When it comes to planting flags, Russia has previous

Actually, that’s a slightly misleading title.  Pretty much every country in the world has planted its flag somewhere to stake its claim to some piece of land or other.  But the Russians of old - well, they had a slightly different approach…

Professor Basil Dmytryshyn, in a letter to the Wall Street Joural, writes:

[In] June 21, 1787… Lt. Gen. Ivan V. Jakobi, the governor-general of Siberia, sent a secret instruction to two Russian merchant-explorers instructing them to bury at various points along the Alaska shore 10 iron plates proclaiming “This land belongs to the Russian Empire.” Russia did not give up her claim until she sold Alaska to the U.S. in 1867.

Following the Alaska sale, Russian explorers also planted similar iron plates along the Western coast of North America, from Washington to Northern California.

As far as I know, none of these plates have yet been discovered.  Which leads one to wonder whether the Russian Empire’s approach of putting down invisible markers was actually all that effective.

Tagged as: History, US-Russia relations