This work is an attempt to reconstruct and describe a rather specific discourse, that of the “Soviet incredible.”
This discourse is well known to anyone with a specific interest in the Soviet past or who simply lived at that time and remembers constant talk about psychics, yogis, extraterrestrial civilizations, Bigfoot, the Tunguska meteorite, and the like. Soviet citizens actively discussed these topics, and such interest seems curious and marginal but also clearly indicates something important in the social structure, the political situation, and the ideological climate of the era. As a unique, well-defined phenomenon, the “Soviet incredible” began to take shape almost immediately after World War Two, spreading widely during the Khrushchev thaw, gaining more sophisticated and diverse features in the Brezhnev stagnation era, and reaching peak popularity with Gorbachev’s perestroika. Thus, it was present in the life of Soviet society throughout the entire historical period of late socialism.
