More than 150 years ago, Russia sold the Alaska territory in the northeastern part of the double American continent to the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin will meet in the city of Anchorage on Friday for their summit on Ukraine. The whole world is watching Alaska: Trump and Putin will meet at the U.S. military base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage. Its history dates back to World War II.
According to the U.S. military, a runway was built at the site in 1940, and the first Air Force personnel were stationed there that same year. During the Cold War, the base in southern Alaska became increasingly important for the “defense of North America,” according to documents from the U.S. Library of Congress. Since 2010, it has combined the U.S. Air Force’s Elmendorf Base and the Army’s Fort Richardson Base.
A total of 30,000 soldiers are stationed there. Russian colony In the 18th century, it was the Dane Vitus Bering who, on an expedition commissioned by the Tsarist Empire, discovered the strait between Asia and America—the Bering Strait—which was later named after him. This is how the West learned of Alaska’s existence. The Russians first settled on Kodiak Island to hunt seals and sell their pelts.
Tsar Paul I founded the Russian-American Company in 1799, which organized the fur trade without regard for the indigenous peoples. Overhunting, however, caused seal and sea otter populations to dwindle, and the economy of the Russian settlers collapsed. In 1867, Moscow sold the territory to Washington for $7.2 million—a sum many at the time criticized as too much for such a remote and inhospitable area. It was not until 1959 that Alaska became a U.S. state.
Orthodox churches and Russian dialect More than 35 Orthodox churches, some with the distinctive domes, still recall the Russian presence in Alaska. The state’s Orthodox diocese is the oldest in North America and maintains a seminary in Kodiak. A dialect derived from Russian, blended with indigenous languages, persisted for decades, especially near the city of Anchorage.
Today, however, almost no one speaks it. But Russian is still taught near the massive glaciers of the Kenai Peninsula, in a small rural school run by an Orthodox community with about one hundred students. Proximity to Siberia “The Russians are our neighbors from across the street—you can even see Russia from an island in Alaska,” said Sarah Palin in 2008, then governor of the state and Republican vice-presidential candidate. In fact, two islands face each other in the Bering Strait:
Big Diomede Island to the west belongs to Russia, and Little Diomede Island, home to a few dozen people, belongs to the United States. They are less than four kilometers apart. Further south, in October 2022, two Russians landed their boat on St. Lawrence Island, just under 100 kilometers from the Siberian coast.
They requested asylum in the United States because they did not want to fight in the war against Ukraine. For years, the U.S. military has regularly intercepted Russian aircraft approaching U.S. airspace over Alaska. When the Tsar sold Alaska, he did not yet know what treasures of oil, gas, and precious metals lay hidden in the ground. But Moscow has no ambitions to reclaim Alaska. “It’s cold there too,” Putin once said.
