(Note: On the day of the historic Alaska Talks during the Trump/Putin Summit held in Anchorage, Alaska on August 15, 2025, a version of this opinion piece appeared on the editorial pages of the Anchorage Daily News.)

Opinions

Opinion: In Russian relations, Alaska once stood as ground zero for citizen diplomacy

By Kathleen Tarr

Published: Anchorage Daily News, Sunday, August 17, 2025

Way back when, I worked on the Alaska Chamber of Commerce staff during the heyday of the Soviet Union’s monumental turn toward an era of glasnost under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev.

The extraordinary cultural and business events between Alaska and Russia that our project team helped organize were dubbed the “Soviet-American Reunion Week.” From an on-the-ground-in-Alaska perspective, it was as if the Cold War tensions between our countries had instantly vanished into the cold Bering Sea.

During the outbreak of euphoria that resulted after borders were opened up, in 1989, an Aeroflot jet made its first-ever landing in Anchorage with over 100 Soviets on board. On extremely short notice, a jam-packed trade show was held in the Egan Civic & Convention Center featuring a diverse array of Russian arts, crafts and furs. that Alaskans quickly bought up. The week also culminated with a joint American-Russian rock concert, and many friendly meetings between Alaskan entrepreneurs and their nascent counterparts, mostly from the Russian Far East. Indigenous Alaskans made personal acquaintances with blood relatives they had never met from “the other side” in places such as Chukotka.

We organized several high-level business trade missions to the Russian Far East with our Russian partners. Immediatley landing in the remote city of Anadyr, paranoid Communist officials confiscated my film.

Later, hundreds of Russians over several years traveled, miraculously and without a lot of bureaucratic red tape, to join a special UAA business exchange program. Alaska’s Carr Gottstein company started selling and shipping foodstuffs to the Russian Far East via the Port of Tacoma — containers of American ice cream and frozen strawberries were especially in demand.

Russians were eager to learn about the market system. We were ecstatic to forge new and deep friendships, and to learn about the natural resources of Sakhalin Island, Yakutia, Vladivostok and Magadan –the similarities in our flora, fauna, and geology. (Magadan, the former administrative headquarters for the Siberian gulags, became Anchorage’s “Sister City” during perestroika. On his long journey across Russia on his way to Alaska, Vladimir Putin and his entourage overnighted in Magadan.)

Of course, back then, there were budding romances, lots of new Russian language courses springing up, vodka tastings, Russian students visiting private homes on popular exchange programs, and many shopping trips for Russians enamored with jeans, sneakers, and what an overflowing grocery store looked like.

Did Anchorage’s history really include Nike missile sites near Anchorage’s Arctic Valley ski area and in what’s now Kincaid Park? Did we store weapons curing the Cold War to immediately shoot down any Soviet planes from the Evil Empire that dare invade our airspace?

We characterized Alaskans and Russians as “brothers of the north” and made light-hearted remarks about a metaphorical Ice Curtain that had melted without the need for a lot of political intervention from the Moscow or Washington, D.C. hierarchies in their typical, top-down, non-listening style of governance. People genuinely came together to try and build new lives. And this grassroots comaraderie with the Russian government’s more humanistic values, seemed to create profound changes.

After all, regimes and administrations come and go, but in the end, it is people-to-people relationships that mattered the most, as Alaskans so ably demonstrated. Personal experience most profoundly shapes our understanding of freedom and human rights and teaches us the truths we need most.

Some social media posts have cast the Trump-Putin Summit as a meeting of two “dictators” and a “murderer.”

I am trying to keep in mind what the great Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, said after he first visited Alaska in 1966 and published his book, “Divided Twins” about Alaska and Siberia:

“At the end of the 20th Century, hopes we had not dared to hope have appeared at last. The diplomacy of diplomats tricked us in many ways, but a new ‘citizen diplomacy’ has appeared. This diplomacy has been extremely successful, just as the action of partisans during wartime are sometimes more important than those of the regular army.”

A multitude of voices from everyday people are speaking up against Russia’s authoritarian leadership and publicly demonstrating their support for Ukraine after three years of war and the loss of an estimated 400,000 Ukrainians and 900,000 Russians. Whatever happens as a result of this summit, and the next round of negotiations, let us hope we won’t be tricked again.

Kathleen Tarr lives and writes in Anchorage. She is the author of the spiritual memoir, “We Are All Poets Here” and has been a frequent traveler to Russia and Poland.