Alaska Day or time for annexation? The Russian jokes that just won’t die.
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Version 0 of 1. On this Saturday in 1867, Russia officially handed over the territory that would become Alaska to the United States. Nearly a century and a half later, icy relations between Russia and the United States have breathed new life into old jokes that "Russian America" should reunite with the Motherland. It is a joke, isn’t it? Russians have never looked on Alexander II’s sale of nearly 600,000 square miles of land for about 2 cents an acre with a particular sense of pride, and over the years, tongue-in-cheek calls to reclaim Alaska have been a way for Russians to express their frustration with the United States through various forms of pop culture. “Don’t be a fool, America,” goes one campy hit from just after the Soviet Union broke up. “Give us back the land of Alaska! Give us back our dear land!” But since the annexation of Crimea this year, the idea of Russia pulling together old territories it once willingly sold or gifted away no longer seems so farfetched – which is giving the Alaska reclamation trope new life in social media, statements and song. “From Alaska to the Kremlin!” an accordion player and well-known Russian singer belts in a song describing “My Homeland” that has gained well over a million views since being posted on YouTube in late September. (This version, with less hits, has English subtitles.) “Alaska back to Russia” was the title of a WhiteHouse.gov petition that earned more than 42,000 signatures and was widely covered in Russian media this year, before being removed. It even became popular to refer to Alaska as "Ice-Cream" – a play on the Russian word for Crimea, which is pronounced like the English word "cream." But the Alaska bandwagon also has some more serious hangers-on. As highlighted in the Moscow Times this week, Deputy Prime Minister for defense issues Dmitry Rogozin recently penned a forward to a book purporting to prove the folly of the Alaska purchase, and argued that handing over Alaska was the sort of bum deal that “can produce an entire century of loss and defeat of a great power.” Russia’s decision to get rid of Alaska in 1867 was motivated by concerns that it might lose the territory, which was important to the then-empire mostly for its role in the fur trade, in a future war. The idea of offloading Alaska started gaining ground after Russia’s loss to an alliance of European powers during the Crimean War. Modern-day Russia is arguably using a very different playbook in its international relations, as the move to seize Crimea earlier this year touched off a sanctions war with the West that escalated when troops and weapons came into Ukraine over the border from Russia. (Russia denies its troops or weapons were ever in Ukraine.) But if Crimea is once again inspiring Alaskan adventurism in Russia's collective imagination, it will be a long while before former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has to worry about finding herself subsumed into the country she once famously said she could see from her state. “What would you need Alaska for?” Russian President Vladimir Putin said this year, when asked if annexing Alaska was on the table. “It’s quite cold there.” |