IOTL Russia used all Siberia as penal colony. They didn't need one more
True but perhaps the fur company in Alaska wants a free labor force?
This. If you try to flee Siberia you'll either end up dead or still in Siberia. This and the logistics of sending people across an ocean when you can just cart them off to Siberia.
It does not. The company was almost exclusively about hunting and fur trade and these criminals are not good in either. Not to mention that the company simply did not need more hunters: the available natives and Russians plus the foreign poachers managed to deplete the most valuable fur animals almost to the brink of extinction and company was losing money (and getting state subsidies). Then goes the supply issue. In the early XIX the colony was starving, which prompted establishment of the agricultural settlement in California (did not live to the expectations) and later arrangement with Hudson Bay Co. Transportation is a problem as well. Alaska was reachable either by circumnavigation and Russian navy was considerably smaller than British or by traveling by land across Siberia and then sailing to Alaska from Okhotsk. Obviously, it was more practical to leave the criminals in the penal colonies along the route where, BTW, they would be doing something useful and where the labor force required. Even on Sakhalin the penal colony was established only in 1857 with the first group of prisoners, totaling 20, arriving in 1858 and the real “flow” (on average 1,000 per year) picking up only after 1879 when the prisoners had been transported by the steamships from Odessa sailing through Sues Canal.
Actually, the prisoners were routinely escaping from Siberia ending up in Moscow and other big cities. They were escaping even from Sakhalin (between 1898 and 1901 1,100 out of which 320 escaped into Japan forcing Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to sent to Russia a request to improve security of the colony).
People no doubt escaped prisoner camps in Siberia, but they'd be less likely to succeed, or even do so from Siberia than from Alyeska.
Sure, but the video games are based on historical concepts. So why couldn’t or wouldn’t they? Not to mention, the Americas often was settled by religious dissidents, though usually voluntarily.
As I understand, the professional criminals (and definitely the political ones in the later times) had a well-established “infrastructure” supporting escapes. Judging by Gilyarovsky (a famous reporter of the late XIX - XX), the “serious” criminals had been finding their way back to Sukharevka (a “criminal district” in Moscow) numerous times with a full knowledge of the local policemen who would not arrest them unless there was an explicit order to do so. Smaller fish would, of course, have much more serious problems but then, again, Siberia of the Imperial Russia was not one big penal colony and the penal colonies usually were not in a middle of a nowhere: the prisoners had been working and result of their work had to be transported. At least some of the settlers in the area had been generally sympathetic to the prisoners and not only the Old Believers. And, of course, after reaching the ‘civilized area’ an escapee would find himself within a familiar environment and, if he was a professional criminal, he could count upon the local criminals for some help. However, it does not look like the Tsarist government considered escapes as a major or even truly significant problem.
I think logistical concerns are ultimately the most important in trying to cobble together a timeline that supports these far-flung colonization AHs. I wonder if there's anything to be gained by modeling it after real-world case studies such as Australia or French Guiana.
Look, Imperial Russia was neither Britain nor France so that type of modeling does not make sense. Neither Britain nor France had place suitable for the settlement of the criminals on their home territory so they had to ship them somewhere. Russia did not have that problem.
