be translated as quiet or barren in Mancy.
(19:33):
For these hunting people, height one zero seventy nine wasn't
worth the climb because there was too little game to
be caught there. Not for any more sinister reason, but
the Manci were the only people in the vicinity of
the mountain in the depths of winter nineteen fifty nine,
(19:54):
so suspicion for the hiker's deaths fell on them, and
maybe they had a motive. Stalin's terror hadn't spared these
semi nomadic tribes. Their lands had been taken by miners
and loggers, their religious rights had been suppressed, and their
children were gathered up and confined in Russian speaking boarding
(20:18):
schools in a few decades. A proud way of life
honed over centuries had been ignominiously disrupted. Had the Diatlov
expedition been a humiliation too far for the Nanci? Had
the Soviet students entered sacred land or stumbled across some
(20:40):
illegal ceremony and paid with their lives. The Soviet interrogators
descended on the local tribespeople to find out. Many people
around here were arrested. Valerie an Yamov told the BBC
reporter Lucy Ash Valerie's father had joined the search effort
(21:01):
back in nineteen fifty nine, only to find himself amongst
those treated not as rescuers murder suspects. They said that
the secret police tortured them. They were certainly interrogated for weeks,
but eventually the investigators were satisfied, and other evidence emerged,
(21:24):
also pointing suspicion away from the Manci. The ragged clothes
found in the snow den had been examined. They seemed
to have been torn or cut off the bodies of
the other skiers, but further analysis of the fabric revealed
something else. These rags were radio active. For all that
(21:52):
Nikita Krushchev mocked Stalin's obsession with spies and foreign plots.
The Cold War with the West ramped up under his rule.
In nineteen fifty seven, the launch of the Revolutionary Next
satellite delighted Soviet citizens but struck fear into the hearts
(22:14):
of citizens in the free world. The twenty one inch
metal sphere did little but transmit a bleeping signal back
to Earth. But what if it could rain down something
more deadly? Khrushchev couldn't help boasting about his country's lead
in rocket and missile technology, prompting the Americans to hurriedly
(22:37):
increase their spending to close the gap. The result a
fevered arms race, and a key center of Soviet military
research was in the Urals. The closed city of Chelyabinsk
forty contained a plant making plutonium for atomic bombs, and
(22:57):
it was there that Mandolin playing Geyorgi Criminalshenko worked. Could
this top secret job have had anything to do with
his death? Was the radioactive residue evidence that Georgi had
smuggled something out of his workplace, something secret, something that
(23:21):
people would kill to possess or kill to reclaim. A
young Soviet prosecutor lev Ivanov had so far diligently chased
all lines of inquiry in the mysterious deaths of the skiers.
He'd gathered witness statements, ordered toxicology reports, and examined the tent,
(23:44):
But all of a sudden, Ivanov halted his investigations, saying
that homicide was no longer suspected. His report ended, thus
it should be concluded that the cause of the hiker's
demise was an overwhelming force which they were not able
(24:04):
to overcome. Ivanov's file then locked up, and the exhibits
he had gathered were allowed to molder away. The families
of the dead, fearing a cover up, protested exactly what
overwhelming force had killed their children. They wrote to Nikita
(24:27):
Krushchev asking that he reopened the case, but Khrushchev faced
far bigger problems. Within a few short years, he was
swept from power and replaced by a regime that was
less tolerant of dissent. Details of what happened on Dead
Mountain would not be forthcoming, and public speculation about the
(24:52):
fate of the expedition was definitely not welcome. It wasn't
until nineteen ninety that lev Ivanov then retired as a
prosecutor revealed why it shelved the investigation. His superiors had
warned him off and then transferred him to Kazakhstan. Had
(25:19):
Ivanov come too close to naming the overwhelming force that
had killed the trekkers. He certainly had an unnerving theory
to explain the deaths, which he expounded in an article
entitled The Enigma of the Fireballs. We found that some
(25:42):
young pine trees at the edge of the forest had burnmarks.
To Ivanov, these scorch marks seemed peculiar. He imagined that
they could only have been made by some heat ray.
Whoever was directing this deadly beam had eventually got the
(26:02):
unfortunate skiers in their sights and fired. Ivanov was comfortable
publishing The Enigma of the Fireballs in nineteen ninety because
by then the Soviet system that had stifled debate for
so long was itself all but dead, and as the
(26:27):
Iron Curtain rusted away, the doors to the secret state
archives began to unlock. Serious historians rejoiced, but so too
did amateur salutes titillated by Ivanov's stories of mysterious mountaintop
death rays. The fireballs cited by Ivanov had emanated from
(26:50):
a UFO. Some claimed or were part of a new
Soviet weapons system being tested away from prying eyes. Other
theories pointed to murder. The skiers had witnessed a secret
military operation and been silenced. Others suggested that one or
(27:12):
more of the party were spies, and that the whole
group had been executed by the Soviet KGB or the
American CIA. If I were being charitable, I might just
say that there are holes in many of these theories.
The unifying theme to them all is that the truth
(27:33):
is known to the authorities, but is being suppressed. If
only we could somehow reconstruct the expedition's final hours, well
in a way we can. The trekkers carried cameras, and
in two thousand and nine researchers gained access to the
(27:54):
roles of film they'd shot. In black and white, we
can see mustachioed semons Ala Tardiov, jugged Georgi Krivonishenko, beaming,
Ludmilla Domina, photograph after photograph after photograph, but then in
(28:14):
one an eerie, distant figure, blurry and out of focus.
