The Russian Empire
Question & Answer

Why Did Russia Sell Alaska to the United States?

The treaty was signed in the United States Senate chamber at 10 p.m. on the night of 29/30 March 1867, after a twelve-hour session of the U.S. Senate and after a champagne dinner in Seward’s home. The price was $7.2 million, payable in gold coin at the U.S. Treasury and at the U.S. legation in Paris. The transfer of sovereignty took place on Castle Hill in Sitka on 18 October 1867. The total area transferred was about 591,000 square miles, including the Aleutian arc; the price worked out at about 2 cents per acre. The Russian minister in Washington was Eduard Andreyevich de Stoeckl; the American counterpart was Secretary of State William Henry Seward. The Senate’s roll-call vote of 37–2 was held the night of 30 March 1867, with Charles Sumner of Massachusetts the principal floor advocate (Allison, Alaska, 1867, 2014; Gruening, The State of Alaska, 1954).

The Russian public heard the news in May 1867, and the immediate reaction was not amused. The Petersburg satirical press published the cartoon of “Seward’s Icebox” and the caption: “We had 1,000,000 people in the United States; now we’ll have 50,000 more: the bears, the seals, and the indigenes of the colony will, of course, vote as Seward directs.”

The financial state of the colony

The Russian-American Company had been chartered in 1799, given a 20-year monopoly on the seal fisheries and a 30-year exclusive on American coastal trade. The Company employed about 575 Russians in 1860 (out of 1,400 in Alaska) and counted 13,000 promyshlenniki (settler-workers), Creoles, and Aleuts among its dependent population. The dividends had been suspended in 1862; the Company’s own report of 1862 recorded an annual net loss of 100,000 paper roubles. The post-Crimean naval decline and the impossibility of resupplying the colony through the closed Baltic had been registered by the Ministry of Finance as early as 1855. The Naval Ministry estimated the cost of building a depot at Ayan or on Sakhalin to relieve Alaska at 4 million silver roubles — half the imperial annual revenue from the gold mines (Black, Russian-America, 2004; Etkind, Internal Colonization, 2011).

The decision

The decision to negotiate was made by the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, the Naval Minister, and by Alexander II’s personal adjutant, Baron Eduard de Stoeckl. The new Russian envoy in Washington, Baron de Stoeckl, opened the formal channel on 15 December 1866. The Russian Cabinet Committee on Alaska (9 February 1867) recorded four grounds:

  1. The colony was indefensible against British attack, given the limitation of the Russian navy after the loss of the 1853 Petropavlovsk to the Anglo-French.
  2. The colony produced 3,200 metric tons of ice, some peltries, and 2.4 million silver roubles’ worth of furs in its best year (1859); in 1865 the value of exports was 1.4 million silver roubles.
  3. The territory was a colony, not an incorporated province; a sale would not displace Russian subjects.
  4. The American purchase would create a Pacific counterweight to the British presence in British Columbia (Dall, Alaska and Its Resources, 1870; Bolkhovitinov, Russia and the United States, 1986).

The Polish tax

The immediate pressure was the Polish uprising of 1863. The cost of the suppression — the operation under the Governor of Poland, Count Friedrich Wilhelm Rembert von Berg — was 82.4 million silver roubles, of which 41.5 million was paid from the imperial treasury. The 1864 settlement had also cost 22 million silver roubles in compensation to the Russian landed gentry. The Russian Finance Minister, Mikhail Reytern, told the Grand Duke that the Alaska sale was a “post-war fiscal measure” — a way to finance the deficit left by the Polish campaign and to set aside 6 million roubles for the Ministry of Finance’s gold and platinum mines (Figes, The Crimean War, 2010; Bobroff, Roads to Glory, 2010).

The reception

“Seward’s Folly” entered the American press in April 1867; the New York Sun of 18 April 1867, on the editorial page, called the territory a “Frozen Wasteland” and the price an “extravagant sum.” The discovery of gold at the Anvil Creek in 1899 and the Klondike gold rush of 1896–1899 made the early criticisms look foolish. The American investment was amortised by the Klondike alone. The 1867 suspicions survived in Russia: the Russian Foreign Ministry received a petition in 1907 from the Alaska-descended Russian-American Company bondholders to reconsider the sale; the Imperial Council considered the petition and rejected it. The 1959 Alaska Statehood Act was, in American public memory, the moment when “Seward’s Folly” was reframed as “Seward’s Wisdom” (Grinev, Tales of Alaska, 2005; Etkind, 2011).

Russian legacy in Alaska

The Russian Orthodox diocese of Alaska was established in 1840 at New Archangel (Sitka); the diocese had 11 parishes, 7,000 communicants, and 7 schools in 1867. The diocese was not transferred by the treaty; the Church of Russia retained the title and the parishes until 1970, when the Orthodox Church in America was granted autocephaly by the Patriarchate of Moscow. The Russian heritage in Alaska is preserved in the Sitka National Historical Park, the Baranof Museum, the Russian Bishop’s House, the Holy Resurrection Cathedral in Kodiak (rebuilt 1945), and the catalogues of the St Herman Seminary on Kodiak (Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews, 1986; Bolkhovitinov, 1986).