Imagine that Russia had colonised America

The Telegraph blogs ^ | September 2, 2013 | Daniel Hannan

[cunning_fish]

What if Russia had got to California first? What if Spain’s feeble, arthritic hold on the province had been prised away, not by mutinous Mexicans or land-hungry Americans, but by sea-borne Cossacks? How different might the twentieth century have been if, in the nineteenth, the Russian Bear had sunk her claws deep into American soil, drawing the entire North Pacific into her embrace?

Glorious Misadventures by Owen Matthews is the story of how it almost happened, and a splendidly ursine, shambling, alcoholic, opéra bouffe story it is. As British, French and Spanish settlers pushed westward into the American interior, looking for land or gold or religious freedom, Russians came from the other direction, looking for fur. Sea otters’ hides were especially valuable: a single pelt could fetch the equivalent of two years’ salary for a working man in the licensed entrepôts of northern China.

Avarice for this ‘soft gold’ pulled the Russians in a remarkably short time across the vastness of Siberia and on, over the Bering Straits, into Alaska. From the other end of the country – the other end of the world, really – Tsars marked maps and poets wrote of the civilising mission of the ‘Russian Columbuses’, as Mikhail Lomonosov called them.

‘In Europe we are hangers-on and slaves’, wrote Dostoevsky, ‘but in Asia we are masters. In Europe we were Tatars but in Asia we, too, are Europeans’.

[2banana]

To colonize (and make it stick) you need lots of your own people to move to the new land.

Russia has yet to colonized Siberia...

[Fiji Hill]

They did land in the US,but in Washington DC not California,read Diana Wests book,American Betrayal,it will open your eyes about the communist infiltration that goes back to the 30s

They did land in California. Read all about it in Red Channels: The Report on Communist Influence in Radio and Television (New York: American Business Consultants, 1950) or Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930's and 1940's by Lloyd Billingsley (Rocklin, Calif.: Forum, 1998)

[Fiji Hill]

In his bestselling novel If the South Had Won the Civil War (New York: Bantam, 1961), McKinlay Kantor wrote that had the South won the war, the Union and the Confederacy would have eventually gotten back together and that by 1961, the alternative America would look about the same as the real one, with two notable exceptions: Cuba would be a US state, while Alaska would be part of the Soviet Union.