Alaska

The official arms of Alaska is the golden eagle and the shield of blue with a golden elk

After the failed referendum for joining Russia, they started a new movement, renaming the country as just Alaska.

The current Tsar changed his personal arms, abandoning the title of Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias and merely claiming Alaska

He also changed the arms by removing the arms of Muscovy and replacing it with Alaska’s

The Alaskan flag was made bearing the national colors of white blue and gold from the coat of arms and inspired by the arms of the Russian American Company

The official arms of the country is the golden two headed eagle charge with the shield of alaska

Russian Alaska History (Credits to Alternate history forum)
Russo Japanese War

My guess is that if the Japanese managed to seize a few of the major Alaskan settlements, (This would could likely only be done by a detachment of cruisers with a few merchant ships pressed into service as troop carriers. SO the number of occupation troops would be very small) then it would cause a lot of worry in Washington and Ottowa. When it came to the peace table the US and British would be adamant that Alaska would have to be returned, that or it would would be handed over to the British and Americans (possibly run a a co-dominion.)

In compensation I could see the Japanese being awarded all of Sakhalin. Given that Japanese control of Alaska would be tenuous at best, and it would be far outside their then ability to keep supplied and garrisoned, they would probably be inwardly happy with this, but publicly would complain bitterly and sue it as further evidence of their unfair treatment by the western powers.

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1. In way of settlers, it's unlikely Russian Alaska would see much of them around, since settling implies a more or less permanent residence. As far as I know, most of Canadian and American presence in the region was first fur traders and then those looking for gold.

In matter of gold, you had the Panhandle where the Juneau gold rush happened in the 1880s. But the region was hardly accessible except by sea. That wouldn't deter Americans and Canadians from trying their luck to play hide and seek with Russian custom officials. But you can bet the Russians would send a naval detachment capable enough of policing the area, if it's necessary to protect "the Tsar's gold" (I'm not speaking of big warships, but ships capable to carry custom duties here, besides, the Russian navy, having de facto governed the territory for a good chunk of the 19th century, is more than familiar with the region).

Further north, if I'm not mistaken, the Klondike gold fields were mostly on the Canadian side of the border, so much so that Circle heavily declined in population when the gold rush happened there. In the somewhat comatose TL I've been developing on a Russian Alyaska into 20th century, Russian presence in this region initially resumes to a detachment of Siberian cossacks at Fort Yukon after the British Canadian presence here was expelled in the early 1880s during the Great Game (given the border treaty of 1825 had a clearly enunciated longitude to delimit Alaska, this would remain a legal move, just like the Americans did in 1869 OTL). It's not really an area where you can settle and prospect in total impunity; unlike Texas and California, unless you were a native, you could hardly live on the land and were reliant on unsteady supplies brought from Canada at great expanse, and this was a route that could easily be interrupted by a local garrison. In these conditions, you could hardly rebel lest you be forced to exile yourself into Canada just to find food to survive the winter.

Then, you got the Nome gold fields, sitting at the western edge of Alaska right in the Bering Strait. If reaching the panhandle by way of sea is not so much of a hard task from either British Columbia or Washington state, making it into the Bering strait area is quite a route away, where I guess it's even more difficult to escape eventual Russian patrols (minding if there is gold around, I'm pretty sure they will patrol the area).

Atop of these difficulties, you also got the Natives. As far as I know, the Russian regime in their regard wasn't much different from what it was in Siberia, ie essentially a tributary, iasak based, relationship, where they provided for the fur to the Russian American company to export. Furthermore, they were being evangelized by the Russian Orthodox church (see Innocent of Alaska's life), with quite some success if I judge by the orthodox community in Alaska today (

Demographics of Alaska - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

). I'm inclined to think that the Russians would have used them to counter or monitor Canadians and Americans, if only for the simple reasons they are competition for the Natives (even if the Russian American Company monopoly is abrogated as it is in my TL, on the model of Hudson Bay Company's abolished monopoly and the Golovin Report, it's unlikely decades of RAC enforced economic structures would vanish overnight) or an unwanted presence, possibly in the manner of intelligence gathering on behalf of Russian garrisons.

Besides, Russians are probably going to launch some colonization effort to reinforce their control of the territory at some point and counteract American and Canadian residents and wannabe settlers. This would at least begin with the ATL Juneau gold rush (which in my TL I kept roughly on schedule) and further discoveries of gold across the territory would make it clear to the Russian government Alaska is a resource rich territory that requires bolstering Russian presence to defend the Tsar's and Russia's sovereignty and the taxes that go along. Then, as the Transsiberian gets built, lines of communication with European Russia would shift from the circum American route to Vladivostok and open even wider the valves of Russian empire settlers (in relative scale, minding that Alaska had only around 30 thousands inhabitants according to the census as quoted on wiki and about doubled in size after the gold rush, a dozen thousands or two settlers would be a big deal if it came to only that number). I'd expect a good number of western Russia and Ukrainian peasants, Mennonites, Polish exiles and possibly Siberian peasants as well, not to mention Siberian cossacks in garrison duties.

As for Anglo-American settlers, I imagine they would be much less to stay in a territory controlled by autocratic and slavic Russia as opposed to an American, English-speaking, territory.

