Thaw in The Ice Curtain

It was a heartwarming scene in the coldest of climates. Ora Gologergen, 72, boarded Alaska Airlines' "Friendship One" flight in Nome for the 40-minute trip to Provideniya, U.S.S.R., a bleak town of dilapidated concrete buildings across the Bering Sea. There, with hugs and shouts in Yupik, her native language, she was reunited with her close childhood friend, Uksima Uksima, 73, a Siberian Eskimo. The two are among the thousands of Eskimos separated in 1948 when the cold war dropped an Ice Curtain across the Bering Strait, closing the Alaska-Siberia passage. With this flight, about 25 Eskimos living on the American side of the strait were able to visit kinfolk on the Soviet side.

The impresario behind last week's inaugural flight, James Stimpfle, has more than glasnost on his mind. The Nome real estate broker hopes to make Siberia a major tourist attraction, with regularly scheduled air shuttles and even a cruise ship. But Provideniya in the Soviet Far East has drawbacks: it has no hotel and only one restaurant. Cement mixing and reindeer-hide tanning are its major enterprises. The architecture runs to concrete boxes. Then there is the climate: only Eskimos may consider 30 degrees F in June balmy.

But Provideniya does have its charms. The Eskimos and 54 other day-trippers, each with some $200 worth of rubles, bought out the town's supply of Sputnik toothpaste, Soviet flags and T shirts commemorating the Russian Revolution. The Americans gave Oleg Kulinkin, who functions as mayor, a Xerox copier, the town's first, and a gas generator to power it. As the Alaskans headed toward the gravel runway for their return, the group's tour guide said, "I think you must come back. Soon is better than later."