Born 1746,
Kargopol, Russia
Died April 13, 1819,
Sunda Strait, near Java

Aleksandr Andreyevich Baranov played an important role in Russia’s control over the Alaska territory during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His career was in the fur trade, though he initially studied to be an accountant and later opened a glass factory. When the failure of his Siberian fur-trading business threatened to ruin him, he accepted an offer to manage Russian trading posts in Alaska. At the height of his career, he controlled most of “Russian America.”

The son of a poor itinerant merchant, Baranov was born in Kargopol, a village in northern Russia near the Finnish border. At the age of 15 Baranov ran away to Moscow, where he witnessed the coronation of the empress Catherine the Great. He then went to work for a German merchant, who taught him German and...