Chukchi Gold: American Enterprise and Russian Xenophobia in the Northeastern Siberia Company

Abstract

During the gold rush in Nome, Alaska, neither Russians nor Americans found significant quantities of gold on the Chukchi Peninsula, across the Bering Strait from the Seward Peninsula. Despite its failure, the documents of the Northeastern Siberian Company (1902––1914) and the memoirs of its managers and employees illuminate important contrasts between the political and cultural perspectives of its founders in St. Petersburg and those of its agents in Seattle. The Russian criticisms of American managers of the company also place the Soviet government's antipathy to American capitalism in historical context. Despite many differences between the tsarist and Marxist-Leninist ideologies, the hostile stereotypes of Americans expressed by tsarist officials and Russian capitalists in St. Petersburg persisted into the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.