It's perhaps too tall and too broad to be any
of the skiers, who could it be had their killer
unwittingly been caught on camera. Cautionary tales will be right back.
(28:49):
The Yatlov party filled seventeen reels of film with photographs.
There are action shots of skiing and fun group portraits
for the youngsters posing cheerfully for the camera, but the
reel attributed to Nikolai tbau Brignol, is a series of
rather dull long shots of trees and snow. Shot thirteen
(29:13):
appears to be a selfie done the old fashioned way
with a timer. Nikolay goofs surround in a snow drift.
It's not brilliantly framed. Shot fourteen isn't much better. In
the next image, Nikolay is at least in the middle
of the frame playfully munching on a ball of snow.
In frame sixteen he's now standing, But then comes the
(29:39):
very final image on the reel. Only the trees and
the foreground are in focus, their lower branches weighed down
with snow. Most everything else is white. But then in
the middle distance drawing the eye from behind a pine
(30:00):
lurches a hunched, black, almost inhuman figure. The Yetti lives
in the urals, wrote one of the party soon after
the photo was taken a yetti. The arrival of a
towering eight foot beast, all fangs and claws might well
(30:25):
have encouraged the skiers to dash out of their shelter
and run pale mele down the mountain, and had it
caught up with them, such a creature could have inflicted
those terrible injuries smashed skulls, crushed torsos, torn flesh. In
(30:50):
twenty thirteen, the respected American explorer Mike Lebecki retraced the
expedition route in the hopes of unraveling the mystery. I
know if I went missing, he said, I'd want my
family to know what happened to me. He was making
a documentary for the Discovery Channel, with the working assumption
(31:13):
being that a forest dwelling monster slaughtered the Diatlov group.
Lebecky ventured out onto Hollat Siakle in the dead of
night in his search for this Russian yetti. I did
hear something strange, the explorer said, I do believe it's
(31:35):
possible that he YETI exists. The Discovery Channel film makes
much of the supposed blurry image of a monster captured
by Nikolai Tibau Buignol when I saw this photo, this
was it. It was like bam Lebecky told viewers, I
can't tell how big it is, but it could be
(31:57):
eight feet tall. Someone not padding out a ninety minute
documentary might look at the photo and tell you exactly
how the figure is. It's man sized. The supposed Russian
Yeti in the photo is almost certainly Nikolai messing around
(32:19):
with the time of feature on his camera. And as
for the scribbled note the Yeti lives in the urals, well,
it was part of a jokey pamphlet the skiers compiled
to keep their spirits up. It also reported that two
of the highly educated scientists in the group had set
a new world record for getting the camp stove burning
(32:42):
one hour, two minutes and twenty seven point four seconds.
A Yeti didn't kill the Skiers any more than the
death ray of a ufoded. But to understand why these
deaths became such a focus for wild conspiracy theories, we
(33:05):
might want to consider how the very notion of truth
has been put in the deep freeze in Russia. Over
the years. Khrushchev had forced Soviet citizens to open their
eyes to the reality of Stalin's cruel and paranoid rule.
But after Khrushchev came laying in Brezhnev. While not as
(33:25):
violent as Stalin, Brezhnev also favored repression and secrecy. Under him,
Soviet citizens were told to rejoice in their communist system
while watching it crumble before their very eyes. If their
rulers were willing to lie so brazenly about shortages of
(33:45):
food in the shops, what else were they hiding. When
the Soviet Union finally did fall apart, yet another challenge
to objective reality arose, this time in the form of
Vladimir Putin. One feature of Putin's twenty five year rule
(34:05):
is his novel use of propaganda. Generations of propagandists have
abused the truth by massaging facts and inventing lies to
make the public believe their version of events. Under Putin,
propaganda is deployed to make its audience start to doubt
that the truth exists at all. Researchers have called this
(34:28):
modern Russian propaganda model the fire hose of falsehoods, and
it sprays out partial, misleading, or downright made up stories
in a vast torrent and in all directions government statements,
TV broadcasts, online articles, tweets, reels, posts, and comment after
(34:49):
comment after comment from bots all amplifier constant and confusing
commentary on world events, from wars through vaccines to election results.
The fire hose of falsehoods is relentless, inconsistent, and confusing.
(35:10):
But it's also visceral and entertaining. It's hard not to
be drawn in. Evolution has honed the human brain to
pay attention to deadly threats, and so we're suckers for
vivid stories warning of shadowy figures out to get us.
But the specific intention of the fire hose is not
(35:32):
to make us believe in one conspiracy. It's just to
so doubt that any voice can be trusted, not elected officials,
not established experts, not the mainstream media, not even your
fellow citizens. If everyone is lying to you and every
institution is untrustworthy, is it such a stretch to believe
(35:55):
that officialdom is hiding the truth that d'yatlov and his
fellow skiers were killed by a secret weapon, a UFO
or even a yetti. Solving the d'atlov mystery is an
(36:16):
enormous task, which is far beyond the scope of this paper,
so wrote two Swiss researchers in a twenty twenty one
article in the journal Nature, but nevertheless they had an idea.
Their area of expertise avalanches. The possibility that a mass
(36:39):
of snow rushing down holl at Siakle had struck the
skier's tent, prompting them to flee had long been discounted.
