America’s purchase of Alaska in 1867 was a bizarre land deal between two countries. It was either hated or ridiculed across most of the world. But now, Russian nationalists want their long-lost icebox.
Yes, really. Russian nationalists are saying that Putin should come home from his Alaska visit with a very imperial present for the Russian people. They either claim the land of Alaska was leased, not sold, or that a Russian diplomat bribed American lawmakers, or that the Russian Tsar didn’t follow the law of the sale, or some other excuse.
We can’t wait to see how the Alaska population, which is now over 50 percent made up of Americans descended from Western Europe, would react to suddenly becoming Russian. Surely all those bear hunters who are accustomed to their right to bear arms would happily become constituents of the Russian bear and would welcome Russian Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” bombers on their airfields.
The Russian Empire
It’s rarely on Americans’ minds that Russia used to have an impressive empire, mostly because Russia has been a totalitarian bogeyman or a socialist joke for nearly all of living memory here in the States.
But Russia was a tsardom (which is like a kingdom, but you have to double-check the spelling) and then an empire for 370 years. At its peak before World War I, it had a population of over 160 million. The U.S. had about half that in 1910. The Russian Empire stretched from parts of modern Poland in the west to Alaska in the east, with its territory stretching south into modern-day China. It even controlled parts of what is today Japan, though it was already in retreat there, and it lost its possessions in Korea in a war with Japan in 1905.
It was, in 1914, arguably the largest contiguous land empire in history. (The argument comes from quibbles over what to count in Russia’s empire and what to count in the Mongol Empire. The edge should probably go to the Mongols, and Encyclopedia Britannica agrees.)
So if you’re a modern Russian nationalist, and you’re watching your military spend three years attempting to shove Ukraine back into its womb like an abusive mother having a severe mental break, then why shouldn’t the mother just pack herself with all her aberrant children? Why shouldn’t Russia retake any territory that was part of its empire?
Ukraine, Alaska, and we might as well throw Finland and Poland in there.
But why Alaska, specifically?
Russian nationalists want their empire back, whether they’re looking at the USSR like Putin does or they want their former imperial borders, which would give them the largest country in the world. It already is the largest country in the world, but expanding to its former glory would increase its landmass by a full third.
For most of the former Russian territory, that would mean subsuming entire nations or getting out of peace treaties that are more than a century old. But there is one chunk of former Russian land which is now super productive and profitable with industries that Russia already has experience in, and it was released in a land deal rather than a peace treaty or independence movement.
Alaska, which is geographically closer to Russia than to the rest of the U.S., has been a thorn in Russia’s side since the start of the Cold War. It gives America a massive Arctic footprint and a strategic place to base nuclear weapons and air defense shields.
If Russia could find a way to nullify that old land deal, then Russia would gain the territory, could strip out or take over the Arctic bases, and could seize control of the oil infrastructure.
Here’s the thing: Russians claim there was a conspiracy in the 1867 land deal, but there’s literally no evidence to prove it.
The Alaskan Land Deal
In the early 1850s, Russian forces lost the Crimean War. The Russian Empire spent a massive amount of money on the war, and then lost some of its colonial territories. So Tsar Alexander II had to take stock of the empire: What parts of it were productive? And how much would each part cost to defend in a future war?
Alaska required naval assets to defend. And its productivity was declining. At the time, it was most useful as the home of sea otters with highly valuable pelts, but even then, overhunting limited Alaska’s productivity. Since this was long before oil was all that important, and long before it was discovered in Alaska anyway, Alexander II decided to release it to a buyer, if he could find one.
The most logical choice was Britain, which still controlled Canada at the time, but the British had supported the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War for no other reason than to hurt the Russians. So Alexander had no interest in helping Britain expand its empire.
He specifically worried that Britain would simply seize Alaska while Russia was still weak and recovering, ultimately losing the territory for nothing. The tsar wanted to sell the land to someone who, first, could pay, and second, could defend it from Britain.
Luckily, American hunters were constantly running into Russians on the peninsula, so why not feel out the Americans?
‘Cause America didn’t want Alaska
In 1867, this idea was unpopular… from the American perspective. Sure, there were American hunters in Alaska, but not so many as to make it logical to turn it into American territory. Meanwhile, the United States had never taken on a large tract of land that wasn’t contiguous.
The United States was an unlikely buyer. In Alaska, it would take on an absolutely massive amount of territory, centered over 1,000 miles from the Washington Territory, the nearest contiguous American possession. The U.S. had just taken on a couple of million square miles in the 1800s, and the Civil War was barely over. The U.S. government debt was also higher than it had ever been.
So, why spend a bunch of money we didn’t have on territory we couldn’t defend while we needed to unify the populace spread across a country that we already couldn’t fill?
Because Alaska was cheap to buy and would pay for itself over generations
Secretary of State William Seward negotiated the purchase, finalized on March 30, 1867, for $7.2 million. The press immediately panned it as “Seward’s Folly,” and leaders struggled to sell the deal to Congress and the public.
For his part, Seward said the purchase was his most impactful move as secretary of state. He saw the value immediately in how it would keep other European powers out and how it would give America a greater claim to the Pacific Ocean. Then, decades later, people discovered significant gold in Alaska in 1886, and then oil in 1902. Between the strategic position and repeated resource discoveries, Alaska has turned out to be a great deal for the U.S.
A great deal that has a straightforward treaty backing it up. For what it’s worth, diplomats wrote the treaty in English and French because the official language of the Russian court at the time was French. However, it remains a valid treaty signed by the leaders of both countries and approved by Congress.
Sorry, Russian nationalists. If you want Alaska back, you’re going to have to pay for it. And, we’ve seen how your state budget has been stretched by recent oil price drops. So we know you can’t afford it.
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