A group of folks traveled quite a distance to spend a day in Brookside last week.

The town hosted a delegation of Russians on Saturday through the Open World program Friendship Force International.

The purpose of the visit was for Russian citizens to learn more about American government, business, education, technology and culture.

Sergey Kulygin, one of the visitors, has visited the United States several times before through Friendship Force International.

Kulygin, who owns a construction business in Kazan near the Volga River, said one main difference he sees in the two countries is that U.S. politicians are much more accessible to the people than are politicians in Russia.

“That is good,” he said. “Politicians should be open to the public because they are elected by them.”

Ten delegates and two facilitators from Russia toured the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Brookside, led by The Very Rev. Archpriest Benedict Tallant, who has served at the Brookside church since 1965.

The also visited the Brookside History Museum in a tour led by town historian Staci Simon Glover.

“This as such a unique opportunity for both sides,” said Glover. “The Russian delegation got to see how immigrants founded a European village in a coal town in Alabama and why and how they came here.”

Glover said the visitors learned that immigrants were pushed out of Europe by forced military service and were pushed off the land.

“They were pulled to America and Alabama by promises of good wages, a good education for their children, and a good climate,” Glover said.

The Russians could see a correlation to their own history.

“When I was demonstrating how coal miners were paid in clacker and scrip, which we have at the museum, one young man told me that they were given tickets or ration stamps during Perestroika,” Glover said. (Perestroika was political movement within the Communist Party in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.) “So they equated how the company owned your work and your wages and how you spent them with the Soviet Union under government-controlled communism.”

Also while in Brookside, the Russian visitors enjoyed a Slavic dinner hosted by the Sisterhood of St. Olga Ladies Auxiliary.

The group also visited with Brookside citizens at John Bensko Park for the annual Brookside School reunion.

For the rest of their stay in Alabama, the group will visit officials in Helena, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Hoover City Hall, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the capital building and Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery, the Innovation Depot in Birmingham and with members of the Birmingham Business Alliance.