Question by Mercer: Why did a great country like Russia sell us part of their country Alaska to us?
What was the reason Russia sold us Alaska?
Why did Alaska become a state in 1959?
Answers and Views:
Answer by tham153
The Czar of the day needed money, Alaska was extremely remote and had never contributed economically to Russia, and selling to the USA was sure to annoy England, which owned the land bordering Alaska, i.e. Canada. Russia had lots of cold, worthless land in Siberia, and with Alaska on another continent and showing no signs of ever developing or having a large population, selling when the American offer was made seemed like good business.
By 1959 Alaska had a large enough population to qualify as a state. It tended to vote Republican, while Hawaii, also being admitted as a state, tended to vote Democrat, thus balancing the effect of the admissions politically.
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Rubym says
For the second question, probably one word-oil. Oil and other natural resources, plus, at the height of the cold war, and I think it was Alaska in 1958 and Hawaii in 1959; having bases that close to the Soviet Union was very important to the US military and government. Of course, there were bases in Alaska since World War II, but as a state, it seemed more secure in our defense.
As for the first Russia already had the huge, often untapped Siberian forests, etc. It was sparsely populated and the ethnic Russians looked down on the Asian people who did populate Siberia and figured they were not a problem to them or a problem that could be 'eliminated'.
Alaska was just like an extension of Siberia, the same kind of landscape, the same kind of climate and Russia could afford to give up it's foothold on the American continent for some money (like Napoleon selling Louisiana to Jefferson). And in 1867, nobody in America or Russia could have foreseen the Cold War, when the US and Soviet Union were the two most powerful nations in the world, with weapons of untold destruction. Russia, in 1867, while huge, was not a strong country and the US was just coming out of the Civil War and certainly not a world power.