ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- The back doors to the United States and the Soviet Union will open Monday as never before when a jetload of Alaskans makes the brief flight across the Bering Strait to the Soviet port city of Provideniya.
The Alaska Airlines flight, dubbed Alaska Friendship I, will carry 80 passengers from Nome, Alaska, to Provideniya, 230 miles away.
The one-day visit is designed to reunite Eskimo families on opposite sides of the long-closed border, which Eskimos once crossed freely in their walrus skin boats.
'It wasn't easy,' sighed Alaska Airlines spokesman Lou Cancelmi of his company's work to arrange the flight. But it was a sigh of success hard won.
The Alaska Airlines jet, which sports the face of an Eskimo on its tail, got a new paint job for the trip. Provideniya was written on the side of the plane in the Cyrillic script of the Russian language.
The Soviets provided a navigator to guide the plane across the U.S.-Soviet maritime border and up into the fjord where Provideniya is nestled, just about as far from Moscow as any town in the Soviet Union.
Nome and Provideniya are at the same latitude, 100 miles below the Actic Circle, and each is a regional center. Nome has 3,500 residents, Provideniya, perhaps twice that.
Jim Stimpfle, a Nome real estate agent who helped organize Monday's flight, hopes the trip signals the beginning of regular Alaska travel, trade and exchanges with the Soviet Far East and Siberia.
For two years, Stimpfle has written letters to President Reagan, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the mayor of Provideniya and just about everybody else he could think of who might help pry open these back doors and melt the 'Ice Curtain,' as many Alaskans call this border.
A September 'Dear People of Nome' letter from Provideniya Mayor O. Kulinkin helped crack the ice: 'People of Nome, let us be friends. Let us work together and trade together.'
Stimpfle's campaign shifted into high gear, and politicians and business leaders jumped on the bandwagon. The Alaska Chamber of Commerce created a Siberian gateway project and sponsorsed an Alaska-Siberia symposium featuring Gennadi Gerasimov, a Soviet government spokesman.
Gov. Steve Cowper told his trade office to include Siberia in its Pacific Rim planning and called for a Soviet consulate in Alaska to handle proposed trade and tourism.
Alaska Airlines formally applied to make regular flights between Nome and Provideniya and offered to donate a jet for the friendship flight.
In February, Kulinkin promised to work 'for the renewal of family ties' between Alaska and Soviet Eskimos and asked Stimpfle to 'report who of your citizens have relatives in the Chukotsk' Peninsula, where Provideniya and a number of Soviet native villages are located. Stimpfle sent names.
During the Moscow summit the Soviets called Cowper to announce approval of the goodwill flight. Thursday, with arrangements already in place, the Soviets gave the final go-ahead for Monday's flight.
Alaska, a Russian colony until 1867, is close to Siberia -- a mere 2 miles separates an American and Russian island in the Bering Strait, and it's an easy walk in winter.
'But it might as well have been a journey to Mars for Alaskans who just a few years ago took on the task of opening America's back door to the Soviet Union,' said Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska.
Politics got in the way of geography and long-standing neighborly ties linking Eskimos across the strait where the border was bilaterally closed in 1948.
'Something as straightfoward as the friendship flight between Nome and Provideniya seemed like an insurmountable challenge, given the obstacles that evolved over 40 years of cold war between the world's two superpowers,' Murkowski said. 'The 'ice wall' that separated our two nations was as solid as any 'iron curtain' half a world away.'
This friendship flight over the less-than-solid ice curtain is viewed in Alaska as so important that a long-distance telecommunications company, Alascom, won Soviet permission to fly over a cargo plane full of communications gear to broadcast the event live from Provideniya to Alaska. Alascom spokesman Tom Jensen said the broadcast is being made available to the Soviets.
'The Nome-to-Provideniya goodwill flight is a significant first that will go in Alaska's history books,' Murkowski said.
'The most important part of the trip is the reuniting of Alaska native families on our side with their cousins, uncles and relatives on the otherr side,' Cowper said. Cowper and Murkowski are among a handful of dignitaries who will be on the flight.
Cowper said he viewed this as a kind of rebuilding of the old, long-gone Bering land bridge that once linked Asia to America and over which North America's Eskimos and Indians traveled in a trek from Asia millenia ago.
