San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
When Russia rescued Fort Ross State Park
It seemed to be almost a joke. Oleg Matveychev, a member of the Russian parliament, went on television a couple of weeks ago to propose that the United States pay reparations for the cost of the Ukrainian war by returning former Russian properties “seized by the United States” including Alaska and Fort Ross, the onetime Russian colony on the Sonoma County coast.
“As well as the Antarctic,” he said. “We discovered it, so it belongs to us.” It all sounded ludicrous, especially on social media. “Good luck with that,” said Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy. “That will never, ever, ever happen,” tweeted Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Others called the idea “crazy,” or silly.
But it was no joke to many members of the Bay Area’s Russian American community who feel a strong affection for Fort Ross, the colonial settlement 90 miles north of San Francisco that once marked the farthest extent of the Russian empire. Fort Ross was Russian territory for only 30 years, and that was long ago. The Russian flag was hauled down in 1842. But the little fort has an outsize place in American-Russian history. “It was our little connection to Russia,” said Natalie Sabelnik, a San Franciscan who is descended from Russian emigres.
Fort Ross is more than that. Over the past few years, it became a symbol to both the 52,000 Russian Americans in the Bay Area and to the Russian government. Based on directives from what was described as “the highest level” of the Russian government, Russian organizations came to the rescue of Fort Ross State Historic Park during a California budget crisis.
The Russians sent their ambassador from Washington to Sacramento to work out a deal with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. As it turned out, the deal involved financial support for Fort Ross from the Renova Corp. Renova poured more than $1 million into Fort Ross to repair buildings, restore a historic orchard first planted by the Russians two centuries ago, restore California’s first windmill, and to give financial support to a series of high-level cultural conferences and exchanges. One event that was supported financially was a trip by dancers from the Kashia Pomo tribe, the native inhabitants of the Sonoma coast, to Siberia and Moscow.
The series of events were part of a bold and sweeping project — and participants at various times included Stanford University, Chevron and Cisco.
The projects were coordinated through the Fort Ross Conservancy, a Sonoma County nonprofit corporation. The Russian government took the Fort Ross project so seriously that Sarah Sweedler, executive director of the conservancy, was presented with the Order of Friendship in the Kremlin by Vladimir Putin himself.
Dealing with Russia is complex. Much of the money for the Fort Ross effort came through the nonprofit Renova Fort Ross Foundation — and the president of Renova is Viktor Vekselberg, one of Russia’s oligarchs and a close associate of Putin. In 2018, Vekselberg was sanctioned by the United States as a result of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Renova’s involvement with Fort Ross and the Fort Ross Conservancy, the state park’s nonprofit partner, ended.
And now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has added a layer of complexity — and sadness — to Americans of Russian descent. Sabelnik’s family fled two revolutions — in Russia and China. She was born in Shanghai. “I know what it’s like to be a refugee,” she said. She came to the U.S. as a child in the Cold War. Other kids in her first San Francisco school were cruel. “When they found out I was Russian they called me a Commie and a Red. Can you imagine saying that to a child?” she said. Now after the war in Ukraine she sees anti-Russian material on the internet — a petition to change the name of the Russian River or rename San Francisco’s Russia Avenue. “It’s sad,” she says, “It’s hysteria.”
She also finds the war troubling. “We still feel the pull of Russia,” she said. “We are mixed together as well,” she said, like family with relations on both sides, in Ukraine and Russia both. “A bit like a civil war.”
Nicholas Sluchevsky was born in San Francisco and has deep roots in Russia. His great-grandfather was Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister under Czar Nicholas II and a famous figure in Russian history.
Sluchevsky lived for a while in Russia and taught college courses there. He also participated in conferences, festivals and academic seminars that were part of the programs developed with the Fort Ross Conservancy. The turn in relations makes him sad. The war in Ukraine makes him angry.
“It is Putin’s war, and only Putin’s war,” he said. “It is not Russia’s war. There is nothing that justifies the invasion of Ukraine.”
Sluchevsky feels that the war is a defining moment both with relations between Russia and the West and inside Russia. “What we are having now is not just financial and business globalization, but cultural globalization,” an exchange of ideas that can’t be stopped. The young people and the global technology are making it happen, he thinks. “What Putin has done is to open up a Pandora’s box. What comes out can’t be put back in.”
Sluchevsky thought the programs developed around Fort Ross through the Fort Ross Conservancy and its partners in the past few years were an important part of creating a better understanding with Russia. “They were top notch.”
As it turns out, the Russian government’s cultural effort at Fort Ross may have been part of a deeper strategy, “a charm offensive,” as the CNBC network once called it. “Would I accept an Order of Friendship today?” said the conservancy’s Sweedler. “No, I would not.”
The war in Ukraine has changed everything, but wars eventually end. Sluchevsky and others involved in the Fort Ross project have plans. “We absolutely are going to keep the project alive,” he said.