Baby Sasha

[CalzagheChick]

Open Letter to Galina,

Please don't think anything of Teddy and I. We always squabble with each other. It's common place at this point. Some of it is language barrier, some of it is cultural difference, and the rest of it is our emotional/time attachment to the Dyatlov Pass Incident.

There are no undercurrents of comraderie going on here. Many of us are good friends outside of this case and we frequently discuss findings before we make any postings. I particularly need a lot of help with research, interpretations/translations, and navigating Russian sources. After all I'm just an American in a very poor region of the United States with some time on her hands.

I think we all kind of gravitate toward a certain victim, and I just happen to be obsessed with Semyon because of the lack of information written about him. This started over a thread on facebook and I hadn't had a huge opportunity to look into baby Sasha. When Teddy said that you know more about the case than anybody she's met, I humbled myself to ask you about it. And now you have an entire front page dedicated to your research/knowledge on the fact that Semyon wasn't a childless bachelor with only a mother to mourn his loss.

In any case, a lot of what you wrote about the Holodomor, the famines... I can relate to those simply because my own grandparents went through the American Great Depression and it changed how many Americans lived. There was no such thing as waste. My grandfather used to reprimand me all the time for throwing food away. He had his own quirks from that period of American history that too many don't understand today. I used to think it was gross that he would save every newspaper to be used as fertilizer on his back porch. Used pie tins he would put underneath his plants to catch water. And the thing is, he didn't come from a poor family like the most affected.

Anyway, there's no need to leave. I was just calling Teddy out for initially shooting down the original inquest into baby Sasha as irrelevant to the case, then as soon as you came in to revive it, it was worth putting on the front page of the site. Teddy and I don't take anything personally between each other. In fact, I think she's got quite the thick skin to take many of the jabs.

Althought I'm "emotional" at first, I quickly calm down and remember this isn't about me or Galina or Teddy or Travis or Armide or anyone else here. It's about those who died.

[Vietnamka]

Thanks a lot. We are human and we are emotional)
About Semen. I don't know what donu want to know)) please, ask!
I know, what I don't know a lot about him, still a lot of wight pages.
But please understand my position about him. If a tell "know", I mean "confirmed by documents". What we are doing now with Natalya - trying to find new archive's documents or people who know him.
 also I have "strong feeling" and this "feeling" can be mistaken. But this "feeling" help me to find real people and real documents.
 

[CalzagheChick]

Have you met personally with Tamara's daughters? Is that how you know so much?

[Loose}{Cannon]

Ok, welp......     Riddle me this!   

Why did ZOLOTARYOV for no apparent reason request the group to address him as......  'Sasha'?    Like, why would I ask anyone to call me by my daughters name????


https://dyatlovpass.com/semyon-zolotaryov

[Vietnamka]

Have you met personally with Tamara's daughters? Is that how you know so much?

I have not met them((( Saigon is too far even from Moscow. The eldest one stay not in Russia now, its common after USSR was crushed. . Just phone calls and a lot of letters. But Natalya did.
 Few years ago all information about his Lermontov's life was hidden. We didn't know even did he live there or not. We just had his mom's letters to Ivanov from the Lermontov without any idea did he stay with her or not.
It's was a lot of speculations on that time about him. A read a lot about Lermontov and tried to understand his social position there. Prisoner ? Worker? What is he??? Me "feeling" told - he is a teacher. I started looking for information about schools there and people who study on that time. A lot of articles, social networks, phone calls, letters...it tooks 1 or 2 years. And I found! After that everything getting easier. Official requests, archives, looking for neighbors and etc, collection of pictures and memories. If you find a "right thread" you can "tangle up in knots"
 The same situation was about the Minsk. A read a lot about Minsk, Belarus, institute, making vision of situations in this place at that time. It's more historical research. After that trying to find his way In view of this circumstance following the "feeling". After that - requests, archives, confirmation. From general to specific, all the time. May be it's a reasone why I could find some people))) some times (as expert Grigorev for example) I just want to ask general questions only, but hit the tager. Completely random I found the leader of the tourist  group Alexandr Kolevatov was a member while he has been living  in Moscow. It change my vision about him a lot. May be Kolevatov even more unknown person then semen)


 

[Vietnamka]

Ok, welp......     Riddle me this!   

