Komandorskiye Ostrova — the Commander Islands in English — are about as bleak and remote as anywhere imaginable for human habitation. Indeed, the two islands in the group, named Bering and Medny, support only one hardy community of fewer than 1,000 souls in a settlement called Nikolskoye on Bering Island.

The last, most westernly outliers of the Aleutian chain stretching between Alaska and Kamchatka, these two rocky outcrops from the icy depths of the North Pacific are now the only ones ruled from Moscow. That is thanks to then-U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward, who — on March 30, 1867 — snapped up for Washington the rest of the Aleutians and Alaska for just $7.2 million paid into the needy coffers of Czarist Russia.

Regimes may have changed, but, to this day, everything about the Commander Islands still feels indisputedly Russian in the stereotypical grim subarctic sense. Yet, though a good summer's day seems to consist of low cloud or rain (and what must winter be like?), wild sounds carry far.