Keeping Alaska Russian

Like the title says. What is the best way to keeping Alaska Russian and avoid its purchase by the United States? Is it plausible?
 
Well, in the tl I've been kicking around two things help.

1) Smaller presense of the British. IOTL Russia was afraid that the British were going to beat them up and take Alaska away from them, so they sold it to the US first.

2) In OTL, Russian adventurers tried to establish a Hawaiin colony, but the Imperial Bureaucracy refused to recognize the effort and ordered the colony abandoned. With a larger presense in the Pacific, Russia might be more reluctant to sell Alaska, fight if somebody tried to occupy it, etc.

BTW, at first glance, an 1860 gold rush might help keep Alaska imperial, but IMO it is just as likely that one of the Big Kids would occupy the gold fields instead.
 

Arrix85

Donor
I agree with Anaxagoras, Alaska was a too far territory which was proving to be more a liability than everything else ( there were almost no revenue coming from there). The only way to change that is an early discovery of Gold.
 
I have to agree with the previous posters: Alaska was in the end not profitable enough. Thus you need at least two of the following:
a) better transit/trade routes, e.g. over Hawaii (warm water port)
b) more regulation for the fur trade (Russian trappers essentially killed almost everything in sight, ridding the colony of its known ressources)
c) gold rushes (self-explanitory)
d) a generally stronger Russian presence / a weaker British presence (self-explanitory)
 

birdboy2000

Banned
I'm not convinced an earlier gold discovery will save Alaska for Russia. Gold means settlers, and settlers are likely to come from the US and Canada, and would probably be willing to pull a Texas.
 
If you have the eastern provinces of russia more populated then it would be a lot easier to colonize Alaska


maybe this would mean an earlier abolition of serfdom...
 
One other thing that will help keep Alaska russian is if you can russanize the population of that area... this mean making the Inuits and the other people subjects to russian influence and culture
 
One other thing that will help keep Alaska russian is if you can russanize the population of that area... this mean making the Inuits and the other people subjects to russian influence and culture

They did partially. Some natives in Alaska are Orthodox today, (not the Inuits i think, since the Russian activity was mostly south of them) and the state used to have a division into Orthodox parishes similar to Louisiana's Catholic ones.
 
They did partially. Some natives in Alaska are Orthodox today, (not the Inuits i think, since the Russian activity was mostly south of them) and the state used to have a division into Orthodox parishes similar to Louisiana's Catholic ones.

Simple just have the tsar set up more camps in alaska;)
 
Keeping Alaska (or Hawaii or even NorCal) isn't as crazy as it sounds. The Russians benefitted the most from it, relatively speaking. However, it's not as crazy as it sounds only if you ignore American enterprise and St.Petersburg's lack of interest.

But there was never much government support at all. In fact, the government was obstructionist more often than not. Russia would easily have enough warships in the area to hold it down against others and certainly could find enough settlers to forcibly relocate, but that's just not how they approached the pacific colonies.

They wanted a cut of the company profits on the cheap, and that was that. They didn't want another money drain for no forseeable goal. Because of that, American shipping outnumbered Russian shipping something like 6:1 in the Nootka Sound area and Hawaii (even though the Russians used the Hawaii-to-Canton route very actively). In turn, the Russians, despite a much smaller population, were more active than the Spanish, who only started investing in California when it began looking like Russia might go and make a grab for it regardless of legalities.

It's a testament to American enterprise and Imperial indifference that the borders now look the wayt they do; and both those factors were almost overwhelming forces at the time.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
Although solutions based on Russian policy....

are probably more interesting, the most plausible and efficient route to a persistent Russian Alaska is simply to have no other power choose to purchase or conquer the territory. The onus is on the US or Canada to take it over.

Simplest PoD - Seward's assassin succeeds in killing him in 1865, and nobody else in the Johnson administration is willing to buy the territory.

Americans may become willing to buy when gold is discovered there, but that is double-edged, as it will make the Russians more inclined to keep the territory or ask for a higher price.

I don't know how likely a Canadian takeover is. From the map, it looks geographically overdetermined, but then again, why didn't the British even bother to try to take it over during the Crimean War?

Maybe in a later Anglo-Russian war (itself a divergence, as there were none in OTL) Russian Alaska would not be so lucky. But Alaska is not worth it for London to start a war over, considering the other, more important territories that a Russo-British war would bring in to play, like Afghanistan, China and Persia.

Likewise, Alaska might look like a territory that the Russians could be willing to hand over as part of a global entente with Britain (a la 1907). However, the problem remains, what did the British empire have at that time that it would have been willing to give up.....for Alaska?

This leads me to some questions about the original sale of Alaska from Russia to the US. Did the Russians ever offer to sell Alaska to the US before the American Civil War? If so, why not? And in the lead-up to the historic sale, was there much haggling.

...and one last thought, regardless of what the Russians do if they have continued sovereignty over Alaska into the twentieth century, perhaps Mormons who dislike some of the compromises made to permit Utah statehood in the 1890s might like to move there.
 
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