Tunguska hits St Petersburg

So, I read somewhere that the Tunguska event occurred at about the same latitude as St Petersburg, and that if it had been delayed about 6 hours it would have hit St Petersburg. So, at about 7:14 AM on the morning of July 30, 1908, a comet airbursts over St Petersburg, at an altitude of about 8 km, and with a force of about 10 megatonnes. What happens next?
 
So, I read somewhere that the Tunguska event occurred at about the same latitude as St Petersburg, and that if it had been delayed about 6 hours it would have hit St Petersburg. So, at about 7:14 AM on the morning of July 30, 1908, a comet airbursts over St Petersburg, at an altitude of about 8 km, and with a force of about 10 megatonnes. What happens next?

We have covered similar things to this effect. Something I always want to know is if it would occur as the earth is tilted, so if at one time I hit Russia, would not Africa, or South American be hit if it hit 6-12 hours sooner? :confused:
 
To say that the comet would have hit St. Petersburg if it had arrived 6 hours later is correct only if while spinning on its axis the earth is not also moving along on its solar orbit. Six hours later and the comet might have missed the earth altogether (I don't know, I'm only theorizing).

To answer your WI question... chaos, panic, mayhem, and anarchy.
 

Glen

Moderator
So, I read somewhere that the Tunguska event occurred at about the same latitude as St Petersburg, and that if it had been delayed about 6 hours it would have hit St Petersburg. So, at about 7:14 AM on the morning of July 30, 1908, a comet airbursts over St Petersburg, at an altitude of about 8 km, and with a force of about 10 megatonnes. What happens next?

I was thinking about this again earlier today. Yeah, moving the impact time wouldn't work as a POD really.

However, if part of the celestial body broke off early, it could deflect the trajectory such that it would hit somewhere else.
 
Reviewed Articles: Julian Arnhem, 1908: St. Petersburg, The Romanovs, And The Making Of The Twentieth Century, London: Picador, 2007.
Tatyana Saratova, “Stolypin’s Unfinished Reforms: Russia’s Lost Opportunities”, The Slavic And East European Journal Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer 2007-2008): 429-440.
Abstract: As we approach the one hundredth anniversary of the fifteen-megaton explosion that destroyed Saint Petersburg, many new articles are coming into print which either revise or revisit that significant event of last century. Most of these use new information brought to light from the archives of the collapsed Bolshevik rump states in the late 1990s. Others approach the subject using post-modern historiographies and methodologies. In the following article, Schwerpunkt reviews two of these works, and is critical of the emerging trend toward ahistorical and counter-factual history.



This week brings us to the centenary of the destruction of Saint Petersburg, and with the marking of this date has come an increase in literature dealing with the varied aspects of that event. As with the proliferation of sources which were published in its aftermath, the current expansion of literature concerning the 1908 explosion over Petersburg has been driven by works of varying style, intent, and – it must be said – quality. Among the recent literature concerning this important event are two works reviewed here, which together approach this topic in a distinct manner, although from different directions.

In 1908: St. Petersburg, The Romanovs, And The Making Of The Twentieth Century, Julian H. Arnhem presents a revisionist history which, bravely, seeks to reinvent the arguments accepted within the covers of the classic texts on the topic. Arnhem takes issue with the “assumptions fostered, made, codified and endlessly reproduced” by works such as Solzhenitsyn’s The Origins Of The Great European War, Moss’s Hammer Of God, and Berenicae’s Europe After 1908. In particular, Arnhem revises the accepted argument that the destruction of Saint Petersburg was a precipitate cause of the First European War, instead submitting the thesis that the roots of that conflict were evident before 1908 and that the collapse of Tsarist Russia was merely a catalyst for the conflagration that followed.

It is curious that 1908 bears the subtitle that it does, as neither the explosion nor the death of most of the Romanov line (nor, at that, the three-quarter-million other deaths) feature specifically as subjects for Arnhem’s attention, but rather are considered only as components of a greater picture which Arnhem argues have been misrepresented in their shaping of the subsequent events of the twentieth century. To be fair, this absence is presumably because so much literature exists to that effect that had Arnhem directly explored these aspects would be to detract from his overall thesis. However it is important to note that the effective end of the Romanov dynasty is of greater significance to Arnhem’s argument – and within that argument to the collapse of the Tsarist government and Russian Empire – than was the instantaneous destruction of an imperial capital, its citizens and infrastructure, and the crème de la crème of its intelligentsia and nobility.

Arnhem’s work is macrohistorical, that is to say, is focuses specifically on large-scale social events. This befits his background as a diplomatic historian, although in this case focusing exclusively on the power vacuum which resulted from the death of the Romanov family and on the conflict which followed limits the extent to which his thesis can be supported by anything other than secondary sources. An example can be seen in his central argument. Arnhem submits that the European War would have occurred even had a stable, autocratic Russia existed at the time of Austria-Hungary’s invasion of Serbia in 1914, and indeed could well have been worse, given the size of the Russian army, its commitment to Serbia and to France, and the possible development of a two-front war for the Central Powers. This argument is reliant solely upon Arnhem’s own interpretation of already-existing sources – indeed, some of the sources which he later attacks – rather than upon any new evidence.

