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