The slope on which d'atlov had supposedly camped was too
gentle to be an avalanche zone, and the Mansi said
they'd never witnessed a snow slip there before. But working
(37:00):
on new information, the Swiss researchers Johann Golm and Alexander
Puzrin concluded that the Datlov group could indeed have set
off a so called slab avalanche. First, Dyatlov, perhaps buffeted
by high winds, was somewhat off his intended route. He
(37:22):
was higher up Holatsiakle than had planned, and on a
slope theoretically just steep enough to pose an avalanche risk,
and crucially, to create a level floor for their tent
and protect it from the wind, the team dug out
a shelf in the snow. They packed down the ice
beneath their feet laid out a carpet of skis and
(37:46):
turned in for the night. But their excavations had destabilized
the snow uphill of them, and as they rested inside
the tent, the wind outside relentlessly added the new snow
to this wall above the flimsy canvas structure, until at
last the drift collapsed. The avalanche might have been modest,
(38:13):
but even that weight of snow could have inflicted injuries
on those inside the tent, and encouraged them to cut
themselves free and seek safety down the mountain, fearing that
a second, much larger avalanche was imminent. Dazed in a
state of undress and whipped by a wicked, freezing wind,
(38:35):
Benign stumbled away, first making a fire from tree branches
and getting so close to the flames that their meager
clothes and frozen flesh were scorched. Yury and Gyorgy succumbed
to the cold first, with Georgy madly gnawing at his
(38:56):
own hand as frostbite took hold. The survivors then split up,
with three stumbling back against the wind for the tent
and four hoping to dig a shelter in the snow.
The spot they picked for that shelter couldn't have been worse.
Situated in a ravine above a still running stream, the
(39:19):
diggers appeared to have caused a tunnel cut by the
flowing water to collapse. Tons of snow then crushed four
hikerds against the stony riverbed. Decomposition or the feeding of
animals accounts for the damage to the faces of young
Jurdmiller and the old man of the group, Semyon, and
(39:44):
as for the radio activity detected on their clothes. Though
not openly discussed in nineteen fifty nine, the Soviet nuclear
industry in the Urals did not have a stellar safety record.
Georgi had probably been contaminated thanks to a recent explosion
at his nuclear plant that rivaled the much more famous
(40:08):
Chernobyl disaster. It's no surprise that his clothes set off
the chirping of a Geiger counter. This explanation of what
happened on Holatsiakol in January nineteen fifty nine seems sane
(40:30):
and sad. Sane because the avalanche experts supplied mathematical formulas
combining things like sheer stress and snow dynamic friction values
to prove that a slab avalanche could have happened that night.
You can't apply such scientific rigor to say the Russian
(40:51):
YETI theory and sad because it was all such bad luck.
Had Dyatlov kept closer to his planned route, they'd have
avoided the avalanche prone slope, and ironically, even in that
same spot, a less experienced team might not have feared
a second avalanche and felt such an urgency to flee
(41:14):
the tent. Staying inside the semi collapsed shelter might not
have been fun, but it wouldn't be fatal. After doing
exactly the right thing to survive a big avalanche, d'atlov
clearly realized his mistake, but lost his race against the
cold to make it back to the tent. If you
(41:43):
ever go to Hollat Siakle, and many do visit it
as a spooky tourist attraction, you'll see that the path
has been renamed in the team leader's honor. It's now
Dyatlov Pass. The memories of the dead are also kept
alive by a foundation established by their friends and relatives
(42:05):
and those simply intrigued by the events of that night.
The foundation takes a dim view of the avalanche theory,
believing instead that some still secret weapons test killed the hikers,
and who can really blame them? The Soviet unions certainly
tried to keep bigger secrets, and for all their formulas,
(42:29):
What the two guys in Switzerland know about snow movements
on a mountain six decades ago. Nothing's ever that simple
or straightforward, is it. Vladimir Putin's fire hose of falsehoods
has been successfully exported around the world. Some of that
(42:50):
torrent of content still comes from inside Russia, that much
is now produced in America and the UK too. Its
effect is not to make us favor one form of
government over another, communism over capitalism, democracy over autocracy, but
to render us impotent, indecisive, and distrustful in the face
(43:12):
of events. It wants us to believe only that everything
is rigged, that no one is decent or trustworthy, and
that all mysteries must be a conspiracy. We're becoming cynics.
Authoritarian leaders love it, says the Stanford psychologist Jamiel Zaki.
(43:34):
When people don't trust Sure, they might not trust the
authoritarian leader, but they also don't trust each other enough
to get together and do anything about it. The nine
deaths on Holatsiakle were very nearly ten student Yuri Yudin
(44:00):
was part of the expedition until nerve pain prompted him
to abandon the trek and head home. As an old man,
he was asked what he thought had killed his friends.
If they really were killed by a natural force, then
there would be no secret, he said, And we wouldn't
(44:21):
be talking about it all these years on. And logic
like that is music to the conspiracy peddler's ears. For
(44:53):
a full list of our sources, see the show notes
at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly.
It's produced by Alice Fines and Marilyn tr us The
sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.
(45:14):
Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio.
Bend A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The show features the
voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah
Jupp Messeiamnroe, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
(45:35):
Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan,
Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios in London
by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember
to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference
(45:57):
to us and if you want to hear the show,
add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show
page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash
plus do
Pushkin. Trust is at the center of so many cautionary tales.
I've told you about the people who trusted a man
in uniform and allowed him to steal from the city coffers,
and the woman who drove into the desert because she
trusted the sat now ahead of her instincts. Then there
(00:35):
was the celebrity author who trusted photographs of fairies as
proof of their existence. We've had people who trusted in
technology when they shouldn't, and those who didn't trust it
when they should and that's before we get to the doctors,
business leaders, and scammers who abuse the trust put in them.
