Russia’s First Secret Influence Campaign: Convincing the U.S. to Buy Alaska
Russia has been peddling influence for a long time, using a playbook that it still uses today
Signing of the Alaska Purchase Agreement, March 30, 1867
For many Americans, foreign influence-peddling seems like a modern threat. But foreign regimes have attempted to target and sway American policymakers for centuries, going all the way back to the earliest days of the American republic.
It was in the middle of the 19th century that the U.S. saw its first big foreign lobbying scandal — and arguably its most impactful one before 2016. That was when czarist Russia, hoping to unload the giant frozen expanse of Alaska, hatched a scheme to manipulate Washington into buying a territory nobody really wanted. It worked. Not only that, it set a playbook that other dictatorships, including future governments in the Kremlin, would be eager to follow.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, U.S. officials were looking for opportunities to patch the country together. One salve for the nation’s divisions was territorial expansion. As some American officials saw it, if the U.S. could conquer or seize new lands, perhaps it could ignore its domestic disputes, at least for a bit.
William Seward
Secretary of State William Seward was the most prominent proponent of expansion. And he argued that one region in particular provided the perfect opportunity to not only improve America’s global and economic standing, but to further tether a fractured country together: Alaska.
At the time, the vast expanse we now know as Alaska was a colony of czarist Russia. Indigenous Alaska Natives had suffered for generations at the hands of Russian settlers, using massacre after massacre to cement Russian rule. By the mid-1860s, though, the province was little more than dead weight for the Russian regime. It was too far from Russia’s capital, with too little infrastructure, for the czarist regime to keep pumping it with money and men. And with Russia’s own finances slowly imploding, czarist officials began casting about for someone to take Alaska off their hands.
But there were only so many options. Selling to the British, which still controlled the adjacent Canadian provinces, was a nonstarter; Britain was Russia’s primary colonial rival, and anything that could strengthen London’s hand had to be avoided. The Americans, though, presented an attractive alternative. Selling Alaska to the U.S. would allow Washington to act as a counterweight to British influence in the region. Plus, in Russia’s eyes, America appeared likely to one day conquer the entirety of North America — so why not sell out early, and at least make a little money along the way?
There was only one problem. Few Americans outside of Seward saw any reason to purchase Alaska from the Russians. To many Americans, Russian Alaska in the 1860s — decades before the discovery of the gold and oil that would eventually make Alaska one of the wealthiest American states — was little more than empty tundra. It was an “icebox,” or a “polar bear garden” that the Americans didn’t need. Plus, Washington had more pressing issues, from the military occupation of the former Confederate states to the passage of basic civil rights protections for Black Americans. “American interest in Alaska wobbled between ho-hum interest and disinterest,” one scholar described.
But the Russians couldn’t wait. Selling the province — and persuading the Americans to spend a gargantuan sum on something Washington didn’t want — was one of the easiest ways to help stabilize Russian finances. If only the Americans could be convinced.
And so began one of the most consequential foreign influence-peddling schemes in U.S. history, one with lasting resonance today. Not only did it involve Russia, which is still being accused of surreptitious efforts to affect U.S. politics and policy, but it also demonstrated how easily lobbying can slide from legal to illegal, from attempted persuasion to overt corruption, and how hard the whole nefarious game is to police and combat.
Fortunately for the Russian government, their ambassador in Washington, a man named Edouard de Stoeckl, had an idea for how to circumvent American opposition — without the American populace, or even much of the American government, realizing what was happening.
In 1867, Stoeckl began working. Huddling with Seward, the two hammered out a tentative deal, largely in secret. For $7.2 million in gold (which would be about $160 million in today’s dollars), the U.S. would take Alaska off Russia’s hands. But Seward still needed to overcome congressional opposition, as only Congress could actually appropriate the funds. Nor did the difficulties stop there. Seward’s primary ally, President Andrew Johnson, began facing a tornado of criticism for his racist policies — and suddenly saw himself the target of the country’s first impeachment crisis, which sucked up all of the energies, and all of the focus, in Washington.
By early 1868, Seward’s Alaska deal appeared all but dead, with plenty of American officials publicly airing concerns and questions about why the U.S. needed to spend millions on what was viewed as little more than barren tundra. Which is when Stoeckl stepped in and developed a playbook that would roar back to relevance in the mid-2010s, when Russia once more attempted to direct American policy without anyone realizing what was happening.
First, Stoeckl identified and recruited an American who could help rally the congressional votes to actually fund the purchase. He targeted Robert J. Walker, a former Treasury secretary and senator from Mississippi. To Stoeckl, Walker was someone who could pose as an independent voice to persuade American legislators to back the funding — without anyone realizing that Walker had become a secret mouthpiece for Russia. The Russian official “paid Walker to use his influence wherever and however he could,” wrote Ronald Jensen, whose 1975 book provides the most detailed analysis of the affair.
Walker was happy to oblige. The former senator and White House official began planting anonymous articles with unsuspecting newspapers, including front-page columns denouncing opponents of the projected sale. (Walker, never known for his creativity, signed his anonymous articles as “Alaska.”) He also publicly defended both Stoeckl and the Alaska purchase, predicting “dire consequences” if the purchase fell through. He pushed for the purchase in Washington wherever, and however, he could — and when questioned, Walker denied that any of his efforts ever qualified as what was coming to be known as “lobbying.”
