Three Engineers, or Heroes of the Wrong Route
Author: Andrey Filimonov
On April 12, 1966, three employees of the Novosibirsk Institute "Sibtransproekt" who died during the design of the Abakan-Nizhneudinsk railway were posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner. Streets in Novosibirsk and stations on the railway line where they lost their lives were named after Koshurnikov, Stofato, and Zhuravlev. Although their sacrifice was symbolic, the railway was ultimately built along a different route: from Abakan to Taishet. Almost 25 years passed between the surveyors' deaths and the decree awarding them.
I'll probably freeze today.
In early November 1942, a man in a blue tunic with black marks on his back and sides staggered and fell along the banks of the Kazyr River in the taiga. This happens when a person, freezing, huddles close to a fire, and the flying sparks burn through his clothing. It was cold. Minus ten to fifteen degrees Celsius. The Kazyr, a mountain river full of rapids, thundered beneath the transparent ice, gripped by an early frost. The Tuvans and Tofalars who lived in these parts had never settled along the fierce Kazyr. They only came here to hunt.
The traveler was about 50 kilometers from human habitation. As an experienced taiga dweller, he knew he had no chance of making it. He only had a faint hope of meeting hunters. Crumbs of bread rustled in his thin duffel bag. He'd lost his rifle while trying to rescue his comrades who had fallen through the ice. Sitting down on a snag sticking out of the river sand, he wet his indelible pencil and wrote in his notebook:
"November 3rd. Tuesday. I'm probably writing for the last time. I'm freezing. Yesterday, November 2nd, there was a disaster. Kostya and Alyosha died. The raft was caught under the ice, and Kostya immediately went under with it. Alyosha jumped out onto the ice and crawled about 25 meters across the water-filled ice. I helped him reach the shore, but I couldn't pull him out, and he's frozen solid, half-submerged. I'm walking. It's very difficult. Hungry, wet, without fire and without food. I'll probably freeze to death today."
He tried to put the pencil in his breast pocket, but missed and dropped it on the sand. He bent down to pick it up, but lost his balance and fell sideways. He no longer had the strength to get to his feet. Before falling asleep, he pressed his body against the notebook to keep it from flying away in the wind.
The dying man's name was Alexander Koshurnikov, 37, a civil engineer who had been involved in railway planning in Western Siberia since 1930, surveying the Tomsk-Asino, Novosibirsk-Abakan, and other routes. He was an experienced field specialist who had traversed thousands of kilometers of impenetrable taiga on foot. Thanks to Koshurnikov's diary, found next to his body a year later, the details of this poorly organized and doomed expedition have been preserved, becoming part of the heroic Soviet myth.
Superman Mikhalych
The creator of this myth is the writer Vladimir Chivilikhin. In 1958, his novella "Silver Rails" was published—a literary adaptation of Alexander Koshurnikov's diary, written in the spirit of socialist realism: warming themselves by a fire in the taiga, finishing their last piece of bread, the story's characters speculate about the outcome of the defense of Stalingrad:
«The water murmured faintly at the shallows. "What do you think, Mikhalych?" Alyosha suddenly spoke from the other side of the fire, and Koshurnikov winced. "Do you think our men will surrender Stalingrad? You know, for some reason I feel like if I were there, everything would have been fine. It's just a feeling. Interesting, isn't it?" "Interesting," Koshurnikov responded, thinking about how Alyosha would have been a good soldier—a pilot, a parachutist, a swimmer, a Voroshilov marksman...»
Alexander Koshurnikov, as described by Chivilikhin, is a romantic hero with childish gray eyes. He fears nothing in the world except desk work at the institute, which he dismissively calls "psychiatric" and hides from in the taiga. His greatest joy comes from saving state funds during railway design.
«For the joy of engineering exploration, he would do his comrade's work for several nights in a row, without asking for thanks or rewards. Here's an excerpt from his letter: "The last few days, I've been mostly helping the guys. I calculated that using double traction on two stretches would reduce the length by 14 kilometers. How could I have missed this opportunity? I also untangled the mountain pass loops—an extremely interesting and challenging task! Now I feel completely satisfied, and that's the highest reward."