I'm fascinated by questions of trust, and given that you're
(00:59):
a loyal listener to cautionary tales, I'm guessing you're quite
interested in them too, And that's why I've invited Rachel
Botsman to join me for a special edition of Cautionary Questions.
Rachel is the author of the new audiobook How to
Trust and Be Trusted, So do better to answer your
(01:20):
trust questions. Maybe you'd like to know why we naturally
trust some people but recoil from others. Maybe you're curious
about why so many people are taken in by particular
historical figures, there might be an episode of cautionary tales
that makes you tear your hair out at the gullibility
of those involved. Are we right to be suspicious whenever
(01:44):
a politician says, trust me? Can being too distrustful be
as dangerous as being too trusting? Whatever your query, you
can trust Rachel to have the answers, So send them
two tales at Pushkin dot FM. That's t a l
e s at Pushkin dot FM. To Soviet officials, it
(02:13):
was simply height one zero seventy nine. But the indigenous
people of the Urals knew the peak by a different name.
The Manse called it holat Seakle Dead Mountain. There's an
equally bleak mancy name for a ridge just to the
(02:34):
north mount or Tauton. Or Tauton means don't go there.
But engineering student igord Yatlov was going there, and in
the freezing depths of winter no less, he was cheerfully
planning to ski across two hundred miles of Mansei territory,
(02:56):
taking a route that even in January nineteen fifty nine,
no Russian had likely traversed before. He wouldn't be going
alone of course to accompany him on the sixteen day trek,
Dyatlov recruited friends from the Ural Polytechnic Institute, both current
students and recent graduates. They were a gleeful bunch. The
(03:20):
joker of the pack was Georgi Krivonishenko, newly employed at
a top secret nuclear facility. His real love was to
sing and play his mandolin. En route to the mountains,
his exuberance nearly landed him in a police cell. He
had burst into raucous song at a train station. Street performers,
(03:42):
it turns out, were not welcome. Senaida Kolmogorova might have
been glad of a cheery song, for she was nursing
a broken heart. We're not even talking, she explained, not
saying hello to each other. He's already going everywhere with
(04:04):
another girl. The object of her spurned affection was Yuri Doroshenko,
and he had signed up for the trek too. Her
plan was to stay as far from her former lover
as possible, no small feat in the cramped train carriages,
remote cabins, and the single tent that would be their
(04:28):
home for the duration of the trip. Zinaida was resigned
to arguments flaring, though not necessarily stemming from affairs of
the heart. We will quarrel, she predicted. After all, Kleevatov
is with us quarrelsome Alexander Kolevatov was a nuclear physicist
(04:52):
who just landed a plum job in far away Moscow.
Maybe it was this good fortune that caused him to
laud it over his university friends. He'd have found it
hard to pick a fight with Rustem Slobodin, of course,
them was a long distance runner and perhaps the epitome
(05:12):
of that lonely pursuit. He was a man of so
few words that he had even forgotten to bid farewell
to his family before heading off to the wilderness. Nikolai
t beau Brugnol was more outgoing in nature, often adopting
the role of mentor. On previous trips, he had taken
(05:33):
younger adventurers under his wing, teaching them to light fires
and allowing them glimpses of his copy of a titillating
but educational tome the sexual Question. The expedition members were
all achingly young, but at twenty Yurdmilla Dumina was the
(05:57):
baby of the group, and while she may have looked
like a child she certainly had an inner steel. She
had been accidentally shot on a recent hike, and yet
had hobbled home and undeterred, signed up to go out again.
I say they were all young, but just before they
(06:17):
departed their university, the Ural Polytechnic Institute insisted on a
late addition. At thirty seven, Semyon Zola Tariov was far
older than Igor Yatlov and the rest, and for many
years had served in the Soviet Army. Now a civilian,
(06:38):
he was odd man out in the fresh Faced party,
a mustachioed interloper who threatened group cohesion and might challenge
Yatlov's leadership. At first, no one wanted him in the group,
because he's a complete stranger, wrote Yudmiller in her diary.
But then we got over it, and he's coming. We
(07:00):
couldn't just refuse to take him. So the party set
off with this stranger in tow. After the sleeper train,
they took a bus, then a truck, and finally piled
onto a horse drawn sleigh. Each leg of the journey
past grim prison goulags, abandoned mines, and remote logging camps
(07:26):
took them further from civilization and closer to Dead Mountain.
They promised the Polytechnic Institute they'd send a telegram the
moment they completed their trek and reached safety on the
other side. Of course, no telegram ever arrived. I'm Tim Harford,
(07:53):
and you're listening to another cautionary tale. When search parties
(08:22):
reached holat Seakle, tracks in the snow led them to
a tent just short of the summit. Mikhail Charavin was
among the student volunteers who had been sent to find
the Yatlov expedition. Part of the canvas was poking out,
Mikaiele said, but the rest was covered in snow. They
(08:43):
used an ice pit lying nearby to uncover the entrance.
Everything inside was neat and orderly. The skier's boots were
lined up, wood was stacked for the stove, and Mikail
saw that a plate of pork fat, a calorific treat,
had been prepared. It was sliced up, as if they
(09:05):
were getting ready to have supper. He said, but what
are the diners? Worryingly, there was a great slash in
the canvas shelter outside. Footprints stretched out, then disappeared. The
prince showed that one of Dyatlov's party had pulled on
(09:26):
a single boot, but the others had fled in just
their socks or, more horrifyingly, barefoot. Frostbite in such temperatures
would have taken hold in mere minutes. It dawned on
the student volunteers that they were unlikely to find their
(09:47):
comrades alive. The first bodies spotted belonged to mandolin playing
joker Georgi and Zeneida's ex boyfriend Yuri. They lay in
their underwear under a cedar tree on the edge of
a forest. Beside them was a burned out campfire. The
(10:10):
trunk of the tree told a piteous story. Branches a
dozen or so feet from the ground had been torn away,
and the bark was dotted with shreds of clothing and
human skin. The dead bodies bore the marks of multiple
injuries and burns. A hunk of flesh was discovered in
(10:33):
Georgi's mouth. It was part of his own hand. The
expedition leader, igord Yatlov, was found next, struck down, making
his way from the cedar tree back up towards their tent.