Why did ZOLOTARYOV for no apparent reason request the group to address him as......  'Sasha'?    Like, why would I ask anyone to call me by my daughters name????


https://dyatlovpass.com/semyon-zolotaryov

We dont know exactly. One of the explanation from his student was - some friend of his was killed, but safed Semen's life during the war. Semen used his name.
 But I can assert, that he used this name long before he met the Dyatlov's group and his son was born. We have a lot of documents  from the Minsk he named Alexander, dated 1946-1950

[Loose}{Cannon]

Few more things I missed.     

If you trust it was avalanche - no need to read about baby Sasha.

I dont believe in an avalanche, but if I did, I would still be interested in the baby Sasha story.  You seem to be implying that unless you subscribe to the murder theory...... you simply dont care about things of this nature, and that would be very incorrect.  Also, baby Sash, or no baby Sasha..... None of it is going to change the facts of the official case, or how the victims died to begin with. Its just good information as it pertains to the individuals personal life. 

If you think it was another reason of the death - you can not understand situation clearly withou historical knouladges.

Im hoping this is just the tower of Babel talking, but I'm having a very hard time comprehending how anyone that subscribes to a dif theory than you equates to "you can not understand situation clearly". 

In other words, are you stating that since your Russian, and you know all about the baby Sasha story....... The murder theory is somehow superior?   Like......  would any of it have changed what happened that night? 

I know a bit about this story

Same here, only about 5 years of brain consumption, all of which thats unbiased and focused on facts rather than conjecture.  I have no emotional involvement, and 99% of all false information that had to be weeded through came from..........   Russia.   Americans didnt create this mess if your picking up what Im slappin down?

I glad to spread historical information about the Russia and Russians. About my country I love a lot

Share away....  we are happy to have ya.   

even all male members of my family were killed in 1937 and just my 18 years old grandfather spent 5 years in Gulag. And survived.

Hopefully you can share more about this in a dedicated thread sometime.  I actually have two family members that are in fact 100% Russian. It used to be three (died last year) and she spent her childhood building rockets underground in Siberia and survived by consuming glycerin.  Her family flour mill was taken from them by the communist party etc.  Now her daughter, grand daughter, and great grand daughter live in the US and are part of my family.   

[Vietnamka]

Cannon, I think we should stop this discussion. I'm not about "theory", I'm  about archive's documents and official confirmation. Have I my own version? Yes. But you didn't read it))) I just know one thing, very important -  MURDER should be excluded. Because it's murder. If I see the patient with a high fever I know - 99% it's a cold. But i must to exclude hemorrhagic Dengue fever in  Vietnam.
If u would like to ask my opinion - I can tell u "yes. I think it was murder". But not because of traumas only, because of documents too. It's complex. I hope u can understand me better in 5 years 

[Teddy]

For those who like me dwelt on Galina's last post, she is saying that even without being married to a theory one should exclude a murder first. It's the order of words.

[Teddy]

And to Cannon (this is how I am going to address him form now own because his aim is pretty good), when somebody says "you can't understand something without knowing something else", there are two possible meanings to the sentence and it is pretty much up to you to figure out which one to choose regardless the content - is it personal you or general you as in "one can't understand something without knowing something else". In a forum we replace intonation with emoticons, this is sad, and it is up to us to choose an intonation that underlines desire of bringing some information into light. Do you really think Galina is trying to put us down as ignorant, or is she trying to share things she knows and/or suspects we (or some of us) might not know?

[CalzagheChick]

Good grief. I have a bottle of glycerine in my medicine cabinet from when I dabbled in making my own cosmetic face washes and such... it's so gross!!!! It's sticky and thick and greasy all at the same time and I can't get my scientific mind over the fact that it's biochemically 3 fatty acid chains away from being a complete lipid (fat) 

Seriously I couldn't imagine ingesting it let alone ingesting it in order to cling to dear life.

All of the things that baby Sasha represents... that his birth is a reminder of as far as Semyon Zolotaryov's progeny... it's insanely difficult for me to wrap my mind around.

