All school children in the United States learn the story of America’s acquisition of Alaska. In 1867 Tsarist Russia sold its vast Alaskan territory to the US for $7.2 million in gold bullion. It is together with the Louisiana Purchase the two great stories of government mega-scale real estate acquisition in US history. The United States’ motives for acquiring Alaska at that time have been fairly well canvassed[1]. But less well-known is Russia’s role in Alaska and the North Pacific littoral prior to 1867 and the reasons for its eventual and permanent withdrawal from the region.

Russia’s move into Alaska was a natural outgrowth of the Romanov Empire’s expanding imperial reach eastwards. It was also driven by the need to find a new source of fur-bearing mammals❈. Siberia and the Russian Far East (Tartaria Oriental) had become rapidly depleted in stock and Imperial Russia was intent on exploring the lands and islands further east and, among other things, getting a stranglehold on the trade in pelts there[2].

Soon after Russian explorers first sighted the Alaskan shoreline in 1741, Russian hunters and fur traders (the promyshlenniki) began to move into the Aleutian Islands, a preliminary step to further expansion into the Gulf of Alaska. An outpost was established at Unalaska, from here the Russian traders encroached on Alaskan territory in a piecemeal fashion. Using the same strategy employed against the Siberian tribes earlier, the promyshlenniki coerced the indigenous Aleuts into hunting sea otters for them. The missionary zeal of Russian Orhodox priests, who were part of the colonial community in the outposts, played a role in the ‘pacification’ of the Alaskan native populations[3]. Contact with the Russians was also devastating to the health of indigenous Americans: it is estimated that 80% or more of Alaskan peoples were wiped out as a result of infectious diseases brought by the Europeans[4].

The Russian-American Company

Moscow chose as its template the successful model of Britain’s East India Company, a powerful enterprise which capitalised on Robert Clive’s triumph over the moguls of India [5]. A Russian foothold was established in 1784 on the peninsula, with the name “the Three Saints Bay Colony” on Kodiak Island. The settlement’s founder, powerful merchant Grigory Shelekhov used brutal and excessive force against native tribes that rebelled against his authority (eg, wholesale massacre of natives from the Alutiiq nation). But the nucleus of the Russian presence in Alaska was to be the Russian-American Company (RAC) (established in 1799). Headed by autocratic Chief Manager Aleksandr Baranov de facto governor of the Russian colony (till 1818), the Company effectively controlled all of Russia’s possessions in North America. RAC established a number of settlements including the Russian American capital, New Archangel (Novo-Arkhangel’sk), modern-day Sitka.

Northern sea otter (enhydra lutris kenyoni)▼ )

Russian over-dependence on the indigenous population
Food: the Russian colonists failed to establish self-sufficiency in food … a foul climate made for low or poor agricultural yields (not helped by the Russians’ inexperience in farming the local Tanana soil) and a lack of fresh food. This made them reliant on the local Indians for the acquisition of deer, fish, etc. The Russians also needed to trade with Hispanic California, the British in Canada and the United States for many of the foodstuffs they couldn’t grow in Alaska (wheat, barley, peas and beans, etc).
Labour shortage: the RAC labour force in Russian America was always well below requirements to make the colony thrive. Most Russian workers were not attracted to Russian America … too far from Russia, a particularly inhospitable, desolate climate, low pay, heavy work, sparse diet. The colony lacked essential infrastructure (no attendant medical doctor before the 1820s).
Unskilled providers of goods: RAC’ eye was on the prized sea otter trade (or “sea beavers” as they sometimes referred to them)✦, but the Russians themselves were not adept at pelagic hunting … the mustelid creatures proved especially elusive, without the superior hunting skills of the compliant Aleuts, RAC’s pelt haul (and therefore its profits) would have been vastly diminished.

Companionship and sex: the colony’s male to female ratio was heavily skewed in favour of men – at its nadir in 1819 there were 29 Russian men for every one Russian woman. An inevitable outcome of this was that many Russian men took indigenous mistresses, with the equally inevitable consequence of producing numerous Creole (or mestizo) offspring[6].

Tlingit resistance to Russian rule
The Russian colonists met with much stiffer resistance from the Tlingit or Kolosh Indians (southern Alaska) than it did from the eastern native tribes. The Tlingits were more war-like and equipped with firearms, and early on engaged in fierce warfare with the Russians. Unable to subjugate them like the Aleuts, the RAC resorted to an assimilation strategy, herding them in close to the reinforced New Archangel fort and engaging in barter with the Tlingit chiefs for fur skins and other, edible animals … RAC created a special ‘Kolosh’ market which allowed the Company to monopolise the trade in Alaska[7].

Eastern Siberian Governor-General Muruvyov on the RUB5,000 bank-note ▼

The Russian withdrawal from Alaska
Although RAC’s brief was to establish a network of settlements in Alaska and its chain of islands, it never managed to penetrate far into the Alaska landmass and so clearly failed to develop the territory as a whole. But this was not entirely down to the RAC and its leadership – as Oleh Gerus notes, had the Russian government taken “a more positive and imaginative approach to (the colony’s) potential”, it may be been a “viable enterprise'[8].

Deprived of adequate funding and support from Moscow, the RAC’s administrative and technological capacities were ultimately found wanting: the provisioning of the colony was way short of the mark, the Company was chronically unable to provide sufficient supplies for its personnel in Alaska … undernourished, understaffed and isolated in a raw, harsh climate, the men slowly drifted into apathy and alcoholism (at the best of times in Russia, not an atypically characteristic trait!)¤.

