Nine autopsies were performed by the Sverdlovsk regional forensic expert Boris Vozrozhdenny: five on 4 and 8 March 1959 (with a second expert, Ivan Laptev, co-signing the four of 4 March) and four on 9 May 1959 in Ivdel. The table gives what each act records, read from the Russian transcription and checked against the scans. Sheet numbers (л.д.) refer to volume 1 of the case file.
| Victim | Found | Cause of death as written | Injuries recorded as inflicted in life | Clothing at autopsy | Sheets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yuri Doroshenko, 21 | 27 Feb, under the cedar by the fire, 1,500 m from the tent | Low temperature (freezing) | Scalp hair singed on the right; small abrasions and a skin wound on the arms with bleeding; foamy grey fluid at the mouth | Shirt and sleeveless vest; long johns over two pairs of underpants; socks only | 104–111 |
| Georgiy Krivonischenko, 23 | 27 Feb, beside Doroshenko | Low temperature; second- and third-degree burns "at the campfire" | 31 × 10 cm burn of the left shin with charring; degloved skin on the back of the left hand; nose-tip defect; a flap of his own fingertip skin found behind his teeth; bleeding into the right temporal muscle and occipital scalp | Shirt and undershirt; long johns with the left leg burnt off; one charred sock | 112–119 |
| Igor Dyatlov, 23 | 27 Feb, 300 m from the fire toward the tent, on his back, one arm round a birch | Low temperature (freezing) | Abrasions on the face, knuckles and both ankles with bleeding; superficial cuts on the left fingers; skull and skeleton intact | Four layers on the torso, three on the legs, socks, no hat | 120–126 |
| Zinaida Kolmogorova, 22 | 27 Feb, 630 m from the fire, face down, "in a pose of crawling toward the tent" | Low temperature (freezing) | Many facial abrasions; knuckle abrasions; a scalped wound on the right hand; a 29 × 6 cm strip abrasion on the right flank | Five layers on the torso (both sweaters inside out), five on the legs, two pairs of socks, two hats, no boots | 127–134 |
| Rustem Slobodin, 23 | 5 Mar, 480 m from the fire, face down, between Dyatlov and Kolmogorova | Low temperature (freezing) | Linear fracture of the left frontal bone up to 6 cm, gaping 0.1 cm; bleeding into the scalp and both temporal muscles; 75 cm³ of bloody fluid under the dura; facial and knuckle abrasions with bleeding. The examiner: the fracture "undoubtedly caused short-term stunning" and "favoured faster freezing" | Four layers on the torso, four on the legs, one felt boot on the right foot over four socks | 95–103 |
| Aleksander Kolevatov, 24 | 4 May, in the ravine stream bed 75 m from the fire, under 4 to 4.5 m of snow | Low temperature | Bleeding at the inner left knee; a wound behind the right ear to the mastoid; neck deformed at the thyroid cartilage (the act attributes the head and neck changes to post-mortem decay); 500 cm³ of bloody fluid in the chest | Five layers on the torso, four on the legs, socks and a bandaged ankle, no boots | 345–348 |
| Semyon Zolotaryov, 37 | 4 May, ravine | Multiple fractures of the right ribs with bleeding into the pleural cavity, in the presence of low temperature | Ribs II–VI on the right broken along the parasternal and mid-axillary lines with bleeding into the intercostal muscles; about 1 litre of blood in the chest; eyeballs absent (post-mortem) | Five layers on the torso, three on the legs, quilted felt boots, two hats; a compass on the arm and a camera round the neck | 349–351 |
| Nikolay Thibeaux-Brignolle, 23 | 4 May, ravine | Closed comminuted depressed fracture of the vault and base of the skull with bleeding under the meninges and into the brain, in the presence of low temperature | Depressed fracture of the right temporo-parietal region over 9 × 7 cm with a 3 × 3.5 × 2 cm piece pressed onto the dura; fissures totalling 17 cm across the base into the left middle fossa; a 10 × 12 cm bruise on the right upper arm | Three layers on the torso, three on the legs, nearly new felt boots, two hats; two watches on one wrist | 352–354 |
| Lyudmila Dubinina, 20 | 4 May, ravine | Extensive bleeding into the right ventricle of the heart, multiple bilateral rib fractures, abundant internal bleeding into the chest | Ribs II–V on the right along the midclavicular and anterior-axillary lines and II–VII on the left along the midclavicular line, with bleeding into the intercostal muscles; a 4 × 4 cm bruise soaking the right ventricle; 1.5 litres of blood in the chest; a bruise on the left thigh. Tongue, floor of the mouth and eyes absent (no bleeding at the hyoid on histology) | Five layers on the torso; torn, burned trousers; one foot wrapped in a burned piece of a wool cardigan; no boots | 355–357 |
Three points in this record bear most on the finding.
The March five froze. All five show the classic markers the examiner used for death by cold: Vishnevsky spots, small haemorrhages in the stomach lining that are a standard marker of death by cold; overfilled bladders, third- and fourth-degree frostbite of fingers and toes. None of the ravine four shows any of them; their hands and feet show only the "bath skin" of three months in water.
