Who knew the answer?

[mk]

There was a cover up - that is what we can say with absolute certainty.

It is important to consider the implications of this. There would be no need to cover up, if it were an accident.

I don't quite agree.  If your mom has told you not to play ball inside the house, and you do, and you break something, then you might engage in a cover-up attempt.  Breaking something was not your intention--it was an accident and you meant no harm.  But the accident is evidence that you were doing something you weren't supposed to do.

[Jean Daniel Reuss]

      Reply  #27
..............
There was a cover up - that is what we can say with absolute certainty.
It is important to consider the implications of this. There would be no need to cover up, if it were an accident.

 

The hikers were killed by human beings

 • A natural or accidental cause (by the storm, the cold,...etc) seems impossible to me because the 9 hikers were obviously all trained, acclimatised to the Siberian climate, well fed (and close to the Labaz), inaccessible to an irrational panic.  And above all they formed a coherent and homogeneous team of 9 people in full possession of their physical and intellectual means. Only a criminal cause can explain why there was not a single survivor left less than 10 hours after leaving the tent (which is hardly disputed).

 • It also seems obvious to me that the hikers were defeated and killed by attackers who had followed the trail of the hikers from North-2 to the slope of the Kholat Syakhl.

 • In this case, an arrival by helicopter might not have been impossible, but it would have been risky and even a exploit of piloting :  wind, night, sloping ground covered with snow, no assistance on the ground, reduced visibility even with a searchlight because of the snow lifted by the blades...........

 • What is difficult to explain is not the rushing out of the tent without sufficient clothing.
What is difficult to explain is the exit from the tent without the hikers taking the 3 short-handled axes that were inside the tent.
The explanation by a Machiavellian ruse of killers pretending to be friends seems to me the most likely explanation.


         

It was not the KGB which, on the contrary, was unable to protect the hikers

 
 • The KGB would never have made the huge mistake of killing the hikers before having questioned them at length (and tortured them if necessary) in suitable premises.

For the dead will never speak again.

Faced with this abnormal incident, there are thousands and thousands of questions to be asked and information to be obtained.

(Like: why were you exactly there at that place and time? Tell us about all your days since 1 January 1959, .
What did you see ? Who did you meet ? What did Professor X tell you ? Neighbour Y ? Friend Z ? ...etc.etc).

 • Indeed, a large part of the work of any effective intelligence service consists in cross-checking an enormous amount of small details which, taken in isolation, seem to be of no interest.

In 1959, in the USSR, as in other countries with specific laws, investigations required consultation of huge confidential files containing all kinds of information. (In 2020 there are almost the same volumes of paper but also large computer databases easier to process).

A simple example is given by A. Rakitin: a US spy counted the wagons running on the railway tracks north of Sverdlovk which was used by the CIA to find out the mass of nuclear warheads being manufactured in the Urals factories.

 • Of course the KGB had no scruples about killing all those who were considered "enemies of the people".
But this was absolutely not the case for the hikers who were among the elite of the Soviet youth and who enthusiastically wanted to participate in the greatness of their motherland. 
  Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was guided by his common sense and therefore respected the lives of all those who could be useful to the USSR.

There was a cover-up about the violent Stalinist opponents of the Thaw

• The cover-up is partly explained by the fact that under either Khrushchev or Putin, the Kremlin refuses as much as possible to acknowledge the existence of currents of opposition to the regime.

 • During the period of the Khrushchev Thaw, what had to be hidden was the KGB's purging of depraved NKVD officers.
Examples of some NKVD officers judged and executed between 1953 and 1956.
   Bogdan Koboulov (1904-1953) 
   Lavrenti Beria(1899-1953)
   Mikhail Ryumin(1913-1954)
   Viktor Abakumov(1908-1954)
   Vsevolod Merkoulov(1895-1954)
   Amaïak Koboulov (1906-1955)
   Boris Rodos(1905-1956)
  ..........................

 • For those responsible for the massacre of the Dyatlov group (carrying a voucher associated with the XXI° CPSU), with Aleks Kandr I am suspicious about the Gulag camp guards, therefore former stalinist NKVD agents, in the Vizhay region.

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To be continued and specified    -->   Altercation on the pass > Altercation on the pass