Free Mountain of the Dead by Keith McCloskey Page B

used to incarcerate both criminal and political prisoners. The system of camps stretched right across the USSR, with many in the most barren and desolate areas. Although the conditions inside the camps were bad enough, to escape from one of them would have required considerable luck and ingenuity as well as a high degree of hardiness just to stay alive as the conditions outside the camps were so inhospitable, especially in midwinter. There were a number of camps on both sides of the northern Urals that would not have been a great distance from Kholat Syakhl, with the camp system at Ivdel being the closest. The prisoners of the Ivdel camps were put to work in mining, road construction and working in the forests on lumber, so there would have been numerous opportunities for escape attempts to be made. The Dyatlov group had also passed through Ivdel on 25 January 1959 on their way north from Serov to Vizhay prior to starting their journey on foot. Another camp system lay 370 miles (594km) to the north of Kholat Syakhl at Vorkuta, which was as desolate and harsh as any in the system. German PoWs had also laboured there in the coal mines in the immediate post-war years. There had been a revolt by prisoners at Vorkuta in July 1953, which resulted in over fifty deaths when the revolt was put down without mercy. An American, Homer Harold Cox, also spent time in Vorkuta after being kidnapped in East Berlin in September 1949; he died of pneumonia a year after he was released in December 1953. There were also further camps on the western side of the northern Urals in the Komi Republic.
    Any escaped prisoners certainly would not have harboured any feelings of goodwill towards anyone they ran into, for the fear of being turned in to the authorities. A recaptured prisoner could expect the harshest of punishments, including, quite possibly, execution.
    There were two main groups of prisoners in the camps, ordinary criminals and people incarcerated for political crimes. Oddly, the authorities treated escapes and attempted escapes by the political prisoners far more seriously than they did the ordinary criminals. An escape by a political prisoner would involve a search party being formed immediately, possibly involving frontier guards. Additionally, nearby towns and settlements would be warned to be on the lookout for them. 11
    It may be doubted that escaped criminals would use extreme violence or murder during their escape bids after they had left the vicinity of a camp, but their desperation can perhaps be illustrated by an example. With many of the camps being in remote areas, one of the biggest problems for anyone escaping and making their way to some form of civilisation was the problem of sustenance on the journey. A known practice – one that was common enough to have its own nickname – wasfor a potential escapee to identify someone who would make the escape with him (or her) on the basis that the two of them would stand a better chance of succeeding. Once they had escaped and hunger started to become a problem, the person who had initiated the escape would kill his or her companion and eat them. This applied to larger groups of escapees as well, where unfortunate victims would be identified beforehand and set upon when the time was right. The nickname for these victims was ‘Walking Larders’. 12
    In respect of the Dyatlov group, it is highly improbable that they were killed by escaped prisoners. There are a number of reasons: there were no other footprints in the snow either in the vicinity of the tent or around the bodies of the group or in the vicinity; there were nine members in the Dyatlov group, all of whom were fit and strong and, in the absence of weapons, it would have taken a substantial group of escaped prisoners to either kill or overpower them; although escaped prisoners would try to stay hidden as much as possible, criminals who would be more likely to use extreme violence tended to head for towns and cities where