The ravine injuries were inflicted in life and required great force without breaking the skin. On 28 May 1959 the investigator questioned the examiner about them. His answers are given below in Russian with a new translation, because the English version in circulation adds a word, "bomb", that he did not use.
Radioactive contamination was found at low levels on three garments only. Only the clothing and tissues of the ravine four were tested (sheets 370–377, by Levashov, the chief radiologist of the city sanitary service, 18–29 May). The activity was beta only, with no alpha or gamma, and it washed off: 30 to 60 per cent came out in three hours of running water. Tissues were at natural potassium-40 levels, indistinguishable from a control body from a Sverdlovsk car crash. On clothing, the expert's own threshold, the sanitary norm for radiation workers of 5,000 disintegrations per minute per 150 cm² before washing, was exceeded by three pieces:
| Item (owner as numbered by the expert) | Before washing | After 3 h washing |
|---|---|---|
| Brown sweater, №4 Dubinina | 9,900 | 5,200 |
| Sweater waistband, №1 Kolevatov | 5,600 | 2,700 |
| Lower part of trousers, №1 Kolevatov | 5,000 | 2,600 |
| Seven other items (Zolotaryov, Thibeaux, Dubinina) | 600–2,000 | 230–1,400 |
| Soil from under Kolevatov (control) | 96 counts vs 90 background | — |
The expert's answer to whether ordinary clothing should carry any such contamination was «Не должно быть совершенно» ("there should be none at all"), and he allowed that after fifteen days in running stream water the original levels "could have been many times greater". He could not identify the nuclide: the laboratory had no radiochemistry or spectrometry. The nine sheets were removed from the file on 10 July 1959 as "not relevant" and returned to the archive only decades later.
One of the nine has been examined since 1959. On 12 April 2018, at the request of Zolotaryov's relatives and with the city's permission, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP) opened the grave under the obelisk inscribed «Семён Золотарёв» at the Ivanovskoye cemetery in Yekaterinburg, outside any criminal procedure; the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation, the Yekaterinburg association of relatives and friends that keeps the group's archive, called it clandestine, and the 2019–20 prosecutors' check neither used it nor ordered its own, its experts holding exhumation "useless" after so long. Sergey Nikitin of the Moscow bureau of forensic medicine examined the skeleton, with the physician Galina Sazonova assisting. The coffin and clothing had rotted away under a fill of stones; the bones and skull were intact. No written expert report has been published. What follows is Nikitin's account on KP's radio programme of 26 April 2018 and his interview with the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets of 28 February 2019.
What the bones settled. The 1959 act is confirmed on the ribs, II to VI on the right along the parasternal and axillary lines, and shown to be incomplete: three fractures of the right scapula (the shoulder blade), inflicted in life, which Nikitin, Sazonova and KP's consultant, the forensic expert Eduard Tumanov, agree are real (the left scapula and far more fragile bones survived the grave intact), were missed because the back was never opened in 1959, so the acts of Dubinina and Thibeaux-Brignolle may under-record as well. The fracture types, the ribs bent inward at the sides and outward at the breastbone, fix the geometry: front-to-back compression of a man lying on his back by a surface wider than his ribcage, slightly right to left. Nikitin and Tumanov both exclude a blast wave, Tumanov also a fall onto a flat hard surface, and both read the load as broad and blunt, "comparable to the surface of the chest".
What they did not settle. Nikitin thought the surface under the body "relatively hard, unlikely snow"; Tumanov answered that the intact spinous processes, the bony points along the spine, argue against a hard surface. The scapula is read as one impact while supine (Nikitin), at least two blows with a narrower object (Tumanov) or two successive blows (Sazonova, "but I am not an expert"); nobody has measured the fractures or converted the pattern into a mass or a fall height. The bones do not show where or when the injuries were sustained. Nikitin said so in 2018, and in 2019 gave Moskovsky Komsomolets his own reconstruction, the four falling into the stream one on another, Dubinina first, Zolotaryov onto her, Kolevatov onto him, Thibeaux striking his head on a stone, and called the version in which the injuries were inflicted in the tent by a slab «неправдоподобной», implausible, because Dubinina and Thibeaux could not have come down the slope. That is an expert's opinion consistent with Vozrozhdenny's mobility statements; it is not an independent measurement. Identity: a photographic superimposition matched 13 of about 24 features; a first mitochondrial test in a private laboratory excluded maternal kinship with the niece; a second, at the Russian Centre of Forensic Medicine under the geneticist Pavel Ivanov in July 2018, gave a 99.66 to 99.84 per cent probability of kinship while noting that mitochondrial DNA cannot separate Semyon from his brother Nikolai. No nuclear test has been reported to September 2026, and no other body has been exhumed.
Bearing on the finding. A broad, sudden, front-to-back load on a supine man is what a snow-loaded tent roof, a collapsing den roof or a fall onto a body in the stream would each produce, so the 2018 examination does not by itself decide between the tent and the ravine. It removes the blast wave, confirms the 1959 act where it can be checked, adds an injury the act missed, and supplies one more expert who places the injuries in the ravine on the same mobility grounds as the 1959 examiner. It does not change the 75 per cent for the ravine, and it is a reason the missing chemistry and the unexhumed bodies of Dubinina and Thibeaux-Brignolle head the list of what would move this finding.