A trigger for the colony’s economic undoing was the over-farming of sea otters[9] – as had also occurred in Siberia. Diversification into coal-mining and other activities was tried but the lost economic return from otter pelts couldn’t be offset[10]. The Russian colony was also subject to fierce competition from American and British traders. By the 1860s RAC’s share value on the Russian Stock Exchange had plummeted and the quasi-government commercial venture was facing bankruptcy. The cost of transportation to and from the colony was an expensive burden for the Russian economy. Overall, from the 1820s, the colony’s expenses were rising at a much higher rate that its revenue[11].

Alaska Purchase

Thus, clear economic reasons for the ultimate unravelling of Russkaya Amerika can be identified, and the $7,200,000 in gold sale price would have eased some of the burden on Moscow’s treasury, but James Gibson downplays the economic factor in the cession of the territory by Russia. He concludes that Russia’s decision was prompted more by political and geo-strategic considerations. The reversals suffered by Russia in the Crimean War, Gibson argues, exposed the vulnerability of Russian America to naval attack by the Allies (GB and France). The inability to match the might of the British Navy in Pacific waters helped convince Moscow that Alaska was a liability and a threat to its security in the event of new conflicts. Gibson continues, Russia’s over-stretched navy was not only unable to defend its Pacific colony from enemy warships, but even from the incursions of ‘freewheeling’ Yankee traders who roamed around the North Pacific trafficking in various goods and products in disregard of Russian authority[12].

If Russian America was not viable as a base for Russian activities in the Pacific and eastern Asia, somewhere else needed to be found. The problem was solved by the Governor-General of Eastern Siberian Nikolay Muruvyov. Muruvyov’s plan was to refocus Russia’s Pacific Destiny on Asia – rather than North America. Whilst China was racked by internal strife (the Taiping Rebellion), Muruvyov took the opportunity to expand Russia’s imperial territory between the Amur and the Ussuri rivers. This waterway foothold gave Russia access to the Pacific at the Sea of Japan and led to the establishment in 1860 of the strategically important port of Vladivostok which became home to the Russian Pacific fleet[13].

▼ RAC flag

PostScript: The Alaska Sale – why sell to the US and not Britain?
Britain already possessed a territory contiguous with Russian Alaska, British Columbia (including at that time the Yukon), so it made geographic sense for Britain to take over and control the northwestern chunk of the continent回. The Russian government’s decision was a political calculation, post-Crimea Britain was still very much Russia’s number one enemy, whereas with the US, if not exactly a friendly power, it had neutral relations. Moscow reasoned that with Alaska American, England’s British Columbia colony, ‘bookended’ by the US, would be under pressure. It was widely thought that given the US’s recent record of territorial aggression on its borders, it would be inevitable that British Columbia would eventually fall into its hands. The positive spin-off for Russian imperial and commercial aspirations in the Pacific would be Britain’s loss of its naval base on Vancouver Island[14].

╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾
❈ much in demand domestically in the Empire as Russia’s northern cold climate necessitated rugging up most of the time
✦ also much in demand by the Russians as a commodity to trade was walrus ivory
¤ the perception of the typical Russian on the ground was that Russian America was more remote and desolate than even Siberia! (JR Gibson 4)
回 as it transpired Britain for its part expressed little interest in buying Alaska

[1] enlarging the American dominion in the name of republicanism (Secretary of State Seward’s aggrandising ambitions which included eyeing off British Columbia and thus strategically flanking British Canada on its west); expanding the US base of its international commerce to Japan and China; knowledge of potential gold deposits in the territory, etc, JR Gibson (1), ‘The Sale of Russian America to the United States’, (PDF, 1983), www.eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp
[2] As well as domestic consumption, furs were also important to Russia’s export market. At one point furs were used as a monetary unit in Siberia due to a shortage of roubles, S Crawford Isto, The Fur Farms of Alaska: Two Centuries of History and a Forgotten Stampede, (2012)
[3] punitive measures against the Indians included displays of the superior technology of their weaponry, holding of family members as hostages, wholesale destruction of villages, reducing the Aleuts and after them the Kodiak tribes to the status of serfs, RM Carpenter, “Times Are Altered with Us”: American Indians from the First Contact to the New Republic, (2015); the priests were very successful in converting Aleuts and other indigenous Indians, ‘Russian Orthodox’, www.alaskaweb.org
[4] JR Gibson (2), ‘Russian Dependance on the Natives of Alaska’, in SW Haycocks & M Childers Mangusso, An Alaskan Anthology: Interpreting the Past (2011)

[5] Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America (2013)]
[6] Gibson (2), loc.cit.
[7] although a smallpox epidemic in 1836 seriously weakened the Tlingits’ power, ibid; AV Grinev, The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741-1867, (2005)
[8] OW Gerus, ‘The Russian Withdrawal from Alaska: The Decision to Sell’, Revista de Historia de América, Nos 75/76. (Jan-Dec 1973)
[9] the promyshlenniki also coveted the furs of other creatures (the largest quantities of animal skins exported by RAC came from sea otters, beavers, land otters, Polar foxes, fur seals and sables), but it was the sea otters that fetched the highest prices – the otter pelt market was highly prized in Canton, China, JR Gibson (3), ‘Russian America in 1833. The Survey of Kirill Khlebnikov’, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 63(1), Jan 1972
[10] at its peak RAC was transporting one million roubles’ worth of furs back to Russia annually, ibid.
[11] JR Gibson (4), ‘Imperial Russia in Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply in Russian America, 1784-1867 (1976); Gibson (3), loc.cit.
[12] Gibson (1), op.cit.
[13] ibid.
[14] Britain countered this threat by forming the Canadian Confederation three months after the Purchase, and admitting British Columbia to it in 1871, RE Neunherz, ‘ “Hemmed In”. Reactions in British Columbia to the Purchase of Russian America’, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 80(3), Jul 1989