Soviet sweatshirts & Seward’s folly converge on historical Trump-Putin Alaska summit
When Air Force transport doors opened in Anchorage and Sergey Lavrov stepped into the cool August air, the cameras were ready. Across his chest, in bold Cyrillic letters—CCCP—announced a relic of Soviet pride, hinting at Russia’s grander ambitions for the Arctic as Vladimir Putin seeks to reestablish the USSR’s former stature and power.
The Russian foreign minister is in Alaska as part of the delegation to Friday’s high-profile meeting between Presidents Putin and Donald Trump, the first such summit in the state’s history. At the top of the agenda is the ongoing war in Ukraine, with the whole affair taking a distinct air of old world imperialism as the victims of Russia’s aggression—Ukraine—absent from discussions.
The choice of venue is already thick with symbolism (and not just for the fact that Trump has decided to invite wanted war criminal Putin onto US soil), Alaska, after all, was once Russia’s to command—a connection Moscow has never quite forgotten. In recent years that nostalgia has taken on a more ominous edge: billboards reading “Аляска наша!” (“Alaska is ours!”) have been spotted in several Russian cities since the start of the war in Ukraine, depicting Alaska as part of Russian territory.
Seward’s bargain
That connection stretches back more than two centuries to a time when the Russian Empire planted its flag along Alaska’s coasts and islands. Russian explorers first reached the region in the mid-18th century with Vitus Bering’s expeditions opening the way for waves of fur traders and promyshlenniki — hardy frontiersmen who established settlements from the Aleutians to Sitka. The lucrative sea otter pelt trade with China financed Russia’s colonial ambitions and the Russian-American Company became the de facto governing authority, building forts, Orthodox churches and trading posts.
Yet Alaska was never an easy prize. Native peoples including the Tlingit and Aleut resisted Russian control and the vast distances to St. Petersburg made administration slow and costly. By the mid-19th century overhunting had depleted fur resources, reducing the territory’s economic value. The Crimean War (1853–1856) further strained imperial finances and underscored the vulnerability of remote possessions. Russia feared that in any future war with Britain, Alaska—just across the Bering Strait from British Canada—would be impossible to defend.
Faced with these realities, Tsar Alexander II’s government decided to sell. U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward, an ardent expansionist, seized the opportunity. Negotiations with Russian envoy Eduard de Stoeckl culminated in the March 30, 1867 agreement: 586,412 square miles for $7.2 million or about two cents an acre. Critics in the American press called it “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox” but the mockery faded as gold, salmon, timber and later oil and gas were discovered. In 1912 Alaska became a U.S. territory and in 1959 it entered the Union as the 49th state—by then a strategic linchpin in the Cold War.
Back to the future
Now, more than 150 years later, the setting for the Putin–Trump summit is bringing that history back into focus. Meeting in Anchorage places the leaders on soil that once flew the Russian flag and Lavrov’s wardrobe choice has turned the subtext into headline material. Whether it is calculated symbolism, Arctic signaling or personal nostalgia, the CCCP sweatshirt lands like a wink from history—linking today’s diplomacy to a moment when Russia’s American ambitions ended with the stroke of a pen.
For a ruthless imperialist like Putin, actively engaged in a brutal war of conquest in Ukraine, all loss of a land is historical humiliation he’d very much like to rectify.
