Alaska (Napoleon's World)

Alaska is a Northern nation located on North America, Greenland and parts of Asia. The country's primary language is Russian, although Aleut, Inuit and Tlingit are common tongues as well. The official religion is the Alaskan Orthodox Church, with 85% of the country practicing; other major religions include Judaism (10%), Roman Catholicism (3%) and indigenous faiths (2%). The nation has a capital at Sitka, although the Church is based out of Aleksandrgrad, and the Kamchatka and Okhotsk Krais, which have semi-autonomous governments that answer directly to Sitka, are based out of Petropavlovsk and Okhotsk, respectively. It is bordered at the 52nd parallel by the United States in North America, as well as Korea, China, Japan and Siberia in Asia.

Russian Exodus
Following the Russian Exodus, many of the migrants in eastern Siberia found themselves in a difficult position. They could return to the Siberian stronghold at Omsk, continue to risk attacks by local peoples out on the Steppe, or attempt to find a permanent settlement on the North Pacific coast. The Chinese had seized Russian territory in Central Asia already, and Vladivostok had been absorbed by the Kingdom of Korea. Many Russians, seeing the absorption of Russian territoy by foreign powers inevitable, moved to large Asian capitals such as Peking or Hanseong and lived in squalid, ethnic communities. The powerful Tolstoy family, recently deposed from their position of power in Russia, led one of the many "Russias in Exile" from Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, controlling territory as far north as the Arctic Sea. In July of 1829, twelve years after the Tolstoys joined the Exodus, they led 40,000 Russian emigrants across the Bering Sea to a place on the Gulf of Alaska they named Aleksandrgrad in honor of their slain Czar. As far as the survivors of the Exodus were concerned, their journey had come to an end.

National Organization and Growth
After the fall of Petrograd in 1813 and the Great Russian Purges of 1817-18, the Alaskan colony run by the Russian America Company had governed itself more or less freely. The Tolstoys were not the first to think of crossing the Bering Sea to safety in North America; the Russian-speaking population of Alaska was around 50,000 in 1830 discounting the Kamchatkan members of the Exodus newly arrived. For the past decade, thousands of Russians had trickled into the wooded hills along the gulf, and many more had fled to the capital at Sitka. There were settlements as far south as Vancouver Island, and the Company maintained a trading post in the San Juan Islands.

Feodor Tolstoy came into this environment in 1829 feeling that his nation of 90,000 Russian expatriates, the survivors of one of the greatest ethnic tragedies in history, was ready to reorganize and form a new Russian Empire on the Pacific. He established his capital at Aleksandrgrad, appointed Bishop Valentin Britov the Patriarch of Alaska and set about forming alliances with the native Tlingits and Aleuts, the latter being far more receptive to the thousands of expatriates arriving by the year. Aleksandrgrad grew to a population of 75,000 by 1840, trading across the Bering Sea with the Kamchatkan and Okhotsk colonies and even with Japan and Korea. In 1843, with the population of Alaska at nearly 800,000 Russian expatriates, Feodor Tolstoy died and passed the execution of Alaskan affairs down to a young politician, Mikhail Lermontov. At only the age of 28, Lermontov, the so-called "Father of Alaska" moved the capital south to the easily defendabale city of Sitka and declared himself Tsar of Alaska, a move even Tolstoy dared not make. Keeping in mind Tsar Ivan IV of Siberia still waging a war with Napoleon in the Urals, Lermontov extended formalities to the expatriate capital at Omsk but declared to his former leader that Alaska was, for all practical purposes, an independent nation. Ivan's death in 1845 severed all formal ties between Siberia and Alaska, allowing Lermontov to claim superiority over Okhotsk and Kamchatka, which relied on Alaskan trade to avoid absorption by China or Korea.

Lermontov would rule until his death in 1869, a life defined by prosperous growth in Alaska (which had a population of nearly three million by his death on both sides of the Bering Sea), as well as his devotion to peace with the Aleuts and wars with the Tlingits, who opposed his every measure in southern Alaska. Lermontov was an artist who, when not at state functions (of which there were few, with most of the Russian nobility murdered in the Purges or dead from the Exodus), would paint the Alaskan wilderness or write poetry describing the plight of his expatriate nation. The famed Alaskan author Leo Tolstoy wrote of Lermontov, "Of Tsar Mischa, there was only grace, gentlemanry and governance. He saw the world and its faults, and he saw the world and its beauty."