Russian America

On March 16, the exhibition "Russian Trace on the Aleuts" opened at the Ryazan State University named after S. A. Yesenin.

Russian America (Russian: Русская Америка, Russkaya Amyerika) wasthe name of the Russian colonial possessions in North America from 1799 to 1867.Its capital was Novo-Arkhangelsk (New Arkhangelsk), which is now Sitka,Alaska, United States. Settlements spanned parts of what are now the U.S. states of California, Alaska and three forts in Hawaii.

Formal incorporation of thepossessions by Russia did not take place until the Ukase of 1799 which established a monopoly for the Russian–American Company and also granted the Russian Orthodox Church certain rights in the new possessions. Many of its possessions were abandoned in the 19th century.

In 1867, Russia sold its last remainingpossessions to the United States of America for $7.2 million ($132 million intoday's terms).

The earliest written accounts indicate that Russians were the first Europeans to reach Alaska. There is an unofficial assumption that Slavonic navigators reached the coast of Alaska long before the 1700s.
In 1648 Semyon Dezhnev sailed from the mouth of the Kolyma River through the Arctic Ocean and around the eastern tip of Asia to the Anadyr River.

One legend holds that some of his boats were carried off course and reached Alaska. However, no evidence of settlement survives. Dezhnev's discovery was never forwarded to the central government, leaving open the question of whether or not Siberia was connected to North America. In 1725, Tsar Peter the Great called for another expedition. As a part of thе 1733–1743 Second Kamchatka expedition, the Sv. Petr under the Dane Vitus Bering and the Sv. Pavel under the Russian Alexei Chirikov set sail from the Kamchatkan port of Petropavlovsk in June 1741. They were soon separated, but each continued sailing east. On 15 July, Chirikov sighted land, probably the west side of Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska.[4] He sent a group of men ashore in a longboat, making them the first Europeans to land on the northwestern coast of North America.

On roughly 16 July, Bering and the crew of Sv. Petr sighted Mount SaintElias on the Alaskan mainland; they turned westward toward Russia soonafterward. Meanwhile, Chirikov and the Sv. Pavel headed back to Russia inOctober with news of the land they had found.In November Bering's ship was wrecked on Bering Island. There Bering fellill and died, and high winds dashed the Sv. Petr to pieces. After the stranded crewwintered on the island, the survivors built a boat from the wreckage and set sail forRussia in August 1742. Bering's crew reached the shore of Kamchatka in 1742,carrying word of the expedition.

The high quality of the sea-otter pelts they brought sparked Russian settlement in Alaska.