Legendary Russian Mountaineer Dies in Kyrgyzstan

One of Russia’s most accomplished and revered mountaineers died last week, after an ascent of Jengish Chokusu, also known as Pobeda Peak, a mountain on the China-Kyrgyzstan border. Nikolay Totmyanin, 66, became ill while descending the 24,400-foot summit on August 10. After getting off the mountain on his own, he managed to reach Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, where he checked into an intensive care unit. He died the following morning.

Prolific and dauntless, the 66-year-old Totmyanin was a living legend in Russia, but kept a low profile. Everyone who spoke to Climbing for this story remarked, above all else, on the humility of the man known as “Iron Uncle Kolya.”

Internationally, Totmyanin is perhaps most well-known for being a key member of the Russian team that made the first ascent of Jannu’s (25,295ft) north face in 2004, winning a Piolet d’Or. But he participated in an array of other cutting-edge expeditions during his 50-year-career, including more than 200 significant climbs in the Caucasus, Pamir, Tien Shan, Karakoram, Alps, Himalaya, and Alaska ranges, both recreationally, and as a leader of the Russian national mountaineering team.

Nikolay Anatolyevich Totmyanin was born on December 8, 1958, in the small rural village of Leninskoe in Kirov Oblast. In 1972, aged 14, he moved alone to St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), to enter a Soviet boarding school for physics and mathematics. He began climbing in 1976, when he was 18, with the Leningrad State University climbing club. He graduated from the university in 1981, with a degree in physical mechanics, and spent the remainder of his life working as a nuclear power engineer in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, in between climbs and his part-time work as an alpine guide.

Longtime friend Sergey Semiletkin first met Totmyanin at the university club in Leningrad when the pair were students. In 1988, the two were part of a four-man team that established a landmark technical line, Semiletkin’s Route (Russian 6B, the grading system’s highest difficulty), up the 3,000-foot north face of Free Korea Peak (15,550ft), in Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan range. At the time, the route was the most difficult in the region.

“It cannot be said that Kolya was distinguished by super climbing abilities,” Semiletkin recalled, adding that instead, what made his late friend stand out—and clearly contributed to his moniker, Iron Uncle—were “his calmness, and confidence” even in the most harrowing, exposed pitches. He said Totmyanin’s nerve was unparalleled, and bolstered the spirit of any team he was a part of. “His endurance was amazing,” Semiletkin added. “A person with such character could have been born only in the depths of Russia, far from the big cities.”

Totmyanin went on to make multiple winter first ascents, and climbed nearly 50 7,000-meter peaks and five 8,000-meter peaks, some multiple times, all without supplemental oxygen. Among other prominent expeditions, he was part of a team that put up a new route on the south face of Lhotse (8,516m) in 1990, and led a rope team on the 2007 siege expedition that made the first ascent of the foreboding west face of K2 (8,611m). Totmyanin also earned the Snow Leopard Award—an accolade given to climbers who summit all five 7,000m peaks in the former USSR—seven times.

On Everest (8,849m), which he summited twice, Totmyanin free climbed the technical Second Step at 5.8/5.9, a feat which has only been performed four times in history. In 2013, he and three partners also made the first winter traverse of the Bezengi Wall, a ridgeline linking the highest peaks of the Central Caucasus.

In 2003, Totmyanin wrote of Pobeda—a mountain he summited at least seven times and that would eventually kill him— that “the price for reaching the top of Pobeda is the life of one or more climbers. If no one died on Pobeda in a given year, that means no one reached the top.”

In the above essay, Mountain.RU editor and former climbing partner Sergey Kalmykov added a postscript noting that Totymanin was the sort of partner who, if you were missing a crampon, would gladly give you his own without a second thought, and continue on without them. “He was always at the forefront of the attack,” Kalmykov wrote, “always in brilliant physical shape [and] always at the highest level of skill.” He was also “always calm, with a light sense of humor,” and “when many people lost their nerve and endurance, he continued to remain balanced and laconic.”

Despite his substantial list of accomplishments in the mountains, what friends and family wanted memorialized most about Totmyanin was an inclination to downplay his achievements. “He remained an exceptionally humble man, a person of few words, but with a great heart,” friend Elena Dudashhvili wrote on Facebook. “He was always reliable, attentive, and ready to help in any situation. You could go into the mountains with him knowing that by your side was someone you could trust without a second thought.” In a sense, his “Iron Uncle” nickname seems a perfect summary: partly a testament to his physical endurance, but also a nod to the internal fortitude and level head that made him the bedrock of the teams he was a part of.

Alexander Odintsov, who led the Piolet d’Or-winning Russian Jannu expedition, and climbed with Totmyanin on many other occasions, told Climbing that it was “hard not to envy him” for his skill and endurance in the mountains. “If normal people survived at altitude, Kolya flourished,” he said. “I think he was the world champion in staying at an altitude of over 7000 meters. I knew many people whom the god of altitude kissed on the lips. But Kolya was the best of them all.”

Odintsov said his late friend and climbing companion operated both in the mountains and in everyday life with a complete lack of ego, a quality that was extremely rare in the mountaineering world. Despite Tomyanin’s revered status in the Russian climbing world, Odintsov said he never let the acclaim go to his head. “He was a celebrity, and fame is a difficult test, especially for those who are deprived of it, but Kolya simply never realized his exceptionalism.”

Temperamentally, he compared his friend as akin to “Buddha,” saying, “I can’t imagine him in a state of irritation, and I do not know a single person who could treat him with hostility. Any attempt to quarrel with him was doomed to failure.”

One of Odintsov’s favorite moments with Totmynanin did not take place in the mountains at all, but while the pair were driving down a street in St. Petersburg, on their way to attend a press conference after their Jannu expedition. A woman driving another car haphazardly pulled out in front of them, almost causing a serious crash. “I barely had time to brake, and Kolya lowered the passenger window,” Odintsov recalled. Though she had been at fault, the woman was angry, and seemed about to curse at the men, “but Kolya tells her, ‘Madam, you are such a beautiful woman, and yet you can die in the prime of life [if you drive like this]!’ The situation was instantly defused, the woman was no longer angry, and was instead “left standing with her mouth open,” Odintsov recalled.

Reminiscing on his late friend, he offered words of Russian poet N.A. Nekrasov: Mother Nature, if you did not sometimes send such people out into the world, the field of life itself would have died out!

Russian alpine chronicler and Mountain.RU editor-in-chief Anna Piunova offered similar praise. She told Climbing that, “Kolya was the most tolerant person I ever knew. Remarkable, given how little tolerance there is in Russia, where people are quick to judge and just as quick to say it out loud. He had a way of smoothing over every conflict before it could even start. That was who he was.”

Dudashhvili, who was with Totmyanin when he died, said that “he came to Bishkek by himself, and we were speaking on his arrival. His condition was suspicious, so we called an ambulance.” She said that after that, “everything happened very, very quickly.” Some outlets reported Totmyanin died of a heart attack, but Dudashhvili disputed this, saying “the doctors didn’t have time to make a diagnosis.” An acute altitude illness appears likely, perhaps high-altitude cerebral edema, given the slightly delayed progression and death.

Totmyanin was married at the time of his death, and is survived by both children and grandchildren, but a family member who spoke with Climbing for this article stressed that throughout his life, Totmyanin made a point of never bringing his family into the spotlight, and requested this be upheld here. He was laid to rest at the Smolenskoye Orthodox Cemetery, in St. Petersburg, on Sunday.

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