An Alaska Anthology: Interpreting the Past

The Sale of Alaska in the Context of Russian American Relations in the Nineteenth Century

The Sale of Alaska in the Context of Russian American Relations in the Nineteenth Century NIKOLAI N. BOLKHOVITINOV Nikolai Bolkhovitinov is the dean of Russian historians who have studied interaction between Russia and the United States in the 79th century. In the 7970s and 7980s he headed a team of Russian historians who worked with American scholars to publish a multivolume documentary record of Russian American contacts. The history ofRussia's colony in America is a particular interest ofBolkhovitinov's. In 7997 he traveled to Anchorage to present the following paper at the symposium "Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier. " Bolkhovitinov interprets the history of Russian American relations in the period as basically congenial. The sale of Russian America, he asserts, took place in an atmosphere of mutual friendship and support. Russia's need for currency and American goodwill were, according to Bolkhovitinov, important factors in the exchange. Not all historians agree. Foremost among those who do not is Howard Kushner , who in his study, Conflict on the Northwest Coast: American Russian Rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 7975), argued that persistent interloping by American fur traders along the coast, and particularly their penchant for trading rum and firearms to the Natives , soured contacts between the two contestants for sovereignty in the Northwest . Relations never recovered, Kushner asserted, from the American refusal to accept the czar's ukase of 7827 prohibiting foreign trading in Russian-claimed lands. While earlier historians of Russian America highlighted signs of friendship, including the visits of the Russian fleet to New York and San Francisco during the Civil War, more recent writers have emphasized America's economic imperialism, manifested not only in Seward's desire for Alaska, but in his interest in Hawaii and Greenland and the Virgin Islands as well. Bolkhovitinov's argument here offers a This article appeared originally in Pacifica (Pacific Rim Studies Center, Alaska Pacific University) 2 (1990): 156-71; it is reprinted here by permission. 89 90 NIKOLAI N. BOLKHOVITINOV useful comparison with the conclusions of the current generation of North American scholars. Portions of the original text of this article have been omitted by the editors. The sale of Russian America has attracted the attention of both Soviet and foreign researchers for a long time. In 1939, the now deceased Professor S. B. Okun' published a monograph in which he gave, for the first time in Soviet literature, an adequately detailed and documented account of the general history of the Russian-American Company and the 1867 sale of Alaska. "It was impossible to preserve our colonies in case of war, it was impossible to protect them from the consequences of widespread rumors concerning the presence of gold there ... and finally, there was a transfer of Russian interests to the Asian mainland -these were the reasons that nudged the tsar's government toward selling Alaska." The most significant factors, in Okun's opinion, were the awkward position of the Russian-American Company, which "was able to exist only with the support of the government," the serious financial problems of that government, and several international considerations. I~ttempting to strike a blow against English power in North America and to force a collision between the United States and the British Empire, Russia decided to put Alaska up for sale. Yet, it was this drive for supremacy on the American continent that compelled the United States to acquire it."l Later on, in a fundamental work, A. L. Narochnitskii offered a detailed interpretation of the expansion of European powers and the United States in the North Pacific, specifically the active involvement of the American traders, whalers, and smugglers in Russia's American possessions in the 1800s and 1860s. A small, and unfortunately, rather tendentious work about the American expansion into the North Pacific and the sale of Alaska was published by T. M. Batueva, while R. V. Makarova devoted an article to the history of the liquidation of the Russian-American Company. A significant number of books and articles about Russian American relations and the sale of Alaska have been published outside the Soviet Union, particularly in the United States and Canada, as well as in Mexico and]apan.2 As a result of successful international collaboration, a collection of articles was published in 1987 under the title, Russia's American Colony, which included papers by N. N. Bolkhovitinov,]. R. Gibson, The Sale ofAlaska and Russian...