Reflections on Siberia's "Gloomy River"

In the 1980s the Soviet Academy of Sciences proposed to build a massive dam and hydroelectric station on the Lower Tunguska river in the Evenki Autonomous Okrug (now a municipal district of Krasnoyarsk Territory). This would have been the largest and most northerly hydroelectric station in the world. Plans for the project were abandoned with the collapse of the USSR. The plan was resuscitated twenty years later, only to be abandoned again. This essay explores themes of protest, anticipation, and deferral in the context of a highly marginalized Indigenous population. Moving between literary and media critique to social theory, we suggest that the effects of the dam proposals produce conditions for enduring feelings of indeterminacy.