Furthermore, 1908 examines aspects of the collapse of Tsarist Russia to the exclusion of others. For example, in his chapter regarding the German annexation of the Russian Polish and Baltic territories in 1909, Arnhem goes to great length to articulate the effect that the destruction of the Russian capital had on the army’s resistance to the foreign interventions, and makes little or no mention of the internal dismemberment of the Russian empire which resulted from uprisings in territories like Finland, Transcaucasia, or the Cossack south. Again, while Arnhem explores the damage to the bureaucracy and cohesion of the army which resulted from the destruction of the capital, he takes little note of the dissent which flared in the country following the declaration of martial law or the manpower required of the army to enact it. No mention is made of the recent Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, nor of the widespread civil unrest of the 1905 Revolution, which were without doubt crucial factors in the collapse of the state.

While the stated intent of Arnhem is to be applauded – specifically, to challenge accepted ways of thinking and to stimulate the discussion of new approaches – the scale and focus of such an effort is not. Arnhem’s diatribes are at times more iconoclastic than academic, and his critique is weakened by it being directed at the aforementioned authors rather than their arguments or methodologies. Furthermore, Arnhem’s argument is hamstrung by his own methodology, reliant as it is upon conjecture and speculation.

Arnhem’s 1908 paints a picture in which the First European War was fatalistically inevitable; in which Russia’s continued existence up until 1914 would not only have hastened the chain of events which led to war, but would have made that war a more nightmarish prospect than it was; and in which the deconstruction of the Russian Empire was an abstract tragedy of history rather than of real and human significance. To Arnhem, it would seem, the Petersburg explosion was more a historical event whose enormity is matched only by its unexpectedness, rather than a humanitarian disaster of unparalleled proportions.

Somewhat better is Tatyana Saratova’s “Stolypin’s Unfinished Reforms: Russia’s Lost Opportunities”. Hers is likewise a speculative work, although with greater focus and respect for her bibliography. “Stolypin’s Unfinished Reforms”, as its name implies, examines the series of domestic political and agricultural reforms enacted by Russia’s last, progressive Prime Minister in the years prior to the Petersburg explosion and to his subsequent execution by reactionary forces in the aftermath. The subject of her arguments has been poorly represented by the literature, focused as its has been for the last century upon Stolypin’s role in the aftermath of June 30, 1908.

“Stolypin’s Unfinished Reforms”approaches its topic in three dimensions. It begins with a treatment on Stolypin himself, which offers little more than has already been contributed to the literature by Stolypin’s many biographers, although Saratova’s work possesses an emphatic focus on the years 1906-1908 rather than that short period of Stolypin’s life directly associated with the Petersburg explosion. Previous works have often blurred Stolypin’s brief assumption of power with Nicholas II and the Tsarskoye Selo controversy, or else focused upon the Holy Synod’s co-synchronous declaration of the forthcoming Apocalypse heralded by the fiery destruction of Petersburg. Saratova perpetuates none of these shortcomings, although she does seem to rely heavily upon Trimenko’s Stolypin: The Last Tsar to describe the period during which Stolypin attempted to re-impose the structure of the state upon a shattered Russia.

Saratova then moves to an analysis of Stolypin’s reforms while Prime Minister, including the 1905 Revolution and the October Manifesto, the dissolution of the first Dumas, beginnings of union movements, suffrage, and the relation between state and Church. This is the cream of her work, as these reforms have received only cursory attention in the past. An interesting point that is made relates to the support of the autocracy of the Tsar by the Orthodox Church, and how rapidly this support vanished once the Tsar, his heirs, and the state bureaucracy were gone. Here, though, Saratova demonstrates a ethnocentrism which fails to fully appreciate the contemporary lack of understanding of the Petersburg explosion, nor the significance of this to the Orthodox faith. To that effect, Saratova makes very little mention of the apocalyptic panic that swept the eighty-seven million Orthodox Russians after the explosion, and instead contrasts the Synod’s support for Tsarism under the Romanovs with its dramatic condemnation of the Stolypin government. In a similar vein, Saratova also overstates the loss of the industrial region of Saint Petersburg in the collapse of both Tsarist Russia and Stolypin’s provisional government, making little allowance for the essentially agrarian and pre-industrial nature of the Russian empire in 1908, nor of the more industrialised heartland of Muscovy.

