|
|
|
REVIEWS
THE GREAT LAND: HOW WESTERN AMERICA NEARLY BECAME A RUSSIAN POSSESSION
|
by Jeremy Atiyah
|
| Parker Press, Oxford and Portland, 2008. Bibliography, index. 250 pages. $29.95 cloth. |
| Jeremy Atiyah was an English travel writer celebrated for producing the first Rough Guides to China and Southeast Asia. With a degree from Oxford and sorely afflicted with wanderlust, he traveled on a shoestring in Asia for a number of years. After working for a time as travel editor of the Independent of London, he decided to settle in Umbria. He died prematurely, of a heart attack at age forty-three, while walking near his Italian home. |
1
|
|
While visiting Irkutsk in 2001, he became fascinated, as many before him, with the story of Russia's North American adventure. His father, an academic, completed the manuscript for this book, left incomplete at Atiyah's death. |
2
|
|
Atiyah hypothesizes that Chief Manager Baranov and imperial agent Nikolai Rezanov dreamed of Russian occupation of the entire North American coast from Alaska to California and that, had their dream been realized, all of the American West might have been wrested from the Spanish and the later-coming Americans, forming a Russian American empire. Russia's failure to colonize Hawaii in 1815, Atiyah argues, doomed this vision, for Hawaii would have been critical for supply and strategic position in the Pacific. He concludes his book with Russia's Hawaiian debacle. |
3
|
|
This is an unusual thesis; Atiyah is alone in arguing it. The historians of Russian America, among them recently Lydia Black (Russians in Alaska, University of Alaska Press, 2004) and James Gibson (Imperial Russia in Frontier America, Oxford University Press, 1976; Otter Skins, Boston Ships, China Goods, University of Washington Press, 1992), suggest that the scant Russian population in North America, never more than 833 (Svetlana Fedorova, The Russian Population of Alaska and California, Limestone Press, 1973), together with chronic undersupply of the few viable Alaskan posts frustrated any Russian notions of expansion south of the Alexander Archipelago (54–40° N. lat.). |
4
|
|
Moreover, the book feels incomplete, as if Russia's Hawaiian venture is as far as Atiyah was able to carry his research. Interestingly, he deals very lightly with Ft. Ross, the Russian American Company post on the middle California coast, which might better be seen as a forward base for Russian designs on the American West. As it developed, Ross was too isolated, unproductive, and ill equipped to serve as a vanguard of a Russian occupation of the American West. |
5
|
|
Certainly the Russians did attempt to extend their occupation further south along the Northwest Coast, beyond the Alexander Archipelago in southeast Alaska. In March 1805, Rezanov, on his way to San Francisco, spent three days trying to cross the Columbia River bar, all for naught. And in 1808, N.I. Bulygin and T.O. Tarakanov, with a small party of Russian fur trappers, landed on the Pacific Coast of the Olympic Peninsula, only to be captured and traded around by various Indian groups in the area, the effort an utter failure. Atiyah devotes pages to this episode, Russia's only significant colonizing foray along the coast of western America, yet argues that it was the Hawaii venture that doomed Russian expansion. |
6
|
|
For over a decade, before James Gibson published his much more accurate Imperial Russia, most readers learned their Russian American history from the colorful version offered by the radio journalist Hector Chevigny in Russian America, the Great Alaskan Venture, 1741–1867 (Cresset Press, 1965). Jeremy Atiyah's is a similarly romanticized rendering of the Russian America story, but one which stops abruptly in 1815. Contemporary readers interested in the full narrative of that history would do better with Lydia Black's new history, and those wishing a balanced interpretation of its significance and the reasons for its end will find it fully argued in Gibson's Otter Skins. |
7
|
|
|
| STEPHEN W. HAYCOX
|
| Anchorage, Alaska |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|