How far can Russia colonize America?

"Russian Hill" in San Francisco is named that for a reason. The Russians did have posts as far south as Sacramento and the North Bay OTL.

But colonize as in, send settlers in large enough numbers to hold? Russia has too much land for that. There's no incentive for a sane person to come all the way to California when there's adequate land just on the other side of the Urals. Before holding California becomes practical, there probably needs to be a well-developed port a la Vladivostok (or retake Constantinople ;)). All that will take too long - by the time the infrastructure and people are ready, some other nation will have grabbed it, as OTL.
 
Retaking Constantinople while nice won't really help with this but as Shawn said Russia needs to have developed Siberia (trans-Siberian railway) to a much greater extent than OTL to make serious (rather than a few hundred fur traders) colonisation possible. The question with colonisation is ease of access from the colonisers core territory where the settlers are coming from i.e. European Russia, Ontario, East Coast of the USA. For Mexico its a few weeks travel over land, for the US or Canada its similar. For Russia its either a four month journey across Siberia and then a long sea trip or its a six month voyage from St. Petersburg going all the way around Eurasia and Africa.
 
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