7 - Poised on the Manchurian frontier

Summary

“What cannot be held had better be ceded”

The belief that Russian navigation on the Amur river was vital for the logistic support of settlements in the North Pacific was an old one, going back well into the eighteenth century. It was a perspective that Murav'ev at first strongly endorsed, and upon assuming office he used this rationale to press the importance of the river. In a memorandum to the tsar on the eve of the Crimean War, however, we have seen how the governor-general gave the first indication of a reorientation in his own thinking about Russia's position in the Far East. In its North American territories, he suggested, Russia was faced with what was essentially a hopeless situation. Despite all efforts to maintain Russian authority and control in these remote regions, it would ultimately prove impossible to resist the expansive pressures of a dynamic American empire which sought almost intuitively to occupy and incorporate them. American dominion over the entirety of North America was simply inevitable, and thus Russia was left with no choice but to relinquish its Alaskan territories as gracefully and as profitably for its own interests as possible. Murav'ev sought to mitigate the shock of this point, however, with the argument that the forfeiture of Russian North American did not in any any way signal an imperial retreat from the Far East.