A Soviet mountain mystery, and the conspiracy worlds shared by Russians and the American Right

The Atlantic has an article about a Russian mystery from 1959 that has sparked many conspiracy theories:

Precisely 61 years ago, a band of skiers trekking through the Ural Mountains stashed food, extra skis, and a well-worn mandolin in a valley to pick up on the way back from their expedition. In a moment of lightheartedness, one drew up a fake newspaper with headlines about their trip: “According to the latest information, abominable snowmen live in the northern Urals.” Their excess equipment stored away, the group began moving toward the slope of Peak 1079, known among the region’s indigenous people as “Dead Mountain.” A photograph showed the lead skiers disappearing into sheets of whipping snow as the weather worsened.

Later that night, the nine experienced trekkers burst out of their tent half-dressed and fled to their deaths in a blizzard. Some of their corpses were found with broken bones; one was missing her tongue. For decades, few people beyond the group’s friends and family were aware of the event. It only became known to the wider public in 1990, when a retired official’s account ignited a curiosity that soon metastasized.

Today, the “Dyatlov Pass incident,” named after one of the students on the trek, Igor Dyatlov, has become Russia's biggest unsolved mystery, a font of endless conspiracy theories. Aliens, government agents, “Arctic dwarves”—and yes, even abominable snowmen—have at various points been blamed for the deaths. One state-television show regularly puts self-appointed experts through a theatrical lie-detector test to check their outlandish explanations.

The article notes that Russian has a very, very long history of conspiracy theories coming from the top down, going back at least to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and makes this surprising claim about how widespread belief in conspiracies remain:

An unsolved mystery such as the Dyatlov Pass incident would no doubt rile up truthers in the United States, but the Russian obsession with the incident is above and beyond American internet-forum debates on Area 51 and the chupacabra. Whereas U.S. conspiracy theories often develop on the fringes of public life—a line that has admittedly been blurred in the Donald Trump era—conspiracy-mongering is mainstream in Russia, a country in which 57 percent of the population believes the Apollo moon landings were a hoax.

Which is interesting - the Trump supporting, Wingnut Right in America now has moved to a similar world of conspiracy belief,  with the conspiracies not so much originating from the top, but created or vigorously promoted for profit (see Rupert Murdoch, and the alt Right corporate and private media universe) and then being adopted by the top for cynical political benefit.    But they have both ended up in the same place regarding a post-truth world of politics.