Non-Russian Far Eastern Siberia

Is there any historical opportunity for the trans-Baikal to the Amur to have been colonized by any non-Russian power? Be it China, Britain, Japan, France, is there any POD after the reign of Ivan the Terrible that would allow such a situation?

Could the area remain effectively without colonization--even without claims?--until the late 19th century?
 

katchen

Banned
Check out my post on "Russia sells Alaska to Great Britain". Siberia WAS geographically vulnerable to conquest from the Arctic Ocean--which is and was regularly open as far as the mouth of the Yensei. The Russians were very lucky in 1856 that they had put down Sweden in 1808 and taken Finland from Sweden, keeping Sweden conservative and small and most importantly, thinking small. And that the Concert of Europe still worked to keep European nations committed to the territorial status quo in 1856.. Because a larger, more assertive Sweden ala Capt. Vogel's TL Sweden wins Finnish War 1898 would have soon seen that northeast Europe (the SevDvina, Mezen and Pechora Basins---and basically everything north of the Volga has a lot of land that had become arable due to global warming and that that land was inhabited by ethnic Finns not Russians. Komi and Mariel and Udmurt and Permyak and Mordvin. Drakon Fin take note.
And from there, overland to and beyond Perm and by sea from the mouths of the Ob and Yensei by steamboat, Siberia would beckon a unified Sweden, Norway and Finland. And almost impossible to defend this territory, especially if Russia's Army was tied down defending the Crimea.
As for China, the Qing certainly could have occupied Siberia from the Urals to the Lena to the Arctic Ocean by taking over Russia's network of forts and trading posts. They chose not to ITTL, preferring to let the Russians police the taiga north of the Stanovoi Mountains but under other circumstances they probably would have handled things differently. If Galden Khan and the Dzungars had taken Siberia from the Russians, integrating the Ugri, the Ket (Ostyaks, Sami, Evenki (Tungus) and Yakuts into his ordos, the Qing would have gone after the Dzungars into Siberia, since they considered the Dzungars a serious enough threat to be worth annihilating to the last man. I suspect even if they had to follow the Dzungars across the Urals to the Volga or across the Verkhoyansk Range into Kolyma (which is mostly Arctic steppe) all the way to the Bering Strait in the early 18th Century under the Qien Lung Emperor.
 
Qing falls early triggering a wave of Chinese (and some Korean) land hungry farmers into Manchuria who then keep on going.
 
In Amerigo Vespucci's Cuban Missile War TL, a full-scale nuclear war erupting from the Cuban Missile Crisis results in a devastating war occurring between the USSR and America, but which China sits out. Thanks to American superiority in ICBMs and some advantages in bombers, the USSR is basically leveled, while America is finished as a superpower by the war. China takes the opportunity to colonize the now-empty wasteland of Siberia.
 
Is there any historical opportunity for the trans-Baikal to the Amur to have been colonized by any non-Russian power? Be it China, Britain, Japan, France, is there any POD after the reign of Ivan the Terrible that would allow such a situation?

Could the area remain effectively without colonization--even without claims?--until the late 19th century?

Pancakes!'s It's All About My Brother TL, where the Taiping Revolution succeeds, has Russia collapsing into anarchy. Anybody who wants to claim Siberia for themselves can.
 
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