Russia and America are less than three miles apart across the Bering Strait, yet they feel as if they are on different planets
to forget—if you ever knew—that Russia and the United States are less than three miles apart, across the icy waters of the Bering Strait . From America’s Little Diomede Island, which is indeed very little, you can cheerily wave or glower, depending on your attitude, at Russia’s Big Diomede Island. Little Diomede has a hundred Alaskans on it, mainly Inuit; Big Diomede has a few military installations and some transient Russian soldiers.
The starting point of a cross-channel relationship in the 1980s was the re-establishment of visa-free travel for indigenous people on both sides of the channel. Many spoke the same language. Large numbers are cousins who had not met since 1948, when the cold war ended fraternisation across the strait. After 1988 there were joyful reunions and talk of open borders.
The town has no proper hotel, just a corridor of five rooms with communal washing facilities on the third floor of a dilapidated block, entered via a smelly, unlit, unmarked stairwell. There is just one tiny restaurant called “Uyut” , valiantly living up to its name but often empty. The town is served by a dismal state airline. Your correspondent was stranded for three days. “You were lucky it wasn’t a fortnight,” said a cheery local. A 36-hour boat ride to Anadyr was the only alternative.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 threw the entire region of Chukotka into the deepest despond, even starvation, as subsidies dried up, the administration fell apart and most of the ethnic Russians, who comprised the population’s majority along with their Ukrainian brethren, cleared off. Nowadays many of the ethnic Russians sign contracts with salaries two or three times higher than in western Russia because of the hardship, then go back home after a few years.
The natives of western Alaska suffer from many of the same troubles, especially alcoholism and poverty: Anchorage, Alaska’s commercial capital, has no fewer than 33meetings. So too do they struggle to retain their culture and language, which Christian missionaries once tried to squash. More and more speak only English.
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