With him on this climb was Yuri's jilted girlfriends in ida.
(10:54):
These bodies were semi clad and pocked with injuries. Rescuer
Mikhail Sharavin later told the BBC he thought the bruises
resembled the results of a beating. The long distance runner
Rustam had made it closer to the tent before he'd died.
He was more warmly dressed than his compatriots, wearing a sweater,
(11:17):
two pairs of pants, and several layers of socks. But
another detail was more striking to the volunteers. Rustem had
a fractured skull. Of the remaining four skiers, there was
no trace. Though young, the adventurers were no novices in
(11:39):
the mountains, no strangers to the hazards, they would have
known that venturing out of their tent, especially barefoot and
in their underwear, would prove fatal. So what could have
prompted them to flee warmth and safety for the dark,
sub zero hell outside? And did they flee by choice?
(12:03):
Or were they driven from the shelter? Had a violent
internal dispute broken out amongst the group, or were intruders
to blame? Such foul play could not be ruled out,
so the corpses were gathered up and their belongings were
packed into a helicopter and flown to a police station
(12:25):
for careful examination. In spring, Hollat Searcle gave up the
last of its dead. A man sea hunter and his
dog made the grizzly find. Receding snow revealed scraps of clothing,
(12:48):
torn pants and half a sweater. It was the entrance
to a den, dug into a snow drift. Inside with
the four missing skiers. Nikolai, the owner of the risque
sex guide, had had his head stoved in. Bits of
(13:09):
were driven into his brain. The others, too, were smashed
and battered. There were broken ribs and awful internal injuries. Semyon,
the army veteran and last minute addition to the party,
was there, and so was lud Miller, the young woman
who had been so opposed to his inclusion on the trip. Chillingly,
(13:32):
the eye sockets of Semyon's corpse were empty. Lud Miller's
eyes were missing too, as was her tongue. Something had
removed them, something or someone. Cautionary tales will return in
(13:54):
a moment. How had the Dyatlov expedition gone so disastrously wrong?
How had such a joyous, lusty band of explorers ended
up naked, burned, and broken in the snow. No simple
(14:16):
explanation was forthcoming, so to some Russians the Yatlov saga
became as rich a seam of speculation as the assassination
of JFK was in the West. In fact, the conspiracy
theories are far weirder and far wilder than those surrounding JFK.
(14:37):
How they sprang up and multiplied is instructive. It has
echoes of the conspiratorial thinking that seems increasingly common today.
Outlandish theories seem to thrive at times of unsettling change,
for instance, following assassinations or terrorist attacks. The distrust deepens
(14:59):
when governments have been found to have misled or failed citizens,
and conspiracy theories could be supercharged by those seeking to
benefit from the suspicion and the cynicism they spread. There's
money to be made by media personalities, influencers, even podcasters
who trade in wild stories. But as we'll see, it
(15:23):
can be the politicians themselves, sometimes at the fringe and
sometimes at the center of power, who use conspiracy thinking
to bolster their position. This isn't just a story about
the destruction of the Diatlov expedition in nineteen fifty nine.
It's a story about the world we live in right now.
(15:45):
So to unpick the many conspiracies about the deaths on
Dead Mountain, let's start with one root cause, the politics
of the time. While the temperatures dropped far below freezing
on hollat Siakle in the winter of nineteen fifty nine, metaphorically,
(16:07):
the Soviet Union was enjoying us thor. The prison camps
that Dyatlov's party passed on the way to the mountains
were being emptied of dissidents and other politically inconvenient citizens.
Under Stalin's rule, the Gulag population had swelled. He saw
traitors everywhere and ordered them rounded up, along with their families, friends,
(16:31):
friends of friends, neighbours. Cold malnutrition and the executioner's bullet
carried off millions. But then Stalin suffered a cerebral hemorrhage,
lay for three days on a sofa, and died, with
(16:51):
his iron grip loosened. A reckoning took place. Stalin was
a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious, so said Nikita Khrushchev,
an underling of the Soviet dictator, now angling to replace him.
Everywhere and in everything, he saw enemies, two faces and spies.
(17:17):
Khrushchev was addressing a closed meeting of the elite of
the Communist Party when Stalin said that one or another
should be arrested. It was necessary to accept on faith
that he was an enemy of the people. Khrushchev now
said this faith was misplaced and that evidence had been
largely falsified. He painted a picture of Stalin as a
(17:41):
ruler as deluded as he was cruel. Stalin was reluctant
to consider life's realities, complained Khrushchev. Did Stalin's position rest
on data of any sort whatever, of course, not facts
and figures did not interest him. If Stalin said anything,
(18:02):
it meant it was so to our modern ears, leader,
peddling in conspiracies, blaming their own failings on plotters, and
making up alternative facts doesn't sound that far fetched. But
to delegates listening to Comrad Khrushchev, the revelations about Stalin's
(18:24):
rule came with thunderclap surprise. Some audience members were taken ill,
others just held their head in their hands. Distraught, it said,
two delegates went home and killed themselves. Soviet citizens suddenly
(18:45):
had to make sense of a past very different to
the one they'd believed in, where the innocent had been
found guilty, where Stalin had been an abuser rather than
a protector, Where the clocks could indeed be made to
strike thirteen. A top seed turvy world where nothing was
as it seemed, a world where the strange deaths of
(19:08):
nine experienced adventurers just couldn't have an innocent explanation, could it?
