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🔍 A forgotten 1992 letter reveals a proposed sister city relationship between Niceville and Penza, Russia.
🌐 The proposal included symbolic gifts like a city key and coin, but no official record of a formal partnership exists.
🗺️ The rediscovery adds perspective to ongoing talks about a sister city partnership with New Taipei City.
We’ve seen a lot about the potential for Niceville to pair up with New Tapei City for the International Sister Cities Program.
Some have loved the idea – while others have critiqued it as a waste of money. It should be noted, though, that several city officials have told me the city isn’t paying for the trip to the autonomous island off the coast of the Chinese Mainland.
Reporting from our own Paul Sjoberg found that the City of New Tapei City is splitting the cost with the City Manager, David Deitch, who is paying out of his own pocket and taking leave to meet with New Taipei City officials.
But it was only recently that Okaloosa Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux revealed the little-known past concerning a sister city for Niceville. Lux said he found a plaque containing information about some sort of sister city or otherwise symbiotic relation between a city in Russia.
Lux, who served as a soldier during the Cold War, immediately became curious about the plaque, key and coin he saw during his first time hosting elections in Niceville City Hall. “I’ve been a Russophile for some time from my earliest days of college after I got out of the military because we kept up with the Russian military, of course, when I was in the service, given the job that I did,” Lux said.
Here’s what he found:
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It’s November 1992: The Soviet Union has collapsed, Russians are communicating with the outside world, Bill Clinton won his first presidential term, and your humble writer was three months old.
A letter gets placed into a mailbox by the Vice Mayor of Penza, Vasily Bukin, or one of his aides and is dispatched across the former Soviet Sphere of influence and on through the Atlantic. It arrives in the United States, gets ingested into the United States Postal Service and arrives on the desk of Lannie Corbin, City Manager of Niceville.
The letterhead is in Russian and two copies are in the envelope. One is in English and the other in Russian. it reads:
“Mr. Lanny [sic] Corbin
City Commissioner
City Hall, Niceville
Florida 32578
We all were delighted to received [sic] your best wishes and the wonderful gift – the City Gate Key. This might be a first step of friendship between our cities.
We have an honour to inform you that we are very glad to consider
Niceville as a sister city of Penza. International cultural cooperation improves understanding between people and helps exchange knowledge. We find this cooperation very useful and promising for both Russian city Penza and American city Niceville.
We also hope that we will be able to establish cultural and business relations. If you are interested in this kind of cooperation please write to us or visit our city any time you want. You are always welcome. We all wish your city prosperity.
Sincerely yours
Vasily Bukin
Vice Mayor
Valentin Nikulin
Chief of Department of Education”
The letter apparently came with a key to the city of Penza and a coin that depicts a man in front of a horse.
On the key are inscribed the year 1663 and works in Cyrillic.
While the key, letter, and coin are evidence a conversation took place – there’s a solid chance the talks went no farther, according to Lux, as neither Niceville nor Penza have anything on their websites or Wikipedia pages about a pairing between them.
Still, the historic footnote combined with some geographic symbiosis continues to interest Lux. “The most interesting thing I think probably about Penza is that given Niceville’s origins and the fact that it used to be called “Boggy,” it’s rather interesting that Penza literally comes from the end of the swampy river that gave it its name.”
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Penza is the capital and administrative center of the Penza Oblast in western Russia. It is located on the Volga River to the southeast of Moscow and is roughly 6,000 miles apart from Niceville and the Russian City. It has about half a million people; the city contains about 32 people for every resident of Niceville.
The city was constructed to keep out the raiding Crimean Tartars. Those nomadic horsemen laid waste to the city in a devastating raid in 1717.
As time passed, more people settled around Penza, which became an agricultural hub. While there is still plenty of Agribusiness in the area, the city saw the rise of the manufacturing industry in the Soviet Era.
