After the U.S. Marines sent to liberate Siknazuak reached the eastern edge of the town in June 1929, a captain waved a white flag, initiating a brief truce with the pro-Soviet agitators who held the town. The Bolsheviks confirmed they could understand English. The captain promised that if they surrendered, they'd be treated as prisoners of war and sent back to the USSR. One Bolshevik officer asserted that they would take back what was theirs, that is, Siknazuak and Alaska as a whole. When the Marine captain reminded him that Vladimir Leinin had ceded Alaska years before and that they had no business on the Alaska side of the Bering Strait, the Bolshevik replied that the U.S. should not have been in Siberia a decade before. The parlay ended on that note without a surrender.[1]