Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

In Dead Mountain, Donnie Eichar’s analysis of what happened before and after the Dyatlov nine died is firmly set in the political landscape of the USSR in 1959. When he speaks to Yuri Yudin about his memories of that time, Yudin remembers some things fondly. The cost of living for students was low, and the government offered them plenty of assistance. The Khrushchev Thaw was a time when government repression was lessened from its Stalin heyday. Eichar also notes that men and women were, in many practical settings, considered equal in the USSR when Yudin was young, which was not the case in many other countries at the time. Of course, not everything was positive. Young people could not go abroad, and music, books, and movies were often banned for political reasons.

More specifically to Eichar’s subject, when the Dyatlov hikers died, the Soviet government behaved very strangely. Officials did not want to provide the hikers’ parents with any information, were reluctant to provide families with their children’s bodies, and they placed harsh restrictions on funeral organizing. Many of the people Eichar talks to are very willing to believe that the Dyatlov hikers died because of weapons testing or because they were murdered. Their willingness to believe theories that seem outlandish makes more sense when Eichar notes that there really was weapons testing near Holatchahl in February of 1959 and that during Stalin’s dictatorial reign in the preceding decades many people were in fact disappeared by the military or KGB; such beliefs are not unfounded, even if they are unlikely to provide answers for the Dyatlov group’s deaths.

Eichar has clearly internalized some of the West’s narratives about Russia as a secretive, spy-ridden monolith in ways that allow bias and sensationalism to creep into his book. In the early part of the narrative, Eichar makes assumptions about what will or will not be permissible on his trips to Russia that verge on paranoia, like when he disguises the Dyatlov-related files on his laptop as thought they would somehow be subject to search. His efforts are odd given that people interview him in Russia, his presence and goals are by no means secret, and people have been researching the Dyatlov incident for decades. Later in the narrative, Eichar does have some seemingly minor experiences that he immediately interprets as political repression: A car that picked him up from the airport is damaged, someone insists on seeing his party’s papers when he and his companions attempt to go into an elementary school, and his guide tells him not to photograph a train station. He admits that the last of these incidents may have been easier to understand had it not been for the language barrier he faced—and even without the barrier, it seems plausible to assume that none of these encounters actually points to anything sinister; if Russia’s government wanted to stop Eichar for whatever reason, they had ample means of doing so directly.  Eichar assumes the worst about the political environment he is investigating without having all the information, possibly to add tension or interest to his book.