Today the Empire of the Tsars turned over possession of Alaska to the United States of America. An entire nation-size territory lost a heritage and gained another. This is bittersweet to me: I have never felt more at home than standing in America in a Tsarist Orthodox Church. At that moment, I felt I was part of the great republican heritage of my nation, the older and culturally richer heritage of Russia, and the deep truth of Christian Orthodoxy.
This is only possible just north of San Francisco in Fort Ross, but easy to experience in its fullness in towns like Sitka, Alaska. Russians got many things wrong in their Empire, but compared to Americans, they got quite a few things right. If you were Orthodox, a big, if Imperial Russia, was far less racist than most European societies. Education and social advancement were relatively open. Americans often forget that the Tsar Liberator freed the serfs peacefully before Americans went through a civil war to free slaves.
I was told in Alaska that the Imperial purse provided more money for the education of Native Americans in Alaska, even after the takeover, than the American government. Help ended with the Russian Revolution of 1918, but there is still a significant Orthodox Native American population and saints like Peter the Aleut in the Church calendar.
I love my country, the United States of American, so much that Alaska is good for me. Alaska reminds me that the USA has done some very bad things, particularly to Native Americans, and that we have never really dealt with that crime. The Russians were not saints, but they did better in Alaska than did the USA. That fact humbles me and reminds me to find the good in cultures different than my own.
Russian culture is very rich and Russian history is a blend of Nobel quality science with pogroms, great literature with time of trouble, saints like Elizabeth the New Martyr and sinners like Rasputin. You cannot tell the story of Russia without golden domes, but also martyrs’ blood. The same is true in Alaska. There a company tried to make a profit on our west coast only to fail. The Russian government eager, not for the first time, to get favor with America handed us a bargain.
Americans have ever since acted as if we “rescued” the Russians from an area they could not keep as if a nation that stretched from Petersburg to Vladivostok could not have kept little Sitka out of British hands. They could have, they just decided it was not worth the price.; Having supported us in our war for independence and then having favored the Union in our civil war, one of the few powers to do so, they wanted to keep us an ally. Alaska was given away, not a terribly popular move in Russia, and the goodwill attempt failed in any case.
American elites would let the British do anything and still venerate London, but Saint Petersburg could never win our hearts.
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