The Soviets liked to build cities. Armed with a worldview that explicitly valorized urban life as a more advanced stage of history, the revolutionary regime that ruled the former Russian Empire from 1917 to 1991 created new settlements throughout its terrain. Part of the thinking was that a predominantly peasant country had to embrace industrial modernity in order to achieve socialism. But the longing extended to places, usually near mineral deposits or in militarily strategic locations, that had few to no rural populations anywhere in the vicinity. With the constant discovery of rich reserves of natural resources, the Soviet north became one of the most rapidly urbanized areas in the USSR. Several hundred industrial cities, towns, and workers’ settlements were built from scratch there, often in previously uninhabited territories and by drawing in completely migratory populations. While eleven permanent towns existed in the Soviet far north in 1926, there were already forty-one in 1933.1 By the 1960s, this number had increased to over 500 big and small industrial settlements.

This chapter picks up in the 1920s where it follows the campaign of scientist Leonid Kulik to reach the site of the blast. After gathering various pieces of information about the 1908 event, Kulik set off to find the location of Tunguska. This endeavor proved more difficult than expected as the desolate taiga of Siberia remained inaccessible on his first several tries. Yet Kulik’s doggedness was well-suited for the remoteness and severity of the Tunguska environment. Aided by Evenki guides and the work of a handful of other researchers, Kulik finally made it to the epicenter in 1927. His team undertook another, more extensive, expedition the following year. Despite this success, the Tunguska taiga and the cosmos continued to exert a major influence on the research of field scientists, while public attention helped turn Tunguska into a mystery.

This chapter concentrates on the environmental engagement of the people who went on the voluntary expeditions. Focusing on the diverse cultural products of participants and the rich experiences that many had in the field, it shows how the Tunguska site helped create an autonomous sphere within late Soviet society. It was also a place where people developed a distinctive form of ecological sensibility. Voluntary researchers felt that time in the taiga led to deeper connections among people and with the rest of the natural world. Both the totality of social life during fieldwork and the evolution of the Complex Amateur Expedition (KSE) as an organization feature here as well.

This chapter describes the experience of the Tunguska event and considers the question of how it should be understood as a disaster. It begins by surveying events around the world from the perspective of a space object hurtling toward the Earth in the early twentieth century. This background sets the stage for the blast of 1908 and introduces some of the characters who will later feature prominently in the book. Telling the story of a group of Indigenous Evenki witnesses close to the epicenter, the chapter considers the experience of the explosion, the initial interpretations of it, and the influence of Soviet ethnography on what can be known. Analyzing observer testimony, it discusses Tunguska as a social and ecological disaster and shows how the concept of vulnerability can be extended to cosmic catastrophes.

The conclusion opens in Vanavara as the author learns that he will not get to walk around the site because of wildfires resulting from ever hotter summers. Global environmental threats such as climate change and mass extinctions garner more attention today than menacing objects from space, but an even richer view of the disasters that threated humankind would incorporate unknown nature more fully. The book ends by reflecting on what Tunguska might teach us about the present environmental crisis.

This chapter looks at the contribution of fantasy to theories about Tunguska. As American nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Soviet science fiction writers turned to the well-known Tunguska explosion with fresh eyes. Building on an established tradition in Russia of blending fantasy and science, engineer-turned-writer Alexander Kazantsev proposed that Tunguska had been caused by a nuclear-powered alien spacecraft that exploded over Siberia in 1908. In the years that followed, this fiction became a hypothesis and the source of significant and acrimonious public debate about the borders of legitimate science. As a subject of Cold War fiction, Tunguska reflected a new international orientation toward the relationship between fantasy and science. It also became fodder for further speculation and imagination about the relationship between Siberia and outer space — some of which played a productive role in scientific research as well.

This chapter concerns the final phase of Tunguska research after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while also looking back at the theories about the event developed by researchers abroad from the 1930s onward. It examines how international science about Tunguska developed from a dynamic of inadvertent corroboration, intentional collaboration, information lost in translation, and conjecture unmoored from Soviet thinking. Accordingly, international perspectives deepened the mystery as scholars from afar proposed their own array of solutions. The end of the Cold War allowed speculation to proliferate even more widely, while also enabling foreign specialists to visit the site for the first time. The past decades have also witnessed dramatic advances in the science of near-earth objects and a more broadly held conviction that an airburst explosion of a medium-sized asteroid fragment caused the Tunguska blast.

This chapter shows how a distinctive logic of conservation developed over time that focused on the need to preserve traces of a mystery. The possible future utility of the land for researchers wanting to better grasp cosmic connections and catastrophes was at the forefront of this endeavor, distinguishing it from the preservation of wilderness areas and historical artifacts. The chapter follows the campaigns that began in the 1960s to create a nature reserve around the site of the Tunguska blast and examines the variegated thinking about environmentalism among participants in the expeditions. The analysis also demonstrates how the success of nature protection fundamentally altered the longstanding research at the place in unexpected ways.

This chapter focuses on the development of voluntary Tunguska research in the late 1950s and the way that expeditions gave rise to alternative forms of knowledge about the event. It follows an informal group known as the Complex Amateur Expedition (KSE) that began making annual trips to the taiga: first to test the alien spaceship hypothesis and later to exhaustively investigate the site for any clues about what might have happened there. An array of other voluntary groups became involved as well, with different camps advancing their own contradictory explanations. After the Soviet Academy of Sciences decided to propose that a comet had caused the explosion in the early 1960s and ended its own research, unofficial efforts led the investigations on Tunguska. From this point on, Tunguska was a zone for thinking about the otherworldly at the edge of mainstream science.

Continuing chronologically, this chapter picks up the story of the expeditions of Leonid Kulik in 1929 and follows Tunguska research through World War II. A desire to figure out the source of the destroyed forest fostered a set of distinct ecological interactions at the blast site. Workers and scientists began draining waterlogged holes in the ground in search of meteorite fragments, collecting rock samples, and planning an aerial survey of the location. At this stage scouring and manipulating the environment to find a space rock took precedence. Thwarted by political intrigues, environmental obstacles, and the lack of large remains, the mission to find a meteorite proved unsuccessful. While a pattern had now been established in terms of how to engage materially with the Tunguska site, the mystery of what had happened there only deepened.

The introduction opens by asking the reader to imagine encountering the mysterious environment where the Tunguska explosion had occurred. It describes the Tunguska event in broad terms and explains why it remains an unsolved mystery. After reflecting on the potent role of meteorites in world history and the status of mystery as both a property of the natural world and a cultural imposition, the introduction foregrounds the main argument of the book. The site of the Tunguska blast has been a landscape of mystery, where distinctive interactions with the natural world, alternative forms of knowledge, and concerns about catastrophe have dominated environmental relations.