To call Holat seacle dead mountain probably misses The mark
Holat can also be translated as quiet or barren in Mancy.
(19:33):
For these hunting people, height one zero seventy nine wasn't
worth the climb because there was too little game to
be caught there. Not for any more sinister reason, but
the Manci were the only people in the vicinity of
the mountain in the depths of winter nineteen fifty nine,
(19:54):
so suspicion for the hiker's deaths fell on them, and
maybe they had a motive. Stalin's terror hadn't spared these
semi nomadic tribes. Their lands had been taken by miners
and loggers, their religious rights had been suppressed, and their
children were gathered up and confined in Russian speaking boarding
(20:18):
schools in a few decades. A proud way of life
honed over centuries had been ignominiously disrupted. Had the Diatlov
expedition been a humiliation too far for the Nanci? Had
the Soviet students entered sacred land or stumbled across some
(20:40):
illegal ceremony and paid with their lives. The Soviet interrogators
descended on the local tribespeople to find out. Many people
around here were arrested. Valerie an Yamov told the BBC
reporter Lucy Ash Valerie's father had joined the search effort
(21:01):
back in nineteen fifty nine, only to find himself amongst
those treated not as rescuers murder suspects. They said that
the secret police tortured them. They were certainly interrogated for weeks,
but eventually the investigators were satisfied, and other evidence emerged,
(21:24):
also pointing suspicion away from the Manci. The ragged clothes
found in the snow den had been examined. They seemed
to have been torn or cut off the bodies of
the other skiers, but further analysis of the fabric revealed
something else. These rags were radio active. For all that
(21:52):
Nikita Krushchev mocked Stalin's obsession with spies and foreign plots.
The Cold War with the West ramped up under his rule.
In nineteen fifty seven, the launch of the Revolutionary Next
satellite delighted Soviet citizens but struck fear into the hearts
(22:14):
of citizens in the free world. The twenty one inch
metal sphere did little but transmit a bleeping signal back
to Earth. But what if it could rain down something
more deadly? Khrushchev couldn't help boasting about his country's lead
in rocket and missile technology, prompting the Americans to hurriedly
(22:37):
increase their spending to close the gap. The result a
fevered arms race, and a key center of Soviet military
research was in the Urals. The closed city of Chelyabinsk
forty contained a plant making plutonium for atomic bombs, and
(22:57):
it was there that Mandolin playing Geyorgi Criminalshenko worked. Could
this top secret job have had anything to do with
his death? Was the radioactive residue evidence that Georgi had
smuggled something out of his workplace, something secret, something that
(23:21):
people would kill to possess or kill to reclaim. A
young Soviet prosecutor lev Ivanov had so far diligently chased
all lines of inquiry in the mysterious deaths of the skiers.
He'd gathered witness statements, ordered toxicology reports, and examined the tent,
(23:44):
But all of a sudden, Ivanov halted his investigations, saying
that homicide was no longer suspected. His report ended, thus
it should be concluded that the cause of the hiker's
demise was an overwhelming force which they were not able
(24:04):
to overcome. Ivanov's file then locked up, and the exhibits
he had gathered were allowed to molder away. The families
of the dead, fearing a cover up, protested exactly what
overwhelming force had killed their children. They wrote to Nikita
(24:27):
Krushchev asking that he reopened the case, but Khrushchev faced
far bigger problems. Within a few short years, he was
swept from power and replaced by a regime that was
less tolerant of dissent. Details of what happened on Dead
Mountain would not be forthcoming, and public speculation about the
(24:52):
fate of the expedition was definitely not welcome. It wasn't
until nineteen ninety that lev Ivanov then retired as a
prosecutor revealed why it shelved the investigation. His superiors had
warned him off and then transferred him to Kazakhstan. Had
(25:19):
Ivanov come too close to naming the overwhelming force that
had killed the trekkers. He certainly had an unnerving theory
to explain the deaths, which he expounded in an article
entitled The Enigma of the Fireballs. We found that some
(25:42):
young pine trees at the edge of the forest had burnmarks.
To Ivanov, these scorch marks seemed peculiar. He imagined that
they could only have been made by some heat ray.
Whoever was directing this deadly beam had eventually got the
(26:02):
unfortunate skiers in their sights and fired. Ivanov was comfortable
publishing The Enigma of the Fireballs in nineteen ninety because
by then the Soviet system that had stifled debate for
so long was itself all but dead, and as the
(26:27):
Iron Curtain rusted away, the doors to the secret state
archives began to unlock. Serious historians rejoiced, but so too
did amateur salutes titillated by Ivanov's stories of mysterious mountaintop
death rays. The fireballs cited by Ivanov had emanated from
(26:50):
a UFO. Some claimed or were part of a new
Soviet weapons system being tested away from prying eyes. Other
theories pointed to murder. The skiers had witnessed a secret
military operation and been silenced. Others suggested that one or
(27:12):
more of the party were spies, and that the whole
group had been executed by the Soviet KGB or the
American CIA. If I were being charitable, I might just
say that there are holes in many of these theories.