2. Not too difficult to imagine. Britain's only interest in Alaska which I'm aware of was it not being acquired by the Americans, fearing it might entertain further annexationist designs over British Columbia. As far as they, and Canada, were concerned, it remained a worthless frozen wilderness (even in the US, there had been quite some difficulties seeing what would be the advantages of "Seward's folly" ). Russia still in control of it wouldn't bother them the least, and they won't start any war over any border incident in the region, which due to its remoteness would be fairly considered minor in nature. That is until gold is discovered in droves in the region, which OTL led to the Alaska boundary dispute, but at this point, that was too late to entertain ideas of conquest over any flimsy pretext. With the understanding the world around is relatively unaffected by the absence of Alaska purchase (and indeed, the premise of a Russo-Japanese war as base for this discussion goes in that direction), the 1900s is a time where Great Britain and the Russian Empire were coming at an understanding, negotiating several conventions to delimit their respective spheres of influence and control across Asia, from China to Afghanistan to Persia, and were on way to find themselves on the same side of the Great War.

3. Capture wouldn't be difficult. It's much closer to the Japanese Isles than the American West Coast, only requiring the Japanese fleet to hop over the Kurile and Aleutian islands. Don't expect a Russian presence here to be strong enough militarily to repell a determined assault. They just have to seize Sitka and Juneau in the Panhandle, Anchorage in the Cook Inlet, and Kodiak perhaps, and Russian control of the territory would be broken, all lightly populated targets which I doubt would fare better than Petropavlosk in Kamchatka during the Crimean War.

But the value of it?

Gold or not gold, that remains a wide and remote territory at the very limit of Japan's reach, which would make any presence here costly, not to mention that the population is either Native American or of European and North American extraction which have no links, cultural, political or historical to Japan, unlike Korea, Manchuria and China as a whole. And Russian presence is nowhere near strong enough to be any danger to Japan. Geographically, an expansion of the Russo-Japanese to the American continent would be very unwise to be euphemistic, given the United States' love of Monroe doctrine, the jingoistic mood of the time, the blatant and widespread anti Asiatic racism, and Theodore Roosevelt in power, all ingredients to make the area a touchy subject. And London, though technically an ally of Japan, is unlikely to tolerate the imperial ambitions of Japan spill over Canada's doorstep.

All in all, few benefits, lots of trouble.

Besides, to be coherent, the Japanese would take Petropavlosk in Kamchatka before Alaska; but that never happened IOTL, so it is extremely dubious they would take Alaska ITTL while they didn't move against Kamchatka IOTL. Saying this, I think it would be moot for me expanding over the other questions in this point.

1940LaSalle said:

Egads...


 * 1) Good luck with that. You're talking a very long border in some rather rugged, remote territory. It'll take a lot more than a minimal garrison, and the opportunities for corruption are huge (you think a commander, several thousand miles from home, with no real means of communication, is going to be able to resist bribes to look the other way while prospectors, miners, loggers, and the like come over the border from British Columbia or the Yukon--or arrive by water from Puget Sound?)

Click to expand...

As far as I know, the Russian administration of Alaska hadn't any recorded mass corruption IOTL during the Russian American Company days. Not to mention, the territory was de facto administered by the Imperial Navy, and would have remained so for a long time if the territory hadn't been sold.

And communications were not that inexistant. By the time Alaska was to be sold, the first Transatlantic telegraph cables had been laid while telegraph lines already connected both coasts (San Francisco in 1861, New Westminster near Vancouver in 1865). As a result, all it took for communications between Alaska and St Petersburg was a telegram sent all the way from there to either San Francisco or Vancouver via cables across Europe to England and then onto North America, and from there, a steamer to make the trip to Sitka (then Novo Arkhangelsk, capital of Russian Alaska). It may be quite circuitous, but that remains quite fast compared to earlier travel times.

Not to mention there was a project to lay a telegraph line from California to Moscow by way of Alaska and the Bering Strait, the Russian-American Telegraph that eventually aborted. Russians could later either resurrect this project along the construction of the Transsiberian or simply extend telegraph lines from British Columbia.

Arkenfolm said:

Canada was also a democratic country, Tsarist Russia most certainly was not. Mostly Protestant Anglos being forced to swear allegiance to an Orthodox Russian monarch in distant Europe and accept the dictates of his governor is not a recipe for success.

Religion wasn't so much of an issue. Imperial Russia did in fact host large Protestant communities, from Lutheran Finns to anabaptist Mennonites and a good number of Volga Germans, and there were present in Alaska even before the Purchase. A good chunk, I think that was about a third, of the Russian American company crews and settlers in Alaska were of Finnish extraction (it may useful to note that through the 19th century, Russians accessed Alaska from St Petersburg with ships making all the way through the Baltic sea, the Atlantic ocean and rounded Cape Horn before heading north, a circuit that was faster and more practical than the long roads of Siberia before the Transsiberian was built in the late 19th century). The Protestant community in Alaska, mostly Lutherans, had their own church here, though they were prohibited from proselytizing among the natives, a monopoly of the Orthodox Church at the time.

As for the political side of it, let's think too they won't be let to stay long there either, rising up being as difficult and unlikely for practical reasons as for geopolitical ones I cited above. These potential settlers you refer to would probably return to Canada or the US as soon as they have won as much as they could do from gold mining.

Also, at individual scale, exploitation of gold fields can only be superficial as returns disminish rapidly, necessitating more heavy equipment and machinery, typically operated by companies rather than by individual wannabe settlers; as such, exploitation is contingent on the agreement of the authorities, and at this time as much as even in our day, you would hardly find mining companies operating for profit really bothering about whether the local government is a democracy or an autocracy, and would in fact very much appreciate an environment where labor unions are not a thing to worry about (and this was a time where the US were barely out of the Gilded Age and its labor related unrest).