1843 Hawaiian flag comes into being
1853 Franklin Pierce becomes U.S. president Crimean War
1855 Alexander II becomes Russian tsar
1861 Abraham Lincoln becomes U.S. president Emancipation Proclamation (Russia)
U.S. Civil War begins at Fort Sumter
1863 Lincoln’s proclamation of slavery’s abolition Russian fleets arrive in San Francisco and New York
1865 The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery U.S. Civil War ends Russian–American Telegraph Company is formed
1867 Alaska purchased by the United States (“Seward’s Folly”)
1872 Grand Duke Alexis visits the United States
1881 Alexander III succeeds to the Russian throne Massive pogroms in Russia
1894 Nicholas II becomes Russian tsar
1897 U.S. flag is raised in Hawaii
1901 Theodore Roosevelt becomes U.S. president
1903 Kishenev massacre
1904 Japan attacks Port Arthur (Russo-Japanese War)
1905 Roosevelt organizes the Portsmouth Peace Conference
1913 Woodrow Wilson becomes U.S. president
1914 Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, triggering First World War
1915 Lusitania torpedoed by German submarine
1917 St. Petersburg riots take over the city Lenin forms Communist government United States declares war on Germany U.S. Expeditionary Forces to Russia
1918 Nicholas II and family are assassinated in July
Chapter 1
The Shortest Distance
In the summer of 1987, an extraordinary young woman from Los Alamitos, California, lowered herself gingerly into the frigid waters of the Bering Strait, some 350 miles north of Anchorage, Alaska, and set out to swim to Russia. Lynne Cox was her name. With long, persistent strokes, the stout-hearted athlete doggedly pressed forward, eventually losing sight of the United States. She wore an ordinary swimsuit and bathing cap. Incredibly, she had no wet suit — only protective grease. In those 38ºF–42ºF waters, hypothermia might have been expected to beset Cox, but the cold appeared to leave her unaffected. Steadily and forcefully, she propelled herself through the choppy waters dancing about her, and after what seemed an interminable time, her feet finally scraped the rocky bottom. Lynne Cox was in Russia — she had made it. That the thirty-year-old succeeded in her goal was an unbelievable feat. Warmly bundled psychologists monitoring Cox’s swim from the comfort of the accompanying boat were astonished, as were the admiring publics of Russia and of the United States. In May 1990, at a White House summit conference, President Reagan and President Mikhail Gorbachev raised a toast to the indefatigable Cox who “proved by her courage how closely to each other our peoples live.”
It took Cox two hours and sixteen minutes to cover the distance from Little Diomede Island in the United States to Big Diomede Island in Russia. For her, swimming in those near-freezing waters, the passage must at times have appeared endless. In reality, however, it is the shortest distance, a mere 2.7 miles. The United States nearly abuts Russia — Canada and Mexico aside, Russia is its nearest neighbour.
For over a century, this neighbourliness transcended any consideration of geographic proximity; the happy state of bilateral relations between the United States and Russia had bonded the two countries into firm friendship. From the very birth of the American nation in 1776, relations between the United States and Russia had been predicated on mutual support and respect. To this day, the two countries have never fought one another. Over the centuries, the United States has at one time or another engaged in warfare with virtually every major world power. Americans have taken up arms against the British and the French, the Germans and Spanish, the Italians and Japanese. But never the Russians. And Russia has fought with all these same powers — Spain excepted — and others, like Sweden and Turkey. But never with the United States. Even through the perilous decades of the Soviet Union, through glasnosts and beyond, in all the conflicts of Europe, Asia, or Africa, not a drop of blood has been shed by one of the other. The tale of how that came to be forms some of the more intriguing pages of European and American histories. Insofar as the United States and Russia are concerned, the account of early interaction is particularly compelling, and no more so than from the human interest viewpoint — the citizens of one country influencing the development of the other.
A vivid illustration of supportive action is the Russian response to American pleas for assistance in addressing the problem of Barbary pirates. For centuries, these North African brigands had engaged in high-seas extortion and raiding, at one point invading Ireland and spiriting away the entire population of the coastal town of Baltimore. Only one of the unfortunates returned home from the clutches of the Algerian raiders. The thugs considered themselves at war with any country that had failed to sign a contract guaranteeing hassle-free sailing in the western Mediterranean in return for a hefty annual fee.
In 1792 George Washington was forced to pay Tripoli a ransom fee of $56,000 to free a captured American ship and its crew. Shortly thereafter, the envious Algerians made similar demands, but for larger sums. Tripoli reacted by raising the ante. Enough was enough. Washington refused all demands, and to nobody’s surprise, the pasha of Tripoli declared war against the United States. President Thomas Jefferson dispatched a fleet of four newly constructed ships to engage the Barbary canaille. During the ensuing battle, some American sailors were taken prisoner — naturally, a huge payment was demanded. Ransom money was out of the question, and the president turned to the Russian tsar for assistance. The response was immediate. Russia at the time had a formal alliance with the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, suzerain of the Barbary Coast, and it also had a well-armed fleet stationed in the Mediterranean. Tsar Alexander leaned heavily on the sultan, and within weeks the incarcerated seamen were released; Jefferson sent a warm letter of gratitude to St. Petersburg. Such was the cooperative relationship between both the two heads of state and also their nations.
Thomas Jefferson, as secretary of state, wrote in 1791, “Russia is the most cordially friendly nation to us of any power on earth.” Tsar Alexander I — the eventual vanquisher of the indomitable Napoleon — declared, “He [Jefferson] is the only sovereign who cordially loves us.” Alexander reciprocated in admiration not only of Jefferson but of the United States, particularly for its “… free and wise constitution, which assures the happiness of each and everyone.” Warm words indeed. Such was the relationship in Jefferson’s time and so it continued over a hundred years. By 1809, when Russia finally extended diplomatic recognition to the young American republic, the relationship between the two countries had solidified into a friendship that ended only with the fall of imperial Russia in 1917.
In Jefferson’s day, the United States was in its infancy, a nation founded on the principles of equality and freedom — in the truest sense an open country with an open society. Russia, on the other hand, was an ancient country of startling inequality and, in the words of Churchill, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” In one country, the democratically elected president, a zealous republican answerable to his people; in the other, a hereditary monarch, an autocrat of boundless power, answerable only to himself. “In the domain assigned to the Tsar,” wrote an eighteenth-century historian, “he can, like God, create what he wills.” Russia and the United States were two countries, nearly half a world apart, standing in startling contrast but regarding each other with respect and partiality.
The countries did have one element in common at that time: insofar as Europe was concerned, they were both outsiders. The United States was a newcomer to the family of nations, physically distanced by the Atlantic Ocean, and just beginning to develop muscle. It was a country where democratic ideals had rooted in revolutionary soil. Many crowned heads in Europe viewed the new nation as a novel, possibly insidious experiment — for some, bordering on anathema. Ancient country as it was, Russia