The unifying theme to them all is that the truth
(27:33):
is known to the authorities, but is being suppressed. If
only we could somehow reconstruct the expedition's final hours, well
in a way we can. The trekkers carried cameras, and
in two thousand and nine researchers gained access to the
(27:54):
roles of film they'd shot. In black and white, we
can see mustachioed semons Ala Tardiov, jugged Georgi Krivonishenko, beaming,
Ludmilla Domina, photograph after photograph after photograph, but then in
(28:14):
one an eerie, distant figure, blurry and out of focus.
It's perhaps too tall and too broad to be any
of the skiers, who could it be had their killer
unwittingly been caught on camera. Cautionary tales will be right back.
(28:49):
The Yatlov party filled seventeen reels of film with photographs.
There are action shots of skiing and fun group portraits
for the youngsters posing cheerfully for the camera, but the
reel attributed to Nikolai tbau Brignol, is a series of
rather dull long shots of trees and snow. Shot thirteen
(29:13):
appears to be a selfie done the old fashioned way
with a timer. Nikolay goofs surround in a snow drift.
It's not brilliantly framed. Shot fourteen isn't much better. In
the next image, Nikolay is at least in the middle
of the frame playfully munching on a ball of snow.
In frame sixteen he's now standing, But then comes the
(29:39):
very final image on the reel. Only the trees and
the foreground are in focus, their lower branches weighed down
with snow. Most everything else is white. But then in
the middle distance drawing the eye from behind a pine
(30:00):
lurches a hunched, black, almost inhuman figure. The Yetti lives
in the urals, wrote one of the party soon after
the photo was taken a yetti. The arrival of a
towering eight foot beast, all fangs and claws might well
(30:25):
have encouraged the skiers to dash out of their shelter
and run pale mele down the mountain, and had it
caught up with them, such a creature could have inflicted
those terrible injuries smashed skulls, crushed torsos, torn flesh. In
(30:50):
twenty thirteen, the respected American explorer Mike Lebecki retraced the
expedition route in the hopes of unraveling the mystery. I
know if I went missing, he said, I'd want my
family to know what happened to me. He was making
a documentary for the Discovery Channel, with the working assumption
(31:13):
being that a forest dwelling monster slaughtered the Diatlov group.
Lebecky ventured out onto Hollat Siakle in the dead of
night in his search for this Russian yetti. I did
hear something strange, the explorer said, I do believe it's
(31:35):
possible that he YETI exists. The Discovery Channel film makes
much of the supposed blurry image of a monster captured
by Nikolai Tibau Buignol when I saw this photo, this
was it. It was like bam Lebecky told viewers, I
can't tell how big it is, but it could be
(31:57):
eight feet tall. Someone not padding out a ninety minute
documentary might look at the photo and tell you exactly
how the figure is. It's man sized. The supposed Russian
Yeti in the photo is almost certainly Nikolai messing around
(32:19):
with the time of feature on his camera. And as
for the scribbled note the Yeti lives in the urals, well,
it was part of a jokey pamphlet the skiers compiled
to keep their spirits up. It also reported that two
of the highly educated scientists in the group had set
a new world record for getting the camp stove burning
(32:42):
one hour, two minutes and twenty seven point four seconds.
A Yeti didn't kill the Skiers any more than the
death ray of a ufoded. But to understand why these
deaths became such a focus for wild conspiracy theories, we
(33:05):
might want to consider how the very notion of truth
has been put in the deep freeze in Russia. Over
the years. Khrushchev had forced Soviet citizens to open their
eyes to the reality of Stalin's cruel and paranoid rule.
But after Khrushchev came laying in Brezhnev. While not as
(33:25):
violent as Stalin, Brezhnev also favored repression and secrecy. Under him,
Soviet citizens were told to rejoice in their communist system
while watching it crumble before their very eyes. If their
rulers were willing to lie so brazenly about shortages of
(33:45):
food in the shops, what else were they hiding. When
the Soviet Union finally did fall apart, yet another challenge
to objective reality arose, this time in the form of
Vladimir Putin. One feature of Putin's twenty five year rule
(34:05):
is his novel use of propaganda. Generations of propagandists have
abused the truth by massaging facts and inventing lies to
make the public believe their version of events. Under Putin,
propaganda is deployed to make its audience start to doubt
that the truth exists at all. Researchers have called this
(34:28):
modern Russian propaganda model the fire hose of falsehoods, and
it sprays out partial, misleading, or downright made up stories
in a vast torrent and in all directions government statements,
TV broadcasts, online articles, tweets, reels, posts, and comment after
(34:49):
comment after comment from bots all amplifier constant and confusing
commentary on world events, from wars through vaccines to election results.
The fire hose of falsehoods is relentless, inconsistent, and confusing.
(35:10):
But it's also visceral and entertaining. It's hard not to
be drawn in. Evolution has honed the human brain to
pay attention to deadly threats, and so we're suckers for
vivid stories warning of shadowy figures out to get us.
But the specific intention of the fire hose is not
(35:32):
to make us believe in one conspiracy. It's just to
so doubt that any voice can be trusted, not elected officials,
not established experts, not the mainstream media, not even your
fellow citizens. If everyone is lying to you and every
institution is untrustworthy, is it such a stretch to believe
(35:55):
that officialdom is hiding the truth that d'yatlov and his
fellow skiers were killed by a secret weapon, a UFO
or even a yetti. Solving the d'atlov mystery is an
(36:16):
enormous task, which is far beyond the scope of this paper,
so wrote two Swiss researchers in a twenty twenty one
article in the journal Nature, but nevertheless they had an idea.
