Fairway Rock, 9.3 kilometres (5.8 mi) to the southeast, is also Alaskan, but generally not seen as part of the Diomede Islands.

1728, the day when the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of the martyr St. Diomede (hence, the name of the islands).

During the Cold War, that gap constituted the border between the United States and the Soviet Union, and became known as the "Ice Curtain".

In 1987, however, Lynne Cox swam from one island to the other, and was congratulated by both Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan for her feat.

[9] In summer 1995, British television actor and documentary presenter Michael Palin started his counterclockwise circumnavigation of the Pacific Rim, encompassing 18 countries, on Little Diomede Island, as part of the BBC series Full Circle.

This became moot in 1995, however, when the International Date Line was moved to the east of Kiribati and that country's easternmost time zone (GMT+14) is now the world's earliest.

After they established a military base there in 1948, the Soviet government relocated the indigenous population of Big Diomede Island to mainland Russia.