Hot New Petition: Give Alaska Back to Russia

21K have signed in 4 days
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 25, 2014 9:01 AM CDT
Hot New Petition: Give Alaska Back to Russia
   (Shutterstock)

Managing to get kicked out of the G8 apparently isn't all that worrisome for at least 21,408 Americans. An anonymous Anchorage resident launched a petition on the White House's "We the People" site Friday titled "Alaska back to Russia," and that's how many people have signed it as of this writing. As UPI notes, the petition needs 100,000 signatures by April 20 in order to get an official White House response. (Remember, though, when Texas petitioned to secede, signers did not get their way.)

Why should the US allow Alaska to secede and join Russia? As the petition explains, in what bears little resemblance to English: "Groups Siberian russians crossed the Isthmus (now the Bering Strait) 16-10 thousand years ago. Russian began to settle on the Arctic coast, Aleuts inhabited the Aleutian Archipelago. First visited Alaska August 21, 1732, members of the team boat 'St. Gabriel »under the surveyor Gvozdev and assistant navigator I. Fedorov during the expedition Shestakov and DI Pavlutski 1729-1735 years." Or, as KTUU puts it, the petition "cites historical evidence of previous visitors and claimants for ownership of the territory." The US bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in 1867. (More Alaska stories.)

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