Melting The Ice Curtain

Just five years after a Soviet missile blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the North Pacific, an Alaska Airlines jet braved Cold War tensions to fly into tomorrow. Crossing the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Russian Far East, the 1988 Friendship Flight reunited Native peoples of common languages and cultures for the first time in four decades. It and other dramatic efforts to thaw what was known as the Ice Curtain launched a thirty-year era of perilous, yet prolific, progress. Melting the Ice Curtain tells the story of how inspiration, courage, and persistence by citizen-diplomats bridged a widening gap in superpower relations. David Ramseur was a first-hand witness to the danger and political intrigue, having flown on that first Friendship Flight, and having spent thirty years behind the scenes with some of Alaska’s highest officials. As Alaska celebrates the 150th anniversary of its purchase, and as diplomatic ties with Russia become perilous, Melting the Ice Curtain shows that history might hold the best lessons for restoring diplomacy between nuclear neighbors.

Maps -- Prologue -- A call to arms -- Extending hands of friendship -- A Juneau peacenik in the Kremlin -- Swimming against the current -- Historic flight approved -- Friendship flight to tomorrow -- Dramatic reversal -- Soviets return the favor -- Breaking the ice -- Adventure diplomacy across the Strait -- Deception on Diomede -- From Uelen to Vladivostok -- Visa-free reunification -- Golden Samovar Service -- Open for business -- Beyond the coup -- University of Alaska teaches Capitalism 101 -- Oil in Sakhalin, flush toilets in Chukotka -- The thrill is gone -- Mercy mission to Magadan -- Always keep talking -- Detained in the Bering Strait -- A special Alaska-Russia affinity -- Appendix

A thriller that explodes with taut suspense and raw emotion, The Ice Curtain pulls us into a murder mystery that is at once compelling and deeply moving. With the skill of a master storyteller, the bestselling author of Siberian Light breathes life into a haunting and unforgettable landscape, weaving a dazzlingly original story of murder, deceit...and diamonds. The Ice Curtain The Iron Curtain is down, and Russia has become a smuggler’s paradise. Hidden behind a curtain of ice in Siberia’s far north is the richest diamond mine on earth, a motherlode of treasure so vast it could break the back of the world’s oldest–and wealthiest–cartel. A cartel that will buy the enemies it can...and eliminate the ones it cannot. Against this turbulent backdrop, Gregori Nowek searches for the truth behind the murder of his best friend–shot in cold blood on a dark Moscow street. In a violent land where a twenty-dollar bill can buy or end a life, half a billion dollars in rough diamonds have vanished, lost between Siberia’s mines and Moscow’s vaults. The brutal murder of his best friend tests everything Nowek believes as a Russian, and as a man. In a dark realm of glittering diamonds, corrupt politicians, biznessmen, and cops caught up in the chaos of modern Russia, Nowek must find the missing diamonds before the world finds out they’re gone. At stake is the future of Russia itself. Nowek’s search will take him back to the place he knows best...Siberia, where the reason for his friend’s murder is buried inside a gem-filled chasm beneath eternal ice and snow. It is a secret guarded by the vastness of Siberia, the diamond cartel, and a beautiful young woman who, like the dazzling gems, is trapped in a grim city walled off from the world behind a curtain of ice. Dangerously stubborn and committed to the truth, Nowek risks his life to vindicate a friend, to secure Russia’s future, and to bring an astounding act of deception into the light of day. With haunting images and a powerful sense of character and place, The Ice Curtain is riveting entertainment. Deeply atmospheric and unfailingly gripping, it delivers top-notch suspense from its opening scene to its unforgettable climax.

The New Ice Curtain explores Russia’s strategic ambitions for its Arctic region—an understudied and underappreciated region that encompasses nearly the entire northern coast of Eurasia.

Shortly after her father’s death, Elisa Brodinsky Miller uncovered a cache of letters among his belongings. Written in Russian and Yiddish, with datelines in Tsarist and early Soviet Russia, the letters detail eight long years (1914-1922) during which Elisa’s father, his five siblings, and their mother spend apart from Elisa’s grandfather who had left for America, believing their separation would be short. Miller, a Russian affairs specialist, learns bit by bit with each translation about the family she knew so little about, and the eight years of history they lived through, enabling her for the first time to connect her own experiences with those who came before her. This captivating memoir bridges the past with the present, as we learn about her grandparents’ struggles to escape Tsarist Russia, her parents’ hopes for their marriage in America, and her own reach for meaning and purpose: each a generation with dreams—first theirs, now hers.

In the Anthropocene, icy environments have taken on a new centrality and emotional valency. This book examines the diverse ways in which ice and humans have performed with and alongside each other over the last few centuries, so as to better understand our entangled futures. Icescapes – glaciers, bergs, floes, ice shelves – are places of paradox. Solid and weighty, they are nonetheless always on the move, unstable, untrustworthy, liable to collapse, overturn, or melt. Icescapes have featured – indeed, starred – in conventional theatrical performances since at least the eighteenth century. More recently, the performing arts – site-specific or otherwise – have provoked a different set of considerations of human interactions with these non-human objects, particularly as concerns over anthropogenic warming have mounted. The performances analysed in the book range from the theatrical to the everyday, from the historical to the contemporary, from low-latitude events in interior spaces to embodied encounters with the frozen environment.

Introduction -- Alaska's first information highway -- Expansion after World War II and "the talking lady of the North"--Early broadcasting -- Privatizing the Alaska communications system -- The beginning of the satellite era -- The NASA experiments -- From satellite experiments to commercial service -- Telephone service for every village -- Broadcasting and teleconferencing for rural Alaska -- Rural television : from RATNET to ARCS -- Deregulation and disruption -- State planning and policy -- Alaska's local telephone companies -- The phone wars -- Distance learning : from satellites to the internet -- Telemedicine in Alaska -- A new century : the growth of mobile and broadband -- Past and future connections

This book provides a comprehensive, systematic overview of original theoretical, experimental, and numerical studies in the building services engineering domain. It brings together different strands of the topic, guided by the two key features of energy savings and reduction of the pollutant emissions. Technical, economic, and energy efficiency aspects related to the design, modelling, optimisation, and operation of diverse building services systems are explored. This book includes various theoretical studies, numerical and optimisation models, experiments, and applications in this field, giving an emphasis to: indoor environment quality assurance; energy analysis, modelling, and optimisation of heating systems; improving the energy performance of refrigeration and air-conditioning systems; valorising the solar and geothermal energies; analysis of thermal energy storage technologies; hydraulic simulation and optimisation of water distribution systems; and improving the energy efficiency of water pumping. With 11 pedagogically structured chapters, containing numerous illustrations, tables, and examples, this book provides researchers, lecturers, engineers, and graduate students with a thorough guide to building service engineering.