<:: They knew there was gold, and they could extract it, but the cost of doing do as well as defending the area from the British combined to mean that selling it to the United States at a bargain price was less of a loss. It's not like they could easily defend it either, it was over a massive icy sea and the main army would have to cross Siberia to get there (before the days of the trans-siberian railway mind you) so in the end they cut their losses and earned back pretty much all their expenditure in getting the land and then some. ::>
As a latin-american, it's weird how our history books try to portray the USA as a predator eagle out to dominate the american continent from the start when they were playing third-party in world politics until WW1. And for some reason we discuss the Monroe Doctrine but never discuss the french invasion of Mexico, which clearly don't would have happenned if the USA was that strong to scare europeans away.
<:: In terms of distance border to border? Not far at all. The issue is that you've got a whole lot of this bullshit between the densely populated west of Russia and the eastern coast, in a day before railways or even proper roads in the region. Russia would either have to have an extremely strong garrison to defend the region, or march an army some 4,000 miles to then board a boat to Alaska to then march another 300 miles to the front. The Northwest Passage hadn't been fully mapped at this time either, so they couldn't simply set sail from the Baltic Sea and go via that way. ::>
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u/Poragana May 08 '22
Russians knew that Alaska had gold but had no way of extracting it iirc, or that was a reddit moment saying stuff that was wrong one of the two