Joseph-Fidele Bernard On the Bering Sea frontier (1921–1922)

In a great number of articles now, Soviet historians have dealt with the attractive theme of the enormity of western, and especially American, activities on the north-eastern fringes of Siberia—activities which, starting in the 1860's, lasted for three quarters of a century. Yet, showing no disrespect to scholars of the stamp of N. Zhikharev, S. V. Bakhrushin, and M. I. Belov, through the operation of one underlying tendency all these accounts of western penetration of Chukotka may be regarded as comprising one large group. For 40 years they have tended, if not wholly to ignore the final phase of North American commercial ‘intervention’ in Chukotka in the years following 1920, then at least to place no emphasis whatever on the awkward facts, for instance, that ‘friendly direct contact between Alaska's and Chukotka's natives went on for several years’ and that some trips between the continents ‘went on until as late as 1944’. The reasons for this are not hard to find: Chukotkan history of the third decade is potentially embarrassing to Moscow. In 1921 the question of whether or not Chukotka formed a part of the Soviet state had not been settled, nor was absolute authority exercised in the remote north-east by the Bolsheviks at that point or, indeed, in 1922. Now a White Russian force would dominate an area, now a detachment of the Japanese army. Worse, there was hostility towards the Bolsheviks in Chukotka even after the demise of the anti-Bolshevik leader Bochkarev in 1923. But more embarrassing than any anti-Bolshevik or petty-bourgeois sentiment, there can be no doubt, has proved the tiresome fact that Moscow blessed the trips to Anadyr' and other points on the Chukotkan littoral made by western schooner masters. Here is the rub: for the new government ‘found it convenient to encourage some American traders to continue, because the Government's own communications with Chukotka were so uncertain’.