Thanks to Vic Fischer’s visionary work helping write Alaska’s constitution and his enormous accomplishments as a city, state, federal, and university official, everyday Alaskans are better off. What is less appreciated is that Fischer also bettered the lives of thousands of Russians, primarily Indigenous peoples.
As Mikhail Gorbachev opened up the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, Fischer was among the first Alaskans to step foot in the Russian Far East after four decades of prohibited contact. Appointed in 1989 to head up a two-person Soviet affairs office within the University of Alaska, he discovered grim conditions in the huge but isolated Chukotka region just 55 miles from Alaska: skyrocketing unemployment, industries collapsing, acute food shortages.
Life was especially disastrous for Russian Natives, many teetering on the edge of survival. Doing something to help was personal for Alaskans, because many Bering Strait Alaska Natives had relatives in Russia, from whom they were banned from contact for 40 years of Cold War isolation.
Likely colored by his childhood in the Stalinist
USSR, Fischer dedicated himself to improving their lives. He found a sympathetic ear with U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. Between 1992 and 2008 — largely at Fischer’s request and mostly earmarked by Stevens — more than $26 million in federal funds passed through Alaska to support economic, cultural, and educational projects in Russia.
Coupled with funding from a new Chukotka governor, one of the world’s richest men, Fischer’s efforts helped produce 18 schools, 28 medical facilities, and hundreds of homes with hot water and flush toilets in one of the north’s poorest regions. Some 62,000 Russian entrepreneurs and officials received Western business training at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s American Russian Center, many of whom today still remember fondly their ties with Alaska.
For the better part of a century, Fischer was a witness to Russia’s evolution: Stalinist purges, World War II, the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR, and Putin’s police state and foreign invasions. Vic’s advice I remember best was: “Regardless of how bad it gets, keep talking.” I can think of no better way to honor his legacy than to heed that.
— David Ramseur
Anchorage
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