V. Chivilikhin. "Silver Rails"
The story's hero is selfless and noble. When a bungling intern accidentally sets fire to a tent containing valuable tools, Koshurnikov, known to everyone as Mikhalych, takes the blame. The accounting department presents him with a bill for "embezzlement"—3000 rubles. That's roughly three years' salary for a Sibtransproekt employee. But Mikhalych is undeterred. He travels to Altai, where he sells his "father's inheritance—a house on the banks of the Katun River" to the forestry department. He charges only three thousand rubles for the house—below market value. Because his goal isn't profit, but rather a desire to repay his debt to the state. Nothing else matters.
"It was hilarious! They offered more, trying to persuade me: the house, they said, was built on a cross, strong, and would stand for another hundred years. And I explained to them that I needed exactly three thousand. Hilarious!" And he burst into infectious laughter, unbuttoning his ever-present blouse on his mighty chest..
V. Chivilikhin. "Silver Rails"
One word: a hero. And he solved problems accordingly.
Any price
On June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht struck the Red Army. And it fled. It was a catastrophe. Panicked retreat on all fronts, the loss of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics. Soviet industry hastily evacuated east, to Siberia. From there, from Siberia, coal and other combustible materials were urgently needed. Everything for the front, everything for victory at any cost!
The Soviet government resorted to every means necessary to extract as much raw material from Siberia as possible. In December 1941, rails were laid across the frozen Ob River between Salekhard and Labytnangi. They thought the ice would support coal trains. Indeed, the first two managed to pass, but the third train broke through the ice and sank to the bottom of the Ob.
The government ordered the immediate construction of new railways. A team was dispatched to Novosibirsk to immediately design a route to Transbaikalia. Alexander Koshurnikov was tasked with the project's implementation. He chose the route along the Kazyra: "It's easier to build a road along the river—there's always a terrace above the bank, a reliable means of transport is always at hand, and there's always plenty of fish, timber, drinking water, and industrial water." The Tuvan name for the river, "Svirepy," sounded like a warning, but he chose to ignore it.
Choosing the wrong route was Koshurnikov's first and biggest mistake. His other bad decisions only hastened the tragic outcome. He chose the wrong person. Rejecting an experienced employee, he invited Konstantin Stofato, a Greek from Primorye who had never been to the taiga, to join the expedition. Konstantin Aristidovich's ethnicity also played a negative role. The route of the future route passed through border territory, requiring NKVD permission to enter. Stofato, a Greek, was subject to a week longer vetting than Zhuravlev, the third member of the expedition.
The departure was scheduled for mid-September, and a week's delay dashed the engineers' hopes of completing the route in good weather. Koshurnikov had decided to complete the 230-kilometer route in 20 days. This meant that the expedition, carrying a 200-kilogram load, would have to walk about 10 kilometers through the taiga each day. This was nearly impossible on foot. Every day, they would have to set up and break down camp, chop firewood, cook food, and dry clothes. And most importantly, work, plotting the route of the future route. So, the only options were to travel by river or by reindeer. Koshurnikov chose the latter and made the last of his fatal mistakes. Although, as it turned out later, when it was too late, the river wasn't an option either.
We have to do everything ourselves.
So, the group consisted of three people. Alexander Koshurnikov, 37, an engineer with twenty years of field experience and a participant in the design of twenty railway projects. Alexey Zhuravlev, 29, an engineer from Transbaikal and a graduate of the Novosibirsk Institute of Railway Engineers. Konstantin Stofato, 27, a technician of Greek descent from Vladivostok, demobilized in May 1942 and heading into the Siberian taiga for the first time in his life.
Each person reached the starting point, the village of Verkh-Gutara in Tofalaria, by their own route. Koshurnikov arrived first, with the funds for the expedition. He hired reindeer from a collective farm and bought food. He approached the NKVD for a radio, but was refused—in the border zone, no one except border guards could use radio waves. The radio ban was a deadly blow—to ensure the expedition had no chance.
Three weeks later, a few days before his death, Koshurnikov wrote in his diary: "They didn't give us a radio, otherwise everything would have been simpler. But what kind of radio is that? We would have ruined it on the raft long ago."
