On August 9, it became known that the meeting of Russian and American Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will take place on August 15 in Alaska. For the first time, a bilateral summit will be held in this state. According to the aide to the Russian President Yuri Ushakov, Russia and the US are close neighbors, making this state a logical choice for the meeting.
Alaska was discovered in 1732 by Russian explorers Mikhail Gvozdev and Ivan Fedorov during an expedition on the ship “St. Gabriel“. The peninsula was explored in more detail in 1741 by the second Kamchatka expedition of Vitus Bering and Alexei Chirikov. In 1784, an expedition led by the Irkutsk merchant Grigory Shelikhov arrived on Kodiak Island off the southern coast of Alaska and founded the first settlement in Russian America, the port of "Three Saints".
From 1799 to 1867, Alaska and the neighboring islands were under the control of the Russian-American Company (RAC). It was created on the initiative of Grigory Shelikhov and his successors and received a monopoly on fishing, trade, and mineral development in northwestern America, as well as the Kuril and Aleutian Islands. In addition, the Russian-American Company had the exclusive right to discover and annex new territories to Russia in the northern Pacific Ocean. In 1825-1860, RAC employees explored and mapped the territory of the peninsula. The peoples living there, who were engaged in the fur trade, became dependent on the RAC. In 1809-1819, the price of furs obtained in Alaska amounted to over 15 million rubles, i.e. approximately 1.5 million rubles per year (for comparison, all revenues of the Russian budget in 1819 were estimated at 138 million rubles).
In 1794, the first Orthodox missionaries arrived in Alaska. In 1840, the Kamchatka, Kuril and Aleutian Diocese was organized, in 1852, the Russian possessions in America were assigned to the New Archangel Vicariate of the Kamchatka Diocese. By 1867, about 12 thousand representatives of the indigenous population who had converted to Orthodoxy lived on the peninsula. The total population of Alaska at that time was about 50 thousand people, including Russians - about 1 thousand.
The administrative center of the Russian possessions in North America was the city of Novoarkhangelsk (now Sitka), their total territory was about 1.5 million square kilometers. The borders of Russian America were fixed by treaties with the United States (1824) and the British Empire (1825; Alaska borders the territory of Canada, which was then in the British sphere of influence).
The idea of selling Alaska to the United States was first expressed in government circles in the spring of 1853 by the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia Nikolai Muravyov-Amursky. He submitted a note to Emperor Nicholas I, in which he argued that Russia should give up its possessions in North America. According to him, the Russian Empire did not have the necessary military and economic means to defend these territories from the claims of the United States. Muravyov wrote: “We must be convinced of the idea that the North American states will inevitably spread throughout North America, and we cannot help but bear in mind that sooner or later we will have to cede our North American possessions to them.“ Instead of developing Russian America, Muravyov-Amursky proposed to focus on the development of the Far East, while at the same time the United States was an ally against Great Britain.
Later, the main supporter of the sale of Alaska to the United States was the younger brother of Emperor Alexander II, Chairman of the State Council and Head of the Maritime Ministry, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich. On April 3 (March 22, old style), 1857, in a letter to Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov, he first officially proposed the sale of the peninsula to the United States. As arguments in favor of concluding the deal, the Grand Duke cited the "tight state of state finances" and the low profitability of the American territories.
The agreement on the sale of Russian possessions was concluded in Washington on March 30 (18), 1867. On May 15 (3), 1867, the agreement was signed by Emperor Alexander II, and on May 3 it was ratified by the US Senate. On June 20, the exchange of ratification instruments took place in Washington.
The deal amounted to 7 million 200 thousand dollars, or more than 11 million rubles. The United States received the entire Alaska Peninsula, the Alexandrovsky and Kodiak archipelagos, the islands of the Aleutian chain and several islands in the Bering Sea. The total area of the land sold was 1 million 519 thousand square kilometers. According to the document, Russia transferred ownership of the RAC to the United States free of charge and withdrew its troops from Alaska. The indigenous population came under US jurisdiction.