Their area of expertise avalanches. The possibility that a mass
(36:39):
of snow rushing down holl at Siakle had struck the
skier's tent, prompting them to flee had long been discounted.
The slope on which d'atlov had supposedly camped was too
gentle to be an avalanche zone, and the Mansi said
they'd never witnessed a snow slip there before. But working
(37:00):
on new information, the Swiss researchers Johann Golm and Alexander
Puzrin concluded that the Datlov group could indeed have set
off a so called slab avalanche. First, Dyatlov, perhaps buffeted
by high winds, was somewhat off his intended route. He
(37:22):
was higher up Holatsiakle than had planned, and on a
slope theoretically just steep enough to pose an avalanche risk,
and crucially, to create a level floor for their tent
and protect it from the wind, the team dug out
a shelf in the snow. They packed down the ice
beneath their feet laid out a carpet of skis and
(37:46):
turned in for the night. But their excavations had destabilized
the snow uphill of them, and as they rested inside
the tent, the wind outside relentlessly added the new snow
to this wall above the flimsy canvas structure, until at
last the drift collapsed. The avalanche might have been modest,
(38:13):
but even that weight of snow could have inflicted injuries
on those inside the tent, and encouraged them to cut
themselves free and seek safety down the mountain, fearing that
a second, much larger avalanche was imminent. Dazed in a
state of undress and whipped by a wicked, freezing wind,
(38:35):
Benign stumbled away, first making a fire from tree branches
and getting so close to the flames that their meager
clothes and frozen flesh were scorched. Yury and Gyorgy succumbed
to the cold first, with Georgy madly gnawing at his
(38:56):
own hand as frostbite took hold. The survivors then split up,
with three stumbling back against the wind for the tent
and four hoping to dig a shelter in the snow.
The spot they picked for that shelter couldn't have been worse.
Situated in a ravine above a still running stream, the
(39:19):
diggers appeared to have caused a tunnel cut by the
flowing water to collapse. Tons of snow then crushed four
hikerds against the stony riverbed. Decomposition or the feeding of
animals accounts for the damage to the faces of young
Jurdmiller and the old man of the group, Semyon, and
(39:44):
as for the radio activity detected on their clothes. Though
not openly discussed in nineteen fifty nine, the Soviet nuclear
industry in the Urals did not have a stellar safety record.
Georgi had probably been contaminated thanks to a recent explosion
at his nuclear plant that rivaled the much more famous
(40:08):
Chernobyl disaster. It's no surprise that his clothes set off
the chirping of a Geiger counter. This explanation of what
happened on Holatsiakol in January nineteen fifty nine seems sane
(40:30):
and sad. Sane because the avalanche experts supplied mathematical formulas
combining things like sheer stress and snow dynamic friction values
to prove that a slab avalanche could have happened that night.
You can't apply such scientific rigor to say the Russian
(40:51):
YETI theory and sad because it was all such bad luck.
Had Dyatlov kept closer to his planned route, they'd have
avoided the avalanche prone slope, and ironically, even in that
same spot, a less experienced team might not have feared
a second avalanche and felt such an urgency to flee
(41:14):
the tent. Staying inside the semi collapsed shelter might not
have been fun, but it wouldn't be fatal. After doing
exactly the right thing to survive a big avalanche, d'atlov
clearly realized his mistake, but lost his race against the
cold to make it back to the tent. If you
(41:43):
ever go to Hollat Siakle, and many do visit it
as a spooky tourist attraction, you'll see that the path
has been renamed in the team leader's honor. It's now
Dyatlov Pass. The memories of the dead are also kept
alive by a foundation established by their friends and relatives
(42:05):
and those simply intrigued by the events of that night.
The foundation takes a dim view of the avalanche theory,
believing instead that some still secret weapons test killed the hikers,
and who can really blame them? The Soviet unions certainly
tried to keep bigger secrets, and for all their formulas,
(42:29):
What the two guys in Switzerland know about snow movements
on a mountain six decades ago. Nothing's ever that simple
or straightforward, is it. Vladimir Putin's fire hose of falsehoods
has been successfully exported around the world. Some of that
(42:50):
torrent of content still comes from inside Russia, that much
is now produced in America and the UK too. Its
effect is not to make us favor one form of
government over another, communism over capitalism, democracy over autocracy, but
to render us impotent, indecisive, and distrustful in the face
(43:12):
of events. It wants us to believe only that everything
is rigged, that no one is decent or trustworthy, and
that all mysteries must be a conspiracy. We're becoming cynics.
Authoritarian leaders love it, says the Stanford psychologist Jamiel Zaki.
(43:34):
When people don't trust Sure, they might not trust the
authoritarian leader, but they also don't trust each other enough
to get together and do anything about it. The nine
deaths on Holatsiakle were very nearly ten student Yuri Yudin
(44:00):
was part of the expedition until nerve pain prompted him
to abandon the trek and head home. As an old man,
he was asked what he thought had killed his friends.
If they really were killed by a natural force, then
there would be no secret, he said, And we wouldn't
(44:21):
be talking about it all these years on. And logic
like that is music to the conspiracy peddler's ears. For
(44:53):
a full list of our sources, see the show notes
at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly.
It's produced by Alice Fines and Marilyn tr us The
sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.
(45:14):
Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio.
Bend A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The show features the
voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah
Jupp Messeiamnroe, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
(45:35):
Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan,
Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios in London
by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember
to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference
(45:57):
to us and if you want to hear the show,
add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show
page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash
plus do
Host
Tim Harford
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