They were forced to switch to a raft when the moss—the deer's main food—ran out of the forest along the Kazyra. The guide took pity on the deer and led them back to the village. The trio of explorers were left alone with their luggage, without any means of transportation. Their only weapon was a rifle. Unfortunately, Kostya Stofato proved a poor hunter, constantly missing the bear. The expedition's maps, drawn over thirty years earlier, were riddled with inaccuracies. But no other maps of this remote wilderness existed.
The expedition diary kept by Alexander Koshurnikov became less and less like a scientific document with each passing day, becoming a chronicle of a painful death.
"October 20th. Tuesday. We don't have a single worker. We have to do everything ourselves, and that's very tiring. Take, for example, the daily firewood collection for the night. We have to saw and haul 2-2,5 cubic meters to the camp. We have to cook our own food, which means one of us has to get up at 5 a.m. We have to build rafts ourselves and drag our belongings across rapids, and that's also hard work—no roads, over rocks and windfall for 2-3 kilometers, carrying 200-250 kilograms of cargo. On such trips, you need two workers who can both assemble the raft and navigate it down the river. I'm the pilot, which eliminates the opportunity to take notes while on the raft. Many details are forgotten, and they can't be recorded in the evening."
They were having no luck. Stofato kept losing the carpentry tools needed to build the raft. The hastily constructed rafts fell apart one after another in the shallows. The expedition members kept falling into the icy river until it finally froze over at the end of October. Nevertheless, they completed most of the route, three-quarters of the way—180 of the 230 kilometers—using nothing but the willpower of Mikhalych, who never lost heart and built the fifth raft with the same enthusiasm as the first. There was no scientific benefit to all this. Research was abandoned. All that remained was to press on, trying to survive. But they failed at that, too.
Winter
Winter of 1942 arrived prematurely in the Sayan Mountains. Kazyr froze over overnight. The group passed through the rapids—Shcheki, Sayansky, Kitatsky, and Bazybaysky. They traveled nearly two hundred kilometers in the cold, their clothes soaking wet that they couldn't always dry them. In the last week, hunger added to the situation.
From Koshurnikov's diary: "There are only 52 kilometers left to our home, and they're so insurmountable that it's possible we won't make it out at all. We're noticeably weakening. Even the slightest exertion makes us dizzy, and besides, we've been completely wet for three days now. There's no way to dry out. But the worst will come when we're unable to cut firewood."
On November 1st, they built their last raft, which sank through the ice on November 2nd, carrying the exhausted Zhuravlev and Stofato. Both died. Koshurnikov made it to shore. On November 3rd, he walked a few more kilometers, made his last entry in his diary, and died.
His group perished due to poor equipment and a shortage of manpower. The search for the missing cost hundreds of times more than the expedition itself. Planes circled over Kazyr for days, search parties trekked through the taiga—all of this vastly outweighed the meager equipment allocated to the three explorers. Koshurnikov had to beg the institute for every axe and every thousand rubles for reindeer. And here—planes, fuel, flight hours.
As a result, the diary and its author were accidentally discovered in 1943 in a side channel of the Kazyra by local fisherman Innokenty Stepanov. The indelible pencil hadn't washed off. The thirty-five pages of text read like Hemingway's prose. A man who doesn't believe in God tries to overcome death, but isn't deluded about his chances and isn't upset by defeat. And the fact that the expedition's outcome was entirely negative—after the death of Koshurnikov's group, it was decided to build the road not along the Kazyra, but along a different route—only adds a certain noble, samurai-like despair to the autumn expedition of the three Novosibirsk engineers.
A pure act of heroism, devoid of any benefit or practical result. Koshurnikov was buried where his route ended—on the banks of the Kazyra River, near Nizhnyaya Tridtsatka, a small taiga settlement. This was once a border post on the border with the Tuvan People's Republic. But two years after Koshurnikov's death, Tuva was incorporated into the USSR, and the border was abolished as unnecessary. The area remains a wilderness, but the popular trail there remains. Every year, pilgrims visit Koshurnikov's grave, repaint the fence, and repair the steps leading to this "sacred site," which has become an important part of Siberia's memorial geography.
