In two northern outposts, 'ice curtain' thaws

As little as 50 miles separate Alaska's Inupiat and Yupik Eskimo communities from the isolated Russian region of Chukotka.

But for decades, these two remote pockets of northern life might as well have been oceans apart, so solid was the cold war's "ice curtain" thrown across the narrow Bering Strait. Even the Soviet collapse did little, in the short term, to rebuild cultural bridges shattered by an era of weapons-grade wariness.

Now, a dozen years after the cold war ended, residents on both sides of the Bering Strait are becoming reacquainted with their ice-bound neighbors – and rejoicing at their proximity.

Fueled by a mutual desire for modernization and economic progress, the cultures are becoming increasingly intertwined:

• Russian officials are inviting applications from US airlines to provide scheduled service to Chukotka from Nome, a regional Alaskan hub of 3,600 people.

• An Anchorage, Alaska, company that organizes tours to Chukotka is using National Park Service funds to train and employ Chukotka natives to guide visitors through their villages.

• Inupiat and Yupik Eskimos are pooling traditional knowledge with Chukotka natives to map the denning sites of polar bears – the original diplomats, who roam across the frozen border.

• With federal money, an Alaska reindeer-meat processor is teaching Chukotkans to open and operate a similar business on their side of the strait.

Such ties may seem only natural for people living in such proximity. And in fact, exchanges between the regions' natives have a long history.

The Bering Strait was once a bastion of multiculturalism. Travel across it was common – for people as well as wandering polar bears – and families spread themselves on either side of the water. Only 2.5 miles separate Alaska's Little Diomede Island from Russia's Big Diomede Island. And one Eskimo dialect, Siberian Yup'ik, thrives in both Alaska and Chukotka, a linguistic legacy of the regions' common past.

Yet the logical link-ups were lost in a political ice age that endured even after the cold war's official end. While the fall of the Soviet Union spurred a race toward a market economy, Chukotka – the closest area, geographically, to the US – appeared trapped in its own anachronistic freeze.

Alaskans striving for business, cultural, or scientific links with Chukotka neighbors ran into bureaucratic roadblocks, or worse. Bering Strait scientists sometimes were arrested or had equipment confiscated when they set foot in Russia. Officials demanded steep fees when charities donated food, clothing, and medicine – yet many of the items remained locked away when they arrived in Chukotka.

Chief among the obstacles, say some Alaskans, was former Chukotka Governor Alexander Nazarov, who treated the region as his personal fiefdom, according to Sue Steinacher, a Fairbanks, Alaska-based researcher studying Alaska-Chukotka relations. "He wanted to do his own thing and he didn't want any do-gooders looking over his shoulder," she says.

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