Новые документы по истории и наследию Русской Америки в фондах Государственного архива Костромской области

Abstract

Presenting new documents to the scholarly society is important for studying the history and heritage of Russian America. The authors pay special attention to the fonds of regional archives, as their unique documents expand our knowledge of already known subjects and elaborate the historical and cultural heritage of Russian America. The State Archive of the Kostroma Region stores papers of local ethnographers, who meticulously collected materials on the history and heritage of the Russian colonial past. These documents have rarely being studied and remain unknown to researchers. The purpose of the article is to study the fonds of the State Archive of the Kostroma Region in order to identify new documents on the history of the Russian colonization of Alaska, as well as documents on the historical and cultural heritage of Russia in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean. The object of the research is document collection deposited in the State Archive of the Kostroma Region. The collection consists of hundreds of documents related to the history of the development of the Far East and Russian America and can provide a basis for preparing scholarly articles on a wide range of issues, such as the history of Russo-Chinese and Russo-Japanese relations, the interaction of the Russians and indigenous peoples of Siberia and Alaska, the transfer of Alaska to the USA, the financial and economic development of the Russian -American company and its joint-stock. Documents from N. N. Selifontov personal provenance fond shed light on the interactions of the Russian-American company with various government agencies during the sale of Alaska to the United States. Of particular value are N. N. Selifontov’s marginalia touching upon certain events in the history of Russian America, as well as his hand-written papers containing his personal opinion on the interaction of the Irkutsk governor-general with the royal court. The corpus of documents from Grigorov collection is vital for studying the early Russian exploration of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska and for preserving the memory of exploration of Alaska in various Russia towns.