Way back in 1991, as the once-mighty Soviet Union disintegrated and Westerners cheered, Vladimir Putin’s favorite rock and roll band released “Don’t Fool Around, America,” a patriotic hit about an even older lost cause – Russia’s 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States.
This bouncy, accordion-driven single ignored the disorienting collapse of the Soviet dictatorship and instead pointed listeners east, across the Bering Strait, to the 49th U.S. state, demanding:
“Give us our dear Alaska back/Give us our dear native land.”
Now the song, by rabble-rousing rockers Lyuba (the Loud Ones), has taken on new significance as President Donald Trump prepares to host Vladimir Putin at an Alaskan military base – and conspiracy theories resurface claiming Uncle Sam swindled Mother Russia out of the 665,000-square-mile Arctic jewel.
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Russian America
Part theory, part wish, longstanding Alaska conspiracies gain prominence in Russia during times of conflict, when nationalists invoke perceived betrayals of the 19th century Russian and 20th century Soviet empires, said Andrei Znamenski, a history professor at the University of Memphis.
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Such talk “is amplified” now, amid the Ukraine war and the August 15 Trump-Putin summit, Znamensi told USA TODAY.
“It turns out that Russian America was not sold to the United States. The real events were completely different,” one Russian news outlet wrote recently, describing an alternative – and, historians say, false – account in which Russia’s claimed dominion in Alaska was merely leased to the United States, with the lease long expired.
An ‘act of spite’
The first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska was founded in 1784, and the state today still preserves a handful of Russian Orthodox churches. Some residents of the Aleutian Islands continue to practice a syncretic combination of Orthodox Christianity and shamanism, Znamenski said.
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But after Russia’s defeat at the hands of the British in the costly 1854-56 Crimean War, Tsar Nicholas II decided to cut his losses and relinquish the difficult-to-defend Alaska. Britain, which ruled Canada, was eyeing the rich territory, so Nicholas sold it for $7 million to a less bellicose bidder: The United States.
“It was an act of spite” against England, Znamenski said.
Nicholas hasn’t been forgiven by nationalist writers, some of whom see him as the dupe of Masonic and Jewish conspiracies. One author, Ivan Mironov, wrote his 2007 book, “A Fateful Deal: How Alaska was Sold,” while in jail for plotting the assassination of a reformist former deputy prime minister.
Paradise lost
Alaska and Crimea remain linked in some ways today, both viewed as historic Russian regions lost by weak leaders – Yeltsin, the first president of independent Russia, is reviled for recognizing Crimea as part of Ukraine after the USSR collapsed.
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In 2016, two years after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, a black granite memorial was raised in Sailors' Square of the Black Sea city of Yevpatoria with a command to future generations: "We returned Crimea, it's up to you to return Alaska."
“Siberia and Alaska, the two shores are the same,” Lyuba sang. “Women, horses, thrills along the way.”
A music video for the song begins with an animated machine gun severing Alaska from the North American continent. (Lyuba’s lead singer was later elected to the Russian parliament, or Duma, as a member of Putin’s United Russia party.)
All or nothing
For most of the Russian nationalist intelligentsia, Alaska is less a jewel to be recovered than a warning against any concession to the West. Alexander Dugin, a leading intellectual of Russia’s “Eurasianist” far right who's closely tied to Putin, has often raised the Alaska example.
Dugin, whose adult daughter was killed in a 2022 car bombing blamed on Ukraine’s secret service – for which he was the presumed target – was deadly serious in discussing the stakes of the Alaska summit in a recent article.
“Putin has repeatedly admitted that the West never keeps its word, constantly deceives and distorts, and to trust its leaders in any way is impossible under any circumstances,” he wrote August 13 in the Russian-language newsweekly Stolista-S.
“For Trump, it is a deal, for us fate,” Dugin said. “Ukraine will either be ours or nothing at all.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: It was sold in 1867, but some Russians want Alaska back from the U.S.
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