History with an Attitude: Alaska in Modern Russian Patriotic Rhetoric
Andrei A. Znamenski, Memphis/USA History with an Attitude: Alaska in Modern Russian Patriotic Rhetoric Guys, stop your speculations and read books. One of my re cent discoveries is Kremlev. Here is a real history of Russia. One reads his books and wants to beat a head against a wall from the realization of how much we lost due to corruption, treason and the stupidity of our rulers – tsars, general secret aries and presidents. What wonderful opportunities we had in the past and how much we have lost!1 A nationalist blogger about the ultra-patriotic popular his tory “Russian America: Discovered and Sold” (2005) by Sergei Kremlev In Russian-American relations, Alaska is doomed to remain a literary-political metaphor – some sort of a stylistic figure of speech whose original meaning faded away being re placed with an imagined one.2 Writer Vladimir Rokot (2007) On the afternoon of October 18, 1867, a Siberian Line Battalion and a detachment of the US Ninth Infantry faced each other on a central plaza of New Archangel (Figure 1), the capital of Russian America, prepared for the official ceremony of lowering the Russian flag and of raising the Stars and Stripes. This act was to finalize the transfer of Alaska (Figure 2) from Russia to the United States, which bought the territory for $ 7.2 million. At 4 PM, Captain Aleksei Peshchurov gave orders to lower the Russian flag. After this, Brigadier General Lovell Rousseau, a representative of the US Government, ordered the American flag to be raised. Salutes were fired. This ceremony ended a brief seventy-year presence of the Russian Empire in northwestern North America.3 Driven by short-term strategic goals, Russian emperor Alexander II decided to get rid of his overseas posses sion, which represented 6 per cent of the Russian Empire territory.
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