this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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But Russia also has enormous fossil fuel reserves. They just sold off a colony that was more expensive to guard than it was lucrative to exploit.
Questionable.
There's about 60km between modern day Russia and Alaska, and plenty of troops are already stationed (and were at the time) on its eastern border. Alaska would provide a lot of resources, and it could absolutely be guarded.
But, at the time, Alaska was seen as nothing but barren piece of cold land, not really useful for anything.
There's over 5000km between Vladivostok and Anchorage. Virtually nobody lives in the interior.
It still is. The mineral wealth is extremely difficult to access due to the weather.
Vladivostok is barely the closest populated Russian area. Even among major cities, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is significantly closer, not to mention Anadyr and other smaller ones. Besides, if Alaska would remain Russian, you bet there would be more connections. They just don't make much sense in the current realities.
Russia has the technologies and infrastructure for efficient resource extraction under extreme conditions, and some of those resources (for example, nickel) are primarily located inside the Arctic circle. Moreover, under American leadership Alaska has still been one of the resource extraction hubs, with up to 2 million barrels of oil produced per day at peak, and about 500 thousand currently, 17 metric tons of gold currently produced per year (and expected to grow), etc. etc.
Its a major base of operations for the Russian Pacific fleet.
Now, sure. And France has the technology and infrastructure to extract resources from the Mississippi delta region now. But the Alaska purchase was in 1867. Russians were still trying to secure territory on their own continent during this time. Repeated wars with Japan, the Ottomans, and with domestic insurgencies plagued the country through the 19th century.
And Alaska was already being filibustered by western colonialists as far back as the early 1800s, necessitating a Treaty (the Russo-American Treaty of 1824) to settle an ongoing dispute over territory (The Oregon Boundary Dispute) that Russians had little capacity or real interest in prosecuting. Much like with the Louisiana Purchase, this was a token transfer intended to get some kind of compensation to relinquish a claim the Russians were poised to lose one way or another.