Plausibility check: Soviet alaska

In OTL, there were hundreds of thousands of miners by the early 1900s. And lord knows if anyone is willing to get crazy for labour unrest, it's miners. Take a look at the Battle of Blair Mountain, and West Virginia unionizing efforts.

There's a few problems with this idea:
  • There weren't "hundreds of thousands" of people, let alone miners, in Alaska until the 1950s and 1960s. Alaska's OTL population in 1900 was just over 63,000, and in TTL, it's likely to be even less, given restrictions on immigration into Russian territory and the fact that few Americans are going to want to trek into Russian territory on the off chance there might be gold there.
  • Those population figures get even worse if you consider the fact that of those 63,000, 25,000 were Alaska Native and thus not likely to join in any "revolution" you might have. Alaska's population actually fell between 1910 and 1920 as the easy-to-get ore bodies were mined out, but I'm not sure how much that would happen in an ATL where you have different discovery times and all.
  • The type of mining in Alaska in the early 1900s was wholly different from that of the coal mines you're talking about. During that point in Alaska history, it's mostly placer mining, which means miners are spread out over the surface on vast quantities of land. There aren't hundreds of miners on a single mine, except in rare instances.
  • By the 1910s, those rare instances have all but dried up. OTL, the deep Treadwell mine was Alaska's biggest in the 1910s, and it was flooded out of existence in 1917 when the ocean poured in. The Kennecott mines are just reaching peak production in 1916-1917, but they're inland and could easily be butterflied away in TTL.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Heck, the Bolshies _were_ a minority, you know, and there was another Russian revolution before the Bolshevik one. Perhaps the Kerensykites remain in control in Alaska, and K. ends up as president of the Alaskan republic (he lived until 1970 OTL, BTW)

Bruce

See, this is a popular thought: that the Kerensky government will hold on to the Russian territory. Myself, I think that America and Canada (especially America, which has a shitload more cash than everyone else in 1917) would lean on Russia to make the sail it didn't make in the 1860s.

Then America can come out smelling like roses no matter how you look at it: they're providing money to an anti-Communist regime, and they're getting Alaska, with it's gold and nascent oil resources, for a bargain.

Sure, they'll have to cut a deal with Canada in a hurry to settle the border dispute in the Yukon, but that's not something that's a deal breaker.

Amerigo: I'll be honest. I kind of picked that population number out of my ass. All of my source material on Alaska I had to give to my dad except for stuff on the Alcan Highway and the Aleutian Campaign, so the historical stuff on the late-1800s is almost purely guesswork. I made a guesstimate, and I was wrong. But I was just making a point.

You are correct, though, with the fact that a Russian government would change the demographics. I can't help but wonder how many of the mines that would be running would be operated by crown companies employing prisoners.
 
Last edited:
Myself, I have to wonder how many mines would be running at all, MacCaulay. I look at all the easy-to-get resources that Imperial Russia was unable to develop IOTL for lack of capital, and I wonder how it could expect to do anything approaching what happened in Alaska OTL.

Nome's gold is definitely the easiest to get -- it's right on the beach, after all -- and there's plenty of placer deposits to be developed. The problem is finding them, and IOTL, many of the deposits were discovered only when Alaska Natives realized that they could get a ton of trade goods for just a bit of the "shiny sand" instead of a winter's worth of work on the trap line.

But TTL, you're going to have a longer period of time with the really brutal Russian attitude toward Alaska Natives, and some of those discoveries probably won't be shared, or at least not as quickly.

Then there's the matter of investment, as you mentioned. I think you're right -- it'd take Imperial investment in the Russian-American company or something on that level to get things moving. I don't think Russia has the capital to develop the easily reachable stuff that still requires investment -- near Juneau, forex. Those deposits require mineshafts and stamping mills, and that's not even mentioning the Kennicott area, which requires investment even though it's the richest copper deposit in the world, or here in Fairbanks, which is the richest gold-bearing region in Alaska but is smack dab in the middle of the territory.
 
So, in your humble opinion, why might a Confederate victory in the ACW result in no Revolution in Russia? The Communist Mainfesto has already been written, and someone's going to pick it up and go along with it, somewhere in the world. So why did Russia end up Communist IOTL instead of, say, America? Or Germany?


well, assuming that it gets kicked off like OTL, you could easily get a good portion of the main leaders of the revolution killed through pure chance, a little spanish flu here, a stray bullet there, an execution in stead of exile and you effectively wipe out a good portion of the bolshevic movement. No guarantee of a loss for the commies, but a definite game changer.
 
Top