Every now and then, I see the following meme circulated:
">8 Marxist female mountain climbers who wanted to prove women were just as good at mountain climbing as men.
>Picked the easiest peak.
>Refused any help from men along the route.
>When asked over the radio by A MAN *yuck* how they were doing, gave evasive answers "we're fine!", even though one of them was sick and dying.
>Get disoriented in the snow and all 8 women end up freezing to death.
>All male search party comes and retrieves their bodies."
Recently, I pointed out that very little of this was true and was challenged "Prove it, faggot."
In my experience, people who aggressively ask for proof never acknowledge that they are wrong when proven to be wrong (someone who just claimed that I was deluded when I said that open borders, racial quotas and sterilising children are pushed by Democrats in the US, doubled down when I presented tons of evidence for this and waved his hands and claimed none of what I said supported the claim and continued to double down even after I quoted his nonsense and directly juxtaposed it with the evidence I had presented that provided it was nonsense), but hey, it's material for another blog post (naturally, the person who called me a faggot claimed I didn't prove it after I presented all of the below).
Let us dig into the meme. So what this meme is misrepresenting is a 1974 attempt to cross the Lenin Peak
The team of 8: Elvira Shatayeva, Nina Vasilyeva, Valentina Fateyeva, Ilsinar Mukhamedova, Tatyana Sardashove, Galina Perekhodyuk, Lyudmila Manzharova, and Irina Lyubimtseva was indeed all female and from the Soviet Union, but this doesn't necessarily mean they were "Marxist" (anymore than 8 Communists today who happened to come from the US could be called "Capitalist").
The women were experienced climbers and 3-4 of the 8 had climbed Lenin Peak in the past, so this definitely wasn't a group of women who didn't know what they were doing. One potential team member had even been dropped because the others thought she wasn't good enough.
One page does claim, quoting Pavel Rezvoy, "a Ukrainian geologist who was in the area about the time the women died", that "The idea of the expedition was to prove that women could do this without the help of men." I found this reported (but without sources) by wiredforadventure too. The leader did promote all-women climbing and the team wanted to be the first women's team to do it.
Rezvoy does note that Lenin Peak was "an ultimate task", so this was definitely not "the easiest peak". SummitPost does call it "one of the easiest mountains over 7000m", but considering that the tallest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, is 8,849m high, over 7,000m is still no mean feat. Peakbagger.com lists 106 mountains whose peaks are 7,200m or more, and Lenin Peak is 7,134 m. Explorersweb says that "the mountain’s reputation as the easiest 7,000m peak is misleading because of its high altitude, unpredictable weather, and avalanche risk". They were also going to be the first team (gender aside) to traverse the peak, which presumably would've added to the difficulty level.
There is no evidence that they refused help from men along the route. They did not have any problems from July 30 to August 4, when the storm was forecast. On August 4 Richard Alan North met the Soviet women, but did not offer help.
They did not give evasive answers or claimed they were fine when asked over the radio how they were doing. On August 5th they said visibility was bad and they were having trouble making out the descent, on August 6th they reported conditions had worsened and later that one of them was sick. Vitaly Abalakov told them to descend and they did (i.e. they followed a man's instructions). They reported on August 7th that one of them had died and two of them were sick. So they reported their situation over the radio at least 4 times.
The climbers did not "get disoriented in the snow" but huddled together in their tents during the worst storm in 25 years and then froze to death trying to descend (I did not find any reports that this was due to disorientation). 7 bodies were found and 1 seems to have fallen off a ridge, so we can only confirm that 7 froze to death. Maybe you can say the one who fell off a ridge got disoriented, but mountain climbing is perilous and disorientation is not the only possible cause of that.
Their bodies were not retrieved by an all male search party; the phrasing indicates that the first group looking for them took their bodies off the mountain. In reality, their bodies were discovered by a group of Japanese and American climbers (there is no gender breakdown given), but a few days later, the expedition leader's husband and two others (who were also men) buried them in temporary snowgraves.
Notably, the women's team were not the only ones who died climbing the mountain at the time. Jon Gary Ullin, three Estonians and Eva Isenschmid died too.
So in conclusion, let us enumerate the claims of the meme and whether there is evidence each was true:
1) They were 8 women: True
2) They were Marxist: Not True
3) They wanted to prove women were just as good at mountain climbing as men: Possibly
4) They picked the easiest peak: Not True
5) They refused any help from men along the route: Not True
6) They refused to report that they were having problems when asked over the radio: Not True
7) They got disoriented in the snow: Not True
8) All 8 froze to death: Close enough
9) An all-male search party came and retrieved their bodies: Not really
So we can see, truly, that the majority of this meme is not true.
