The Diomede islands are situated on opposite sides of the International Date Line, and although they are only three miles apart, the larger island is nearly a day ahead of its smaller neighbour.

Big Diomede is on the Russian side of the Bering Strait, which separates mainland Alaska from Siberia. Little Diomede is on the US side. Big Diomede is nearly a day ahead of Little Diomede, but not quite; because of locally defined time zones, Big Diomede is only 21 hours ahead of Little Diomede (20 in summer). The International Date Line, which runs through the Pacific Ocean, separates them.

As a result, the islands are occasionally referred to as Yesterday Island (Little Diomede) and Tomorrow Island (Big Diomede).

“It’s a real time machine. We could see what was happening yesterday in real time,” 40-year-old ex-soldier Ramil Gumerov told Russia Beyond. Gumerov served in the Russian army for two years starting in 1995, and he spent over a year of that time on a section of the larger island, which today has only a military base, a polar station, and a border guard post.

“In reality, to travel to the other island in the other country, or to yesterday, when one was on leave, was pure fantasy. To us, going on leave remained just a dream,” Gumerov said. The ice bridge that forms between the two islands in winter would even make possible, although illegal, to walk the short distance between them and ‘travel through time.’

However, the only people who are allowed to travel freely between the islands are the Eskimos, who are the native inhabitants. After fact, they had already been living here for a long time when Semyon Dezhnev, a Russian naval adventurer, became the first European to set foot on the islands. The two islands, which are 35 kilometres from Chukotka and Alaska, were a part of Russia for the next nearly 150 years after that event in the 17th century.

When Russia surrendered Alaska to the United States in 1867, the Diomede islands were split along the state line. The native populace suddenly found themselves in a peculiar circumstance where the dates were different on the two islands but the time was the same. Small Diomede Island (Yesterday Island) is constantly in the past when compared to Big Diomede Island (Tomorrow Island). Even though there haven’t been any humans on the Russian island for a while, the Eskimos were given visa-free travel so they could visit family.

In order to minimise cross-border interactions, the Eskimos moved to Little Diomede in the early 20th century (about 135 of them still reside in a tiny town on the island), and the remaining local population was driven off Big Diomede Island to the Russian mainland following World War II.

According to legend, after the Eskimos left, a local shaman came to Big Diomede and cursed it. And, allegedly, since then, for various reasons, people on the island have been dying. Gumerov, however, rightly observes: “People die everywhere and the island is no exception. What’s to blame – an accident, the forces of nature, or a shaman’s curse? I don’t know.”

Many years after the first border guard detachment arrived here in 1941, Gumerov was dispatched to the islands on army duty from the Republic of Bashkortostan’s south. He claims that the nine months of winter on the island are tough, with frigid temperatures and high winds. Helicopters only fly to Big Diomede once every two to four months to bring mail and supplies since it is shrouded in dense fog for 300 days of the year.

The portion of the border between the US and the USSR that divided Big and Little Diomede was dubbed the “Ice Curtain” during the Cold War. However, on August 7, 1987, American long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox braved icy waters to swim 3.5 km (2.2 mi) from the small island to the larger one.

Four months later, she was congratulated jointly by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan during the signing of the INF Missile Treaty at the White House, when Gorbachev made a toast. He and President Reagan lifted their glasses and Gorbachev said, “Last summer it took one brave American by the name of Lynne Cox just two hours to swim from one of our countries to the other. We saw on television how sincere and friendly the meeting was between our people and the Americans when she stepped onto the Soviet shore. She proved by her courage how close to each other our peoples live”.

Did he say two hours? Hold on. Not twenty-two?