Russia once controlled 20 percent of U.S. territory. Why we’ve forgotten about it, and why we need to remember it now.
A 19th century illustration depicting Vitus Bering's expedition wrecked on the Aleutian Islands in 1741. The story of Russia’s imperial designs in North America traces to this instance, when Bering first sighted Alaska’s Aleutian islands.
It’s also an overlooked aspect of Russian history inside Russia. Official accounts of Russian expansion suggest that Russia simply agglomerated neighboring peoples as part of its defensive acquisition of territory, happily gathering new peoples and new lands into Moscow’s embrace. In Russia’s telling, the word “colonialism” applies to only other empires, not to the Russian one.But as the removal of Baranov’s statue indicates, Russia’s colonial legacy is hardly forgotten in Alaska.
A 1775 map depicting the Russian Discoveries. It didn’t take long after the Russian landing in Alaska in 1741 for the familiar pattern of colonial crimes to play out, sending Indigenous populations reeling. | Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg via Wikimedia Commons” that lay to Siberia’s east, a semi-mythical outpost of untapped wealth that could enrich his benefactors back in St. Petersburg.
And then the Russians came. And just as they had among Indigenous peoples in Siberia — and just as British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese explorers had done in the warmer climes of the Americas — Russian troops saw Indigenous peoples as little more than a subhuman hindrance, but also as a potential means to an end.
Backed by the Russian navy, the RAC’s expansion wasn’t difficult, sending employees across the broader Alaskan landmass, and even exploring farther south along the Canadian and American Pacific coasts. And at the helm of the company was one man: Baranov, serving as the first formal governor of Russian Alaska — and a man who,A lithograph from an 1802 Atlas showing the Three Saints Bay settlement in Kodiak Island, where hundreds died in a Russian mass slaughter event.
Adak Island, part of the Aleutian Islands, in Alaska. In America, the broader crimes of Russian colonialism in Alaska have been largely ignored. | Nicole Evatt/APmany ways, an apt one — and one that should help Americans, as well as Russians, more accurately understand Russia as a colonizing power, both then and now.
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