God is High Above and the Tsar is Far Away
Fort Ross, New Archangel and how we all could've been living in Russian America
I grew up in a small mining town of maybe 1,000 people.
(Oop, upon googling that, I have discovered we are now at 1,950. Impressive!)
I need to put some respect on Graysville, which is - as I also learned from that same search — Alabama’s “most progressive town”. I’m gonna take a massive liberty here and say that might the biggest lie Satan ever told… but moving on.
My town bordered three other tiny-to-small mining camps turned towns: Sayre, Cardiff and Brookside.
The latter was settled by several hundred Slovak miners, who emigrated to Alabama after the invention of Erskine Ramsey’s coal washer in 1897. By 1910, Slovak families were nearly 40% of Brookside’s population.
My source for the above stat is a historical marker right outside of St Nickolas Russian Orthodox Church, where I used to ride my bike by all the time. Lots of intense research I did for this one lol
Shout out to one of my favorite people, Dystopos for the above photo. He runs the absolute best website in Birmingham: BhamWiki. If you’ve never dived into it, here you go and you’re welcome.
Until I was 10 or so, I never really questioned why a small church with sizable onion dome was sitting in the hollow beneath my town, in the very center of Brookside.
Probably the most important and also insanely on brand thing about the settlement of the town is… folks moving into Brookside weren’t Russian. Lots of their customs overlapped with Russian culture and so the English & Welsh settlers they lived beside began referring to them as Russian.
Before John Archibald’s recent gripping expose on the crooked Brookside cops, the town was primarily known for its Russian Festival every year. Folks from all over Alabama line up to pour into the church to eat pierogis and see the young members of St Nicholas dance in traditional Russian outfits.
As I got older and developed my core group of hyper fixations, one slipped in that is somewhat adjacent.
AND NOW I WANNA TALK ABOUT IT!
Welcome to Don’t Go Outside, Week Three! We’re getting into Fort Ross and Russian Expansionism in the West!
My purpose of info dumping below is not to offer an unabridged timeline or any sort of comprehensive history of Russia’s advances on the New World, but honestly just sort of point & stare at it for what it is to me: a complement to our common understanding of how America was colonized.
Take a look at this one, detailing Russia’s exploration and colonial outposts in Alaska:
Brookside’s history was tangential and adjacent to Russia but not quite “Russian city in the New World” levels.
However, Fort Ross fits the bill. Russia pulled up a boat and set up camp in the contiguous 48.
I mean, it was not that simple. As we know from every other expedition motivated my colonialism in all of history, there’s always gonna be exploitation, murder and just general terrible activities top to bottom.
Settled in 1812 as Крѣпость Россъ, it was the southernmost Russian settlements in North America until 1841.
The Russian’s imperialist ambitions began with enslaving members of the indigenous Alaskan Aleut tribe who settled with Native Californians to then hunt for sea otters so they could trade with the Chinese. This earned them the distinction as the first multi-ethnic community in northern California on Wikipedia. I mean, damn, that’s one way.
Growing up as a kid during the tail end of the Cold War and becoming an adult during our most recent tensions with Russia, it’s obviously a lot to take in. The idea of Russians having a colony in America is intense. It all seems so exotic and distant from the Anglo manifest destiny expansionism we became used to in our simplistic grade school history textbooks.
But it’s not. Same old worn out playbook, that seem flashy and different bc it’s East vs West I guess.
Russian sea otter hunters led the exploration of the American PNW the way that French fur traders did in eastern Canada and New England.
(Question: Did y’all know beavers were fish? Me neither! Apparently though, French fur traders were devout Catholics and stayed true to their habit of not eating meat on Fridays by appealing to the Pope to reclassify beaver meat as ~fish~. A win is a win when you’re cold & hungry in the New World, I guess.)
And Fort Ross was just an outpost. That’s what caught my eye in the first place. Just the idea of some alternative history. An orthodox chapel perched high on a Pacific bluff on the coast of California.
Removed from it’s brutal history, it could be romantic. But it’s not.
On land sold by California Indians, Russians brought Alaskans to capture furs for markets in China.
It’s now a historic monument, complete with museum, to a history of what might’ve been. Fears of Russian encroachment drove the last stage of Spanish settlement of California, making it what it is today. A land of Catholic missions.
But there is… another place.
New Archangel.
It sounds like a megacity in Bladerunner, or a video game. It probably is. More interestingly though, it was once Russian America’s imperial HQ.
It even became home to a very rare breed indeed, a Russian Orthodox cathedral on American soil, St Michael’s. It shared a name with the Russian Fort in town — Saint Michael — which is also referred to as Old Sitka. After Seward’s Folly and the purchase of Alaska from Russia, the city has been called Sitka.
In 1733, Tsar Peter I commissioned the Great Northern Expedition.
It was described as “an ambitious exploration of Eastern Siberia and the Northern Pacific Ocean”. Originally, Vitus Bering, who was a Dane serving in the Russian Navy (girl don’t ask me) and Aleksei Chirikov, a Russian Captain, were sent to map “Russia's northeast coast”. On their trip they discovered that there was lots of money to be made further south and east in what Alaskans now refer to as “the Inner Passage”.
The National Park Service offers some excellent and remarkable familiar background into what the Russians (and the one Dane smh) were up to:
Siberian fur trappers known as promyshlenniki operated the fur trade through brutality. They often took hostages and forced Aleut and Alutiiq peoples to supply resources for their subsistence. Their justification for this behavior can be summed up in an Old Russian maxim, "God is high above, and the Tsar is far away," meaning that judgement of or punishment for their behavior was unlikely in this remote frontier.
In 1799, Tsar Paul I consolidated these private companies into one entity, the Russian American Company. This gave the Russian American Company (RAC) a monopoly on Russia's North American trade. It also entrusted the RAC with the government of Russia's North American colonies.
Sounds just as brutal and familiar as the British and Dutch East India Companies, doesn’t it? Just approaching from the other coast, honestly. Same playbook of enslaving and exploiting the locals. That part of history we were taught here in the States so the framework is there. Not everything is as strange as it first seems.
French Fur in the Northeast and Canada. Russians and their Sea Otters in the PNW.
Don’t know why this particular thing lodged in my head and refused to exit, but hey… that’s why I started this thing.
Until next week, which will either be about China’s glorious Kurst mountains? Or the giant mess of a saga that is Pitcairn Island?
Your guess is as good as mine!
If you want to dive in and learn more about Russian American exploration, you can dive into the wikipedia here.
I'm hooked and can't wait for the continuation