IN 1812, as Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's Grande Armee was nearing Moscow, on the other side of the world Collegiate Councillor Ivan Kuskov's motley band was founding Fort Ross on the coast of New Albion less than one hundred miles north of San Francisco Bay. This outpost represented the farthest base of a process of relentless eastward expansion that had been unleashed in 1582, when the renegade Cossack Yermak had captured Isker, the capital of the western Siberian Khanate and the last obstacle in the advance of Muscovy from the Urals. No foreign power or native horde blocked the taiga corridor to the Pacific.' The next formidable obstacle was not encountered until two centuries later on the Northwest Coast of North America, where the Russians finally came against their westward-moving fellow imperialists from Great Britain, Spain, and the United States. The Russian open eastern frontier-the counterpoint to the confining western marchland separating Muscovy from powerful European neighbors-finally began to close, and with the eventual rise of the United States and Japan as Pacific powers Russia became as vulnerable to encircling alliances as the leading European states. Meanwhile, the bulk of the Russian Empire-at least in sheer territorial termshad been won, thanks to the enterprise of a suprisingly small number of Cossacks, promyshlenniki (fur traders), muzhiki (peasants), and meshchane (petty townsmen). Largely on their own initiative, because their government was rightly preoccupied with weightier European affairs, those frontiersmen moved rapidly eastward in search of "soft gold."2 Some sought adventure or solitude, many craved free farmland, others fled conscription or serfdom, and still others were exiled. But initially the