Heyday of Alaska-Russia Relations

David Ramseur - historian, author & former senior aide to two Alaskan governors and one of its US senators - will speak about the heyday of Alaska-Russian relations and the new Cold War between the US and Russia. Author of Melting the Ice Curtain: The Extraordinary Story of Citizen Diplomacy on the Russia-Alaska Frontier.

David Ramseur moved to Alaska in 1979 where he reported on politics and government in the state and national capitals for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and Anchorage Times. Beginning in 1986 for nearly 30 years, he served as press secretary, communications director, chief of staff, and foreign policy advisor to Alaska Governors Steve Cowper and Tony Knowles and to Anchorage Mayor and U.S. Senator Mark Begich. Ramseur has visited the Soviet Union and Russia more than a dozen times starting with the Alaska Airlines' "Friendship Flight" in 1988, and lived and worked in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, in 1993.

Cover photo of David visiting the memorial to Vitus Bering in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia, in July 2018. In 1725, Bering was sent by Russian Czar Peter the Great to explore the strait between Asia and North America to determine if they were connected by land ( http://www.davidramseur.com/photo-gallery.html ).