The Inupiat are among the least-advanced (in terms of "ability to resist Euro conquest") societies in the New World; probably the least advanced ATL. Once they start butting up against the Tlingit, though...
Probably, yeah. Moscow's a long, long way from Vladizapad, but the genie's out of...
Bronze Age New World: Empire of the Steppe (Part 2)
[Russia and Alaska, 1701-1711]
Moscow, 1701
The Kremlin bells toll, in mourning for the old Czar and in honor of the new. The last czar was in late middle age when he took the throne and old when he died, and his reign was marked with...
It's actually not unlike the relationship that Alaska bears to the modern US. Alaska's got a lot of a resource that's super-valuable to the modern world: oil. But in order to make the extraction of oil possible--to make it so that people are willing and able to live and work in...
Stronger relative to Russia, yes; Russia hasn't modernized as fast, and both Poland and Sweden are relatively stronger. Hence the loss of the Baltic ports.
Phillippines ain't happening. One thing I don't think people are picking up on--the Russian Empire is *weaker* than they were OTL, and Russian America was a marginal enterprise in our world. The one thing they have going for them: Their supply lines for most stuff is marginally shorter, due to...
Do you mean down Kamchatka and into the Aleutians? Yes; eventually they'll discover sea otters and that will lead them into the Aleutians, although with their weaker navigational technology they might not be able to make some of the longer crossings. Or did you mean down towards the Primorsky...
Russia's definitely not totally isolated from the West...in fact, other than in naval technology, they're not super-far behind where they were OTL. The men who rule Russia ATL don't think of it in these terms, but what Russia is really doing is giving up a strategic buffer in the west in...
In the sense that he was personally responsible for significant changes to the course of Russian history, yes. The system of Czarist autocracy--autocracy in general, really--is set up so that one individual personality can make a great deal of difference. The decision of Russia to modernize...
Bronze Age New World: Empire of the Steppe (Part 1)
[Russia and Siberia, 1492-1691]
==
The year Christopher Columbus comes ashore to find ruined Arawak
cities on Hispaniola, the Russians are barely a decade out from under
the Tatar yoke. The tremors from that world-shaking event will take...
Different Copper River; Lake Izok is up by the Great Slave Lake and that neck of the woods. The Copper River at the mouth of which is Cordova is an all-Alaskan river, arising in the Wrangell Mountains.
Just that there was never a tin-mining district in the Copper River area the way there...
Probably not; I don't know *all* of the details of the Russian conquest of Siberia and the people they conquered, but I think the Tlingit were the most-advanced folks they ran into OTL.
Great question. Russia is going to be a pretty different place OTL; the very different New World will have...