Semyon by all accounts should have died of starvation or on the front lines. His own government made a genocide of his people that fought to gain Russia much of its lost territory BACK. Nice debt of gratitude there--starve them.

Hunger is a very VERY personal thing to me. I have such an issue with people going hungry. I always have since a young age. Events such as the Holocaust and the Holdomor... they rip me apart inside as a person with a soul. Perhaps I'm weird in that I enjoy listening to others tell their account of what they endured--the hardships. I feel like those thing keep my own life in perspective.

By the way, since we've all decided to become to blunt with one another in these last few disturbingly hostile posts, this is my way of toning it down a little bit.

[Per Inge Oestmoen]

Fortunately, there is no genuine hostility here.

[CalzagheChick]

Before becoming a nursing student, I was a history major. My particular interest was in Western Civilization. The things is, once western civilization started going beyond colonization/Middle Passage/Elizabethan age, I started having a hard time keeping up. At this particular moment in history not only does Western Europe begin to develop very seriously out of the Dark Ages but this is the point that Eastern European history really starts to take off and Russia becomes a super player. It seemed that before Europe treated Kievan Rus through the Mongol conquests to Peter the Great & Ivan the Terrible as the red-headed stepchild and just allowed the territory to go buck wild and raise itself just as you'd expect of out deadbeat parents too consumed with their own selves to be bothered with their kids until the parents (France?) age and get sick THEN decide to make a phone call and connect after all the years of neglect and pretending that their kids were the greatest thing they'd ever done in their lives (Russia.) Before we know it, Marie Antoinette loses her head and the Napoleonic Wars land in Russia. This is the point that my history books REALLY started to inclulde Russian politics into the courses.

So at this point the first semester of Western Civilization ends and the Spring semester brings the second half of Western Civ to present day. And this is where Russia and all those Eastern European territories go absolutely CRAZY with territory lust and serfdom falls out of fashion but only in favor of a new way to handcuff the people to industrialization. Bla bla bla, Romanov dynasty murdered by Bolshevics along with Rasputin who just wouldn't die it seemed launching Russia into a civil war of reds versus whites, Lenin's communist revolution followed immediately with Stalin and Stalinism. The rapid industrialization under Stalin means that the patriotic Russian duty is work. You work until your arms & legs are stretched. You work until your fingers are nubs. You work until your backs are broken just in time for surprise!: Holdomore, Famine, World War 2, Gulag prison labor camps when you're no longer able to produce work and the cost of feeding you becomes how shall I put it? Futile? The death of Stalin brings us into a kinder, gentler communism: Kruschev aaaaaaaand Dyatlov Pass is right there with that Kruschev Thaw.

See what I mean? Crazy! Just CrAzInEsS!!!! And that's just one flippin' area of this rock. Without needing to say as much, this course took off from day one and did not stop.

So my being drawn to the Dyatlov Pass Incident has a lot to do with the fact that my first love is history.

And here we have all of these players that are not only the product of so much civil unrest and chaos, but later and much too early in their young lives they became the victims of it.

Ultimately my point in this comment is that here we have this baby that's completely fallen through all of the cracks in the systems put into place no matter how tightly monitored by the government. All of that civil unrest has come to this one year old child that just disappears from history and all existence! And I'm not even sure if it's not for the better or worse.

[Armide]

Completely random I found the leader of the tourist  group Alexandr Kolevatov was a member while he has been living  in Moscow. It change my vision about him a lot. May be Kolevatov even more unknown person then semen)

I know this is off-topic and I'll happily move this conversation along to Kolevatov's respective thread, but what exactly do you mean here Galina?

[Teddy]

Galina's answer about Kolevatov is here

[jarrfan]

I started a new subject because I am not certain this follows any thread. My question is:  Why would Semyon or his wife give away their only male child? In a country with many more women, I would think keeping their "heir" male child would be an asset instead of a deficit.

This is just wondering about family connections in Russia at that time. I also do not understand why Semyon would want to be called Sasha and hide his date of birth unless he was hiding something? This of course does not make him a murderer unless he was  not  one of the 9 hikers and he is not in the grave with  his name.