Alaska was purchased from the Russians in 1867. Were any Russian citizens from before the transfer allowed to stay and become naturalized Americans or were they all forced to return to Russia? If they were allowed to stay, do we have any descendants from those original Russian colonists? Do any remnants of pre-American Russian culture survive in Alaska?
You realise these are different questions? Even if every Russian citizen was repatriated, there could still large numbers of their descendants living in Alaska. If, for example, a Russian man fathered a child with an Eskimo woman, neither she nor their child would be deported.
As such, it’s inconceivable that there wouldn’t be descendants still living in Alaska.
And there’s no reason to assume they would all have remained in Alaska.
Absolutely. Just as all French descendants did not remain in Louisiana. But that wasn’t the question.
The Orthodox Church is still around, with congregations that predate the purchase by the USA. There are a very small number of elderly people in at least one community who speak a dialect of Russian. It looks, from that, like a few Russians did remain in Alaska after the purchase. There weren’t ever all that many Russians in Alaska, though, so there won’t have been all that many who stayed either.
Since Alaska was Russian territory before the transfer, wouldn’t native Alaskans have been Russians? There are many of them still there.
The Russians who lived there were explicitly allowed to stay if they wanted. The treaty said that any non-natives who remained after three years would become US citizens:
We know he meant actual Russians, direct from the actual country Russia , not just unidentified residents of remote territories.
That was my understanding of the situation - they were welcome to stay (and some almost certainly did), or they were free to head back to Russia, which many obviously did.
It’s worth bearing in mind the US wasn’t a superpower in the 1860s the way it is now, so the choice between staying and going wasn’t nearly as clear-cut as it would be 100 years later, for example.
You can’t swing a dead salmon on the Kenai Peninsula without hitting a Kvasnikoff or an Oskolkoff.
The native Yupik people had been going back and forth between what is now Russia (Siberia) and what is now Alaska for thousands of years. It was only the onset of the Cold War in the 1940s that stopped this intermixing. Those Yupik people on the “other side” of the Bering Straight were Russians, too. Same as the Europeans who inhabit that country.
Perhaps that’s what Sarah Palin meant. Not “I can see Russia from my house” but “I can see Russians from my house”. As in the next-door neighbors are descendants of the Russian settlers.
I know this is a joke and I hate to defend Bible Spice, but Palin never said that. Tina Fey did AS Palin on SNL.
There you go trying to introduce facts into my attempted defense of the most misunderstood woman in America.
But you have to understand, they were uncivilized savages who didn’t deserve the simple dignity of having a nationality. They’re more like the local wildlife. :dubious:
There does seem to be a certain Eurocentrism in the the way people are looking at this. It’s easy to forget that Native Peoples didn’t recognize boundaries or nationalities in the way we do today, and there movements never had anything to with international boundaries unless such boundaries were enforced by the local authorities. There wasn’t much “local authority” in the places where Yupik contact would have been happening in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 
True, what Palin actually said was something along the lines of “there’s parts of Alaska where you can see Russian land in the distance”.
“You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.”
from snopes
The ethnic-Russian population in Alaska was never very large. According to Wikopedia, at the time of the Alaska purchase the Russian population in the territory was only about 700. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_America Another article states the combined Russian and mixed race population was about 2,500.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase In any case, according to both articles, most Russians chose to move back to Russia soon after the transfer. Nonetheless, I suspect that there are some Alaskans alive today who are descended from the original Russian colonists. Most of them are probably descended from Russians who interbred with the local population.
Was there ever a practice of Native Alaskans taking on Russian surnames without having interbred with Russians? If not, it would seem that most Alaskans with Russian surnames would fit the OP. I can’t imagine there was a lot of Russian emigration to Alaska after the purchase… Unless, maybe during the Alaskan God Rush?