Walker’s effort, with Stoeckl bankrolling him behind the scenes, appeared to succeed. By the middle of June 1868, enough members of Congress had changed their minds that suddenly, and unexpectedly, the funding measures passed both chambers of Congress and the U.S. saw its second-largest expansion in American history.
In fact, the move was so sudden, and so unexpected, that something seemed off. And soon, details began leaking out confirming opponents’ suspicions. One journalist, Uriah Painter, who wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Sun, reported that thieves in New York had supposedly stolen thousands of dollars from Walker — but when authorities nabbed the thieves, Walker refused to press charges. (A handy move, Painter pointed out, to move money without anyone being able to track its ultimate destination.) Painter also reported that “large sums” from the purchase funds were suddenly missing. Russia still got about $7 million, but as a later write-up in the National Archives detailed, nearly $140,000 of the funds the U.S. had earmarked — the equivalent of about $3 million today — somehow didn’t make it back to the czarist government, and no one seemed to know where the funds had gone. Combined with new rumors of bribery swirling in Congress, all of it pointed to the “biggest lobby swindle ever put up in Washington,” as Painter wrote.
The accusations of financial malfeasance grew so pronounced that Congress opened its first formal investigation into foreign lobbying. And it didn’t take long for congressional investigators to confirm that the entire affair was a swindle and a scandal. And all signs pointed to one inescapable conclusion: bribery and secretive foreign lobbying, all on behalf of Russia.
There was, naturally, one person who could help reveal what happened to the missing money: Stoeckl. Yet by the time congressional investigators discovered the disappearance, the ambassador had himself vanished, heading back to Russia. As Jensen wrote, “The Russian minister was probably the only man who knew the destination of all the missing funds from the Alaska appropriation, and that secret apparently left with him.”
To this day, questions remain about what happened to the missing millions. But as Jensen detailed, there seems one obvious answer. Tucked amid President Johnson’s papers was a memo outlining a conversation the president had with Seward — the man who’d jump-started the Alaska purchase in the first place. As the two sat in a “shady grove,” Seward revealed to the president that Stoeckl himself had “bought the support” of one major newspaper — and that Stoeckl had directly bribed congressional officials to flip their votes, with a total of 10 members of Congress taking Russian funds. Nor were these anonymous officials. Among those bribed to support the Alaska purchase were the “incorruptible” Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a member of the Radical Republicans and one of the era’s greatest proponents for civil rights protections for Black Americans — and someone who, according to Johnson’s note of his conversation with Seward, took $10,000 to change his vote. For his lobbying work, Walker received north of $20,000, according to various documents, about a half-million in 2024 dollars.
Unfortunately for investigators, even while the bribery became an open secret in Washington, no hard proof ever emerged. Seward denied any knowledge, and Johnson refused to comment publicly. The congressional investigation concluded in frustration. As the committee report found, the investigation ended “barren of affirmative or satisfactorily negative results.”
Still, even as Alaska became part of America proper, investigators wanted to make a stand. Part of the investigative committee chastised Walker “for representing a foreign power without public knowledge,” calling him out for working as an agent for a foreign government. And a few of the investigators even floated a potential solution: banning former American officials outright from ever working as lobbyists for foreign governments. As congressional investigators wrote:
Certainly no man whose former high public position has given him extraordinary influence in the community has the right to sell that influence, the trust and confidence of his fellow-citizens, to a foreign government, or in any case where his own is interested.
As they argued, no American official, once out of office, should work as a foreign lobbyist or a foreign agent for any other government. It was, in many ways, a statement ahead of its time, pointing directly to the kinds of foreign lobbying practices that would emerge in the decades to come. But it was also a statement that gained little notice, and that went nowhere.
And that was it. In this first foreign lobbying scandal in American history — in which a Russian official bribed American legislators and journalists, all while hiring a former high-level American lawmaker to act as his mouthpiece in Washington — no one was found guilty. No one lost their job, or ended up in prison. No one, aside from the Russian official at the center of it, even ended up having the full picture of where all the missing millions ended up.
And maybe that’s understandable. After all, the Alaska purchase is now recognized as one of the great successes of American foreign policy: as a pennies-on-the-dollar purchase of a territory that enhanced American power, American finances, and American influence in ways that are still paying off.
But it was also something else: a story whose lessons, not least as it pertained to foreign lobbying (and bribery) of American officials, were promptly forgotten. Lessons about how foreign regimes can recruit former U.S. officials and leading media figures to become their mouthpieces. Lessons about how easy it can be to bribe sitting members of Congress, especially when a foreign government is footing the bill. Lessons about just how wide open Washington was, and still is, to these kinds of foreign influence campaigns — and just how much of an outsize role these foreign lobbyists have played in American history and American policy.
It was all a formula that in coming years would only become more and more familiar — and that would, in the 21st century, allegedly stretch all the way from foreign governments to the White House itself.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/08/russia-secretly-manipulated-congress-00177644
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