The final dimension of Saratova’s work lives more to its subtitle than to its title. Saratova extrapolates upon the image she has constructed of Stolypin’s “unfinished reforms” and writes proscriptively past June 30, 1908. She speculates on the nature of a Russia in which Petersburg was not destroyed, its autarch and his dynasty not killed by the explosion or by reactionary forces afterwards, and its progressive-to-the-point-of-Menshivist Prime Minister was able to affect broad and significant changes to the imperial system. This element of Saratova’s argument is, ultimately, like that of Arnhem’s: counter-factual. She indulges in whimsy and conjecture, and ultimately presents an ahistorical scenario in which the Petersburg meteor hit Earth five hours earlier and exploded harmlessly above the Siberian forests. This author need not remind the reader that, had Saratova’s imagined scenario occurred, the hours which bought Petersburg her safety would also have moved the Earth far from the trajectory of the meteor, rendering the entire speculation – and most of the history of the subsequent twentieth century – moot. And if Arnhem’s structural argument is to be believed, even had the meteor impacted in Siberia rather than Saint Petersburg, very little in history would have changed, and the subsequent wars may well have been more bloody affairs.
Both Arnhem's and Saratova’s works appear in a period of intense introspection as the world approaches the centenary of Saint Petersburg’s destruction. Both approach the topic in ambiguous, unparalleled and, it must be said, un-scholarly ways. Arnhem’s work is macrohistorical to the exclusion of the “smaller” aspects which in confluence compose his macrohistory; while Saratova’s work is microhistorical, bordering on the biographic, and examines the significance of the last Prime Minister and, arguably, the last Tsar. Further separating these works, Arnhem presents a structuralist argument while Saratova presents an agential one. Both, however, are weakened by their conjecture, and represent a growing sub-genre of “alternate history” which has no place in academia, and is better left to authors of science fiction.



My first post. I've also made a map of how I envisioned the 1914 world after this. :)
 
To say that the comet would have hit St. Petersburg if it had arrived 6 hours later is correct only if while spinning on its axis the earth is not also moving along on its solar orbit. Six hours later and the comet might have missed the earth altogether (I don't know, I'm only theorizing).

To answer your WI question... chaos, panic, mayhem, and anarchy.
But Earth's gravity might atract it anyways (again, depending on how much is the time difference, too much and it misses)
 

Michael Busch

I have both personal and professional interests in the Tunguska impact, and have been thinking about this scenario. This is also my first post to these boards, so please pardon and correct any lapses in dialect or historical accuracy - I have been trained as a planetary astronomer, not a historian.

To make the Tunguska-impactor-hits-St.-Petersburg event relatively probable, we must not change the time of the impact. As Lord Grattan and others have noted, that moves the Earth a very long distance along its orbit (2.5 million kilometers in 6 hours) and then we need to move the rock an equal distance for it to hit. Instead, leave the time of the impact constant and move the rock. This is a much smaller deviation: with a change of less than 10000 km, we can put the impact at any point on the hemisphere facing the rock as it came in. That hemisphere included St. Petersburg. A few thousand km is a very small change in the impactor's trajectory through space, when compared to the size of the solar system. The formal point-of-divergence from OTL would be some years before 1908 for a small perturbation to move the impactor, but moving it has no measurable effect on history until it hits at 0:14 UT June 30, 1908.

At this point, the likely effects will depend on _exactly_ where ground zero is. The impact will create a blast zone about 40 km wide, and cause fires and partial collapse of all buildings within a roughly circular region 100 km across. If I have researched correctly, on the morning of June 30 1908 the Romanovs were at the Summer Palace south of the city. If the blast is centered there, then everyone in the palace dies but much of St. Petersburg is spared. If the blast is centered over the city, say above the Hermitage, then the city is laid waste and many of the Socialists (Bolshevik & Menshevik) and the members of the 3rd Duma die. The Summer Palace will collapse/burn in a hard-to-predict manner, and almost any combination of the residents surviving is possible.

So the outcome in Europe could vary from total chaos, through the warfare Schwerpunkt described, to some less violent possibilities. I think Russia's future would have depended most on the number of surviving reactionaries in the city, the survival of Stolypin and other reformist supporters of the dynasty, and the survival and character of the remaining Romanovs.

For example, I considered a timeline where Olga Romanov was the only surviving member of the royal family, and Stolypin and other Octoberists survived. They were able to come to a peace with the more separatist groups in the rest of the Empire - basically enforcing a less autocratic form of the October Manifesto and making Russia a constitutional monarchy. Since Olga was 12 at the time of the impact, she was not in a position to enforce or be used to force government like her father's. The news of the impact caused enough perturbations in Europe that WWI did not start in 1914, although the situation remained tense. I then considered Olga marrying Edward VIII around 1917, making an AngloRussian state that controlled the bulk of the world.

Separate from this, one likely effect of the impact occuring in any populated area would be a greater interest in outer space. I suspect a certain schoolteacher in Kaluga would enjoy earlier and wider fame.
 
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