Alaska: Russia’s American Folly
In 1867 the United States purchased Alaska from Tsar Alexander II at a price of just two cents an acre. What brought Russia’s American empire to such an ignominious end?
In 1867 the United States purchased Alaska from Tsar Alexander II at a price of just two cents an acre. What brought Russia’s American empire to such an ignominious end?
During the first half of the nineteenth century, as Tocqueville perceptively remarked, Russia and the United States had grown to nationhood almost unnoticed. ‘The world learned of their existence and their greatness at almost the same time’. By Paul Dukes.
W. Bruce Lincoln describes how the European Revolutions of 1848 alarmed the Russian Government so much, it sent its armies to aid the Habsburgs in Hungary.
After service in the Russo-Japanese War, writes Norman Saul, the Aurora helped to secure the Bolshevik triumph in Petrograd.
Within a century, writes Sergius Yakobson, the Russians expanded over Asia from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean.
Sergius Yakobson describes the victor in the struggle for power within Russia, a Tsar who guided the medieval Russian state into modern times.
It is the issue of Russian identity, rather than strategic or economic importance, that lies at the heart of the Crimean crisis, argues Alexander Lee
“We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order” announced Lenin to the Congress of Soviets early on the morning of November 8th, 1917. He had prepared no blueprint from which to work, and forty years later, writes Ernest Bock, the structure of the Soviet state is very different from that which its founder envisaged.
Christopher Sykes describes how the last Tsar of Russia, as well as Adolf Hitler and other anti-Semites, were among those taken in by this spurious publication.
The legacy of the Crimean War still resonates in Ukraine, as Hugh Small explains.