RUSSIAN AMERICA

RUSSIAN AMERICA, This seeming oxymoron is now used by specialists to describe the history of the interaction on American soil between imperial Russia and the people inhabiting North America in the 18th-19th c.-if not through to the present. Active suppression of this history until recent decades may be credited to several factors, including the feelings generated by the Cold War, historical conservatism in enshrining the writings of Hubert Howe Bancroft as the “official history” of western North America, cultural triumphalism, and embarrassment over the treatment of Native American peoples.

The era begins with the period of the exploration and “discovery” of Alaska (q.v.) by Russia at the instigation of Peter the Great. Although the “discovery” is usually credited to Bering, recent research has shown that Cherikov sighted land two days before Bering in 1741, and that Feodorov might have sighted “Seward’s Peninsula” as early as 1732. As far as Russian historians are concerned, the first Russian to explore the straits between Asia and America was the Yakut (q.v.) seaman Simeon Dezhnev, who did so in 1648. The exploration is said to have been kept a state secret, smuggled to the West only in 1730 by a Swedish prisoner of war, although American historians dismiss Russians in Alaska prior to 1700 as folklore.

The word “discovery” has been left in quotes because the Russians frequently named lands by their native populations and early knew that locals must have gone back and forth between Asia and North America on a regular basis. In theory the earliest Russian pioneers in Alaska (before 1741) remained anonymous intentionally, so as to escape taxation on fur commerce. The interests of the Bering party lay primarily in discovering a land bridge and establishing the westernmost advance of European occupation; these issues are mentioned as early as Peter’s instructions to Bering, though Peter’s motives remain unknown-supposedly related to the fur trade. The next one hundred years were punctuated by map making, biological and botanical surveys, fur harvest and trading, and getting to know-when possible-the native peoples. Early Aleut resistance to Russian trading colonies in the “Ungnak Massacre” was recently confirmed through archaeological evidence.

The next period, 1741–98, is known as the “Fur Rush” or the time of the Alaskan promyshlenniki (frontiersmen). The era has not been adequately researched, and is complicated by the fact that exaggeration and character defamation abound on many sides. Just as with tales about Paul Bunyan and Daniel Boone, Russian frontiersmen seem to spin their yarns to fit the same genre. Others, like the Russian American Company, told tales to discredit the promyshlenniki with the Russian imperial government, and characterize their corporation as the establishment of the rule of law. American historians seem to have followed these official company reports without reservation, although it is clear that many of the officials of the Company might just as well have been describing their own behavior rather than that of other transgressors. Recently a microfilm of a significant English language diary, the Joseph Billings journal (1787–92), never seen before in the United States, was presented to American scholars working in the field, and should shed new light on these decades. The period ends with the establishment of the Russian American Company (1798) and coincides closely with the arrival of Russian missionaries in 1794.

The following period, 1798–1867, is one in which an indigenous Native American Orthodox culture was established in spite of the exigencies of the fur trade. The most significant events from the Church’s perspective were the arrival of the Elder Herman (q.v.) with about a dozen other monastics who missionized the native population, and ended up protecting them from their Russian overlords. Later, Fr. Innocent Veniaminov arrived and furthered work with the native clergy, like Fr. James Netsvetov (qq.v.), in developing indigenous Orthodox cultures. Although this period ends with the sale of Alaska in 1867, Russian Orthodox contacts with Alaska did not cease. The foray south from Alaska to Fort Ross (q.v.) established links that simply moved the center of activity to the San Francisco Bay area.

The period from 1867 to 1917 focuses on the Russian immigration to the Pacific northwest (especially San Francisco) before the Russian Revolution and the figure of Bishop Tikhon Belavin (q.v.). Tikhon, as Innocent before him, envisioned an autocephalous (q.v.) Orthodox Church in America as an outgrowth of the American Missionary Diocese. He moved the headquarters of the Russian Missionary Diocese from San Francisco to New York in 1905 in anticipation of this indigenous church, and with the shift in immigrant populations from the West to the eastern seaboard. At this time all “ethnic” Orthodox churches recognized the Russian Missionary Diocese as the responsible coordinating organization, and this situation prevailed until the Russian Revolution prevented further Russian support for these efforts. Another significant phenomenon during this period was the return to Orthodoxy of a large number of Carpatho-Russian Uniates in the east through the labors of Fr. Toth (qq.v.) and others, which event greatly increased the number of churches and parishioners in the diocese.

After the Revolution-and with continued immigration-ethnic Orthodox established administrative contacts with their mother churches (q.v.). The Russian missionary diocese continued, breaking off dependence on its own mother church in order to avoid Bolshevik interference. It suffered administrative bedlam in the 1920s and 1930s as a result of the Revolution and from the establishment of the (Soviet-sponsored) Living Church in Russia and the United States, but eventually achieved autocephalous status in 1970 as the Orthodox Church in America (qq.v.).