The high water of Russian imperialism

Every now and again some nationalist pipes up to claim that what their forebears did was not really Imperialism. Jennings over on Patheos has been posting rather a lot about the American side of jingo, and its discontents. One also hears from Spaniards how they were a greater Catholic Roman Empire whose recent conversos were all fellow subjects of the Queen just like Galicians. Now: let's hear from Russians.

One can hardly call the Soviet Union a nonimperial project, but luckily for Russians it was not exactly a Russian project either. (You know upon whom Solzhenitsyn pinned it; Ekaterina Jung pins it on Latvians.) Nah. Russians go back to the Tsar who never ever did any of that Imperialism.

Peter Hopkirk would beg to differ, on behalf of the Bukharis. The Chinese might also have some concerns. Landlocked conquest seems to count less than seabourne conquest, like what Britain was doing on the Northwest Frontier of India at the time. But what if... Russia was also doing a seabourne imperialism?

Recently I looked in on the Kurils, which the EU is recognising as natively Japanese. Russia would - and at the time, did - observe they were not even Japonic until the nineteenth century. They were Ainu. Most of Hokkaido was still Ainu; the Japanese clan Matsumae claimed only a southwest peninsula. And that clan, Irishly, offered little loyalty to the imperium until the Meiji forced it upon them. The Russians, by contrast, were not - then - interested in living permanently in Hokkaido and points northeast, preferring to trade with the Ainu and with the Matsumae, in peace.

The Russians were also on fairly decent terms with the Aleuts until they, like, weren't. Over the eighteenth century, it seems, the Russians out East got more and more imperious. In 1804 they attacked the Tlingit in the Battle of Sitka. Here is Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees’s The Last Stand of the Raven Clan. The battle was a Russian tactical victory, leading to a Tlingit exodus. This did not end the war, the Tlingit enacting a bloody retribution at Yakutat a year later.

The Russians were overextended. Much further into North America and they'd have brushed against the British of the Columbia River.

Which is not to say the Russians didn't try. And that's the point as needs making to these eternal victims.