Mys Shmidta
Most modern occult historians pick 1954 for the ‘official’ start of the USA/USSR esoteric ‘Shadow Struggle’ that took place around, behind, and below the exoteric ‘Cold War.’ The various Western Shadow Governments had hoped that Stalin’s self-assassination (it’s a long story, and one that involves a botched immortality spell and a mirror) would allow for an easing of tensions, but Nikita Khrushchev was unfortunately just the right combination of bloody ambition and secret credulousness to be willing to use the supernatural as a weapon, and never mind what Marx and Lenin said about dialectic materialism. There was a lot of immediate results from Khrushchev’s tacit declaration of war, ranging from the Battle of Dien Bien Phu to the adoption of In God We Trust on all American currency – but it’s the Siberian military base at Mys Shmidta that is of interest, here.
The cover story about Mys Shmidta – that it was constructed near the very tip of Siberia as a forward staging base for nuclear bombing missions – is of course simultaneously true, and irrelevant. The esoteric purpose for the site was to contain what may or may not have been a disastrous magical experiment. The Soviet magical program always labored under exceptionally difficult conditions, thanks to Stalin’s remarkable propensity for state-sponsored murder. This resulted in the program having to work with what they had, when it came to esoteric adepts. It also meant that the program never had in place anything remotely resembling proper anti-magical protections; the Soviets could not even count on theurgical workings in a crisis.
The Mys Shmidta Incident was a perfect example of the problems that plagued Soviet spellcasters. A working group of half-trained, half-mad, and usually only half-sober wizards was scraped together and sent to Siberia to strike superstitious terror in the hearts of the Americans. Their plan (which was admittedly not well thought-out) was to literally turn the West Red by, well, casting a spell that would make the very light itself in the Western Hemisphere crimson-colored. The Politburo was promised that they could have America destabilized and panic-stricken for the cost of only minor resources.
Whether the plan would succeed or not is academic at this point, as what actually happened was that a set of five erstwhile Soviet wizards managed to end up dead with their brains leaking out of their noses, in the process of creating a swathe of territory where large sections are apparently permanently only visible in black and white. The Soviets poked at this ongoing mystery for several decades, in that half-hearted way that one does when one is reasonably sure that doing nothing is fairly safe, but doing anything may be disastrous. The investigation then more or less dissipated with the Soviet Union, because nobody was paying for it and there seemed no pressing danger. And, in fact, there has been no change in the site from then to now.
So checking it out should be a snap. After all, the idea isn’t to do anything; it’s just to see if anything is now happening. As soon as the party makes it to Siberia, allays the suspicion of the local town, and of course spends the traditional day and a night at an abandoned military base that’s also the epicenter of an ongoing botched spell, they’re pretty much done. Trivial, surely.