The food for thought offered by Loose}{Cannon March 16, 2019 Reply #9 and Reply #10
... In other words, there were .... political enemies etc, and they were not entirely mixed up. Many that were eligible for release had nowhere to go and stayed as part of a freed and payed working party of say mining and logging communities..........
My mother inlaw is Russian,.....................She told me when times were really tough,........... Her brother lost his right hand for steeling a loaf of bread..... her parents were never seen again.
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Still, many of the "settlers" living in the area had been former inmates of gulags who remained there after the institutions were closed and they were freed.
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I think the loggers fall into this category--hence the comments in the diary about their roughness. There were also people in internal exile--many Jewish people, some ethnic Germans like the forestry guy--to keep them from away from the European part of Russia to prevent them from defecting. So a lot of area residents would have been exposed to the barbaric conditions in the gulags and to the forms of violence practiced there. That is one of the things that makes it hard to determine who the attackers may have been: many different groups would have the same "tool kit" because of Stalin's practice of mass incarceration, where political dissidents would be thrown in with common criminals and psychopaths.
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prisoners..........................
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running prisoners in the conditions of winter Northern Ural Mountains. .
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I do not suspect the prisoners from some distant Gulag camp. The prisoners, who are often
called Zeks in international literature, were well guarded continuously night and day.
But after Stalin's death in 1953, first Beria and then Khrushchev ordered mass releases ;
and within a few years the population of the zeks was halved: 2 million zeks became 1 million zeks +
1 million ex-zeks.The liberated people, often
called ex-zeks, were in principle free men, but there were many different administrative statutes.
To put it simply, an ex-zek was almost as free as an ordinary Soviet citizen.
A certain proportion of these ex-zeks found themselves in unsuitable material and moral conditions.
• This caused social difficulties in Soviet society between 1953 and 1964.
• This contributed to the fall of Khrushchev to Brezhnev in 1964.
The attackers, who were ex-zeks, had no material difficulties in catching (joining) the hikers on the slope of the Kholat Syakhl on the evening of 1 February 1959.
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The attackers came from the Vizhay region, maybe even simply from settlement 41.
The attackers lived in houses that were comfortable for the time (1959): good food, plenty of firewood, maybe sturdy furniture.
The attackers could have been under house arrest. They had to check in every fortnight, they could only go to certain small towns. But they could work, move around, wander freely in the (big) forest (without going outside certain boundaries).
The attackers knew the route planned for the Dyatloc group because the hikers had (too much) talked about it at Vizhay, at the settlement, at the Rempel forester...
In 1959 there remained in the vicinity of Vizhay a small proportion of ex-zeks or former political prisoners who had many good reasons to hate the Soviet regime and who were ready to continue their patriotic struggle.It is difficult to know if these were: Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Poles, Czechoslovakians, Hungarians, Romanians, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Koreans, Germans, Bulgarians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians... or from other countries.
One of the goals of the hike was "Conducting conversations and reports among the population."
It became easy (but not without risks) for a certain number (3?, 4?) of ex-zeks to improvise, in a few days, a spectacular action to galvanize opposition to this Stalinist propaganda.
From Vizhay to North-2 the journey is made fatigue-free in a motor vehicle or in a horse-drawn sleigh
cf Atmanaki, Sheet 209 :
In Vizhay arrived around noon, ...and agreed in the car park that a passing car we will take us to the village of IInd North, the easiest starting point to go on the route.
From North-2 to the tent, the trace left by the 9 hikers is clearly visible and easy to follow, in less than one day, (except maybe the last mile on the slope of the Kholat Syakhl).
Here is the photographic proof of the existence of pursuers that many investigators want to ignore !
Everything indicates that it is a human being who was only visible for a very short time and then disappeared immediately.
The attackers, who had no guns and no daggers, with difficulty succeeded in defeating the hikers, after 9 hours of fighting in the snow and at night.
This is why I will henceforth send my argumentation in the Topic:
"Altercation on the pass" ( and not on Murdered).