Did the Tunguska asteroid event in 1908 have any effect on the Russian Revolution? Did they think there was a supernatural component?

by William_Wisenheimer
mikedash

No. The Tunguska event was almost entirely ignored at the time it occurred, and was not properly investigated until 1927, ten years after the Russian Revolution. The impact itself was noted only locally, and while the shock wave associated with its was recorded at three Russian stations and at Jena, in Germany, nothing was published about these records at the time. Similarly, while the after-effects of the Tunguska explosion were observed at a considerable distance – optical anomalies such as brilliant twilights were observed as far away as Bristol, in the west of England – they were not at that date associated specifically with any impact in Russia. In short, details of what had occurred in the remote area of Siberia where the meteorite (most likely) impact or detonation occurred were not widely available to anyone at any point prior to, or even soon after, 1917.

According to Vladimir Rubtsov, the Tunguska event itself was marked by "lack of any serious reaction to it." He was able to find only two contemporary newspaper mentions of the event in the Siberian press, the first of which was almost entirely fictional. The other, which appeared in Sibr (15 July 1908), more than two weeks after the event took place) referred simply to "an unusual phenomenon of nature." News of these events was not published in St Petersburg until late September, and little interest was shown in the phenomenon even then.

The first scientific expedition to the Tunguska region, led by the meteorite specialist Leonid Kulik, did not take place until 1921, and discovery of the vast area of forest levelled by the explosion (estimated at around 2,100 square kilometres) had to wait until 1927.

Source

Vladimir Rubtsov, The Tunguska Mystery (Springer, nd [2009])