After 150 years, Russians still decry Alaska deal

The reassertion of Russia’s greatness has been a motif of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, and his projection of military might and cyberpower is in part why Russian-American relations are at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.

So the 150th anniversary on Thursday of Russia’s sale of Alaska to the United States — an event that few Americans likely notice — was a day of mourning for some hard-right Russian nationalists who see the transaction as a gigantic blunder by the ailing czarist empire, one that reverberates as the major powers vie for influence over the Arctic and its natural riches in an age of climate change.

“If Russia was in possession of Alaska today, the geopolitical situation in the world would have been different,” Sergey Aksyonov, the prime minister of Crimea, told a Crimean television network this month.

At the International Arctic Forum in Arkhangelsk, Russia, on Thursday, Putin said that U.S. activities in Alaska could destabilize world order. “What we do is contained locally, while what the U.S. does in Alaska, it does on the global level,” he said, calling U.S. development of a missile system there “one of the most pressing security issues.”

Russians started to settle Alaska in 1784, setting up trading posts and Eastern Orthodox churches, mostly along the coast. By the 1860s, having lost the Crimean War to Britain, and fearful that Britain would seize Alaska in any future conflict, the czar decided to strike a deal.

The sea otters who were the heart of the then-thriving fur trade had almost been wiped out, and the Russians feared that if gold were discovered — as it would be in the Klondike Gold Rush that started in 1896 — the Americans might overrun the territory, said Susan Smith-Peter, a historian at the College of Staten Island in New York.

The United States also thought the purchase would position it closer to trade with China, and fend off any British thoughts of encroachment on the West Coast, said Gwenn A. Miller, a historian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

“It was really about Manifest Destiny,” she said, “about expanding the U.S.”

The treaty — setting the price at $7.2 million, or about $125 million today — was negotiated and signed by Eduard de Stoeckl, Russia’s minister to the United States, and U.S. Secretary of State William Seward. It was mostly considered beneficial to both countries, but some critics derided it as “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’s Icebox” — and even now, scholars debate whether it was a bargain.