Henner Kropp, Russlands Traum von Amerika: Die Alaska-Kolonisten, Russland und die USA, 1733-1867 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 204 pp.

Alaska, the U.S. state at the uttermost northwest margin of North America, represented an unwanted child in U.S. history until its admission to the Union in 1958. For Americans, it was a remote wilderness associated with the legendary gold rush. The dissertation by Henner Kropp, specialist in East European history, explores the history of Alaska as Russia’s first overseas colony before the Alaska Purchase in 1867. Traditionally, Tsarist Russia was a landlocked empire, but the step to colonizing Alaska by establishing the Russian-American Company in 1799 unveiled Russia’s ambitions to become a maritime power in the North Pacific.

Scholarship on Russian presence in Alaska is manifold and highly specialized. Both Russian and U.S. historians provide a good historiography of different aspects of Russian rule: the process of exploring, mapping, and colonizing Alaska, geographic and ethnographic expeditions, the structure and main representatives of the administration, Russian-Indigenous encounters, the creation of Kreol communities as an aspect of a multiethnic empire, Indigenous life under Russian and U.S. rule, the transition from shamanism to Russian orthodoxy, gender (cf. Black; Vinkovetsky; Owens; Grinev; Michael; Rabow-Edling; Mousalimas; Luehrmann). There is also the approach to write a history of Alaska from Russian and U.S. perspectives (cf. Haycox). All these studies have in common that they are examining the process of Alaska’s incorporation into an empire (Tsarist Russia) or into a federation (United States). Henner Kropp also picks up this line of thought in his book, an abridged version of his dissertation. The author makes extensive use of the Russian Maritime Archive, the Archive of the Russian Geographical Society, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and Kropp also has a good command of the secondary literature.

In his regional study, Kropp delivers a solid supplement to the existing historical scholarship on Alaska as a colonial project. His dissertation is concerned with Tsarist Russia’s relationship to the newly acquired territory. In five comprehensive chapters, Kropp unfolds the vision of Alaska as a springboard for a Pacific empire and the hindrances to putting Russia’s dream of America into reality. The Russian “discovery” of Alaska began in the mid-eighteenth century as the extension of Russia’s expansion into Siberia. The strongest motive was the fur trade and Alaska promised to be a lucrative resource frontier. Kropp convincingly argues that Alaska never became a Russian settlement colony, instead it was a not more than a maritime base. Following Jürgen Osterhammel’s concept of colony types, Alaska’s colonization was the result of maritime discoveries with the aim of indirect, commercial exploitation of the fur resources and the stepstone for Russia’s maritime power development in the Pacific. As Kropp convincingly argues, Russia’s presence in Alaska was from the very beginning, i. e., from the end of the eighteenth century until the Alaska Purchase of 1867, fragmentary. There were several issues which contributed to this fragmentary character: Russia’s maritime facilities—especially its navy—was undeveloped, additionally the supply routes from Eastern Siberia to Alaska were too long and Russia had no ice-free harbor on the Siberian Pacific coast. The territory was administered by the Russian-American Company (RAC), a barter company, modelled after the British Hudson Bay Company. Several fur trading posts were set up, but Russia’s intrusion into Alaska’s interior never succeeded due to the resistance by the Indigenous population and the stubborn competition by British and U.S. (Bostonians) fur traders.

The first chapter gives a well-balanced insight into the motives of the Tsarist government in Saint Petersburg and the RAC agents. Kropp puts Russia’s expansion to the Pacific into the context of Russia’s increasing global presence, a process that accelerated between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. The author successfully unfolds a complicate, interwoven web of imperial ambiguities, discrepancies and competitions between a) the central government in St. Petersburg, the various imperial borderlands of the Tsarist empire and Alaska, b) between the central government and the regional agents of the RAC, c) between Tsarist Russia and foreign competitors on the Alaska territory such as the British and U.S. Americans. Judging by Kropp’s line of argument, Russian America was not more than a euphoric vision in order to keep up with Anglo-Saxon powers in the Pacific. Russia’s entanglements in other spots in the world, in Eastern Europe, the Middle and Far East, ultimately ended the central government’s interest in Alaska. Although Kropp’s dissertation has its focus on Russian policy in Alaska, his book also deals with Russian-U.S. relations touched by this issue. In the second chapter, Kropp embeds the U.S. intrusion into Alaska within the context of American westward expansion. The author shows that two facts were important for the American republic: first, to exclude the European colonial powers (Great Britain, France, Spain, and Russia) from the North American continent for concerns of national security and, second, the vision of the frontier, the seemingly endless space for U.S. settlement.

As most chapters of the dissertation focus on Russian policy in Alaska, the second chapter is more relevant to Russian-U.S. relations. Kropp shows that the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., had no interest in limiting the increasing and competing influence of U.S. private fur traders, i. e., the Bostonians. Two factors contributed to U.S. expansion into the Northwest: 1) the Lewis and Clark expedition (1803-1806) and 2) the Oregon Treaty of 1846. Simultaneously, Russian influence in Alaska was decreasing. After the defeat in the Crimean War of 1853, Imperial Russia was bound to European politics. Moreover, from the very beginning, Russian rule over Alaska was fragile. Many circumstances led to this failure: few colonists found their way to Alaska and settled permanently, food supply depended on U.S. (Bostonian) traders, and through overland routes U.S. Americans were increasingly dominating the fur trade with the Indigenous population. Russian rule over Alaska was economically not worthwhile and by 1867 the territory was purchased by the United States. The author succeeds in giving a meticulous insight into Imperial Russia’s ambition to settle Alaska, the book provides a profound analysis of the failure of “Russia’s dream of America” due to internal and external factors, and it delivers a valuable addition to scholarship on Alaskan history.

Eva-Maria Stolberg (Bochum)