In 1697, the Russian explorer Atrasov was ordered to infiltrate the Kamchatka Peninsula to draw topographic maps, and it took two years to return to Moscow to resume his life, while Peter the Great, who was preparing to declare war on Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, had no time to take care of the eastward expansion, and only gave Glova the title (similar to a warlord) and ordered him to return to standby. When Atrsov returned with his entourage, he robbed a Qing merchant ship on the Angara River on the edge of the peninsula, which led to retaliation from the local Kolyaks, and more than 20 of his entourage were intercepted.
Source: Russian Museum of the Far East
Atrasov was a Cossack who assisted the Emperor in restraining the Far East and made great achievements, and in the eyes of all the peoples in the Far East, Atrasov was equivalent to the spokesman of the Russian Emperor in the Far East. Upon learning of his resistance, Peter the Great ordered an expedition to set sail for the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Qing court officials at the time deliberately concealed the war, resulting in the Kamchatka Peninsula being effectively controlled by the Russians, but the Kangxi Emperor knew nothing about it.
In 1700, the Russian expedition retaliated by destroying a Koryak village and establishing the "Lower Kamchatka Province" to implement Russian administration, but the militarily fighting Koryaks did not succumb to Russian control, but assassinated Russian soldiers one after another, and just when the expedition was exhausted, a sudden outbreak of smallpox virus quickly reduced the immune population of Koryak from 25,000 to less than 2,000 people, a considerable number of whom were women and children.
Due to the harsh climate, the Koryaks living in the Kamchatka Peninsula could only survive by fishing and hunting animals, and these Koryak women and children who survived could not afford heavy physical labor at all, and could only follow the expedition to recruit and marry the Russians, and the Itelmen, who were called "the newest people in the Far East" by Russia, were the descendants of the Corians and Russians.
At this time, the Qing court was still using the "ghost country" in the "Book of Tang Dongyi" to call the Kamchatka Peninsula, and its materials and topographic records were copied from the Tang Dynasty nearly a thousand years ago, such as "fifteen thousand miles to the Beijing Division, blocking the sea on three sides and having the advantage of fishing salt", etc., while the Japanese shogunate at that time had rewritten the "ghost country" to "Lower Kamchatka" and "Petertown" (later changed to Petropavlovsk).
In 1755, the first complete "Overview of Kamchatka Land" was published by Russia, which was more detailed than the previous Tang, Ming, Qing and Japanese records, and even accurately surveyed the geographical data of the peninsula of about 1200 kilometers long from north to south, the widest from east to west, etc. Bering Sea routes were also used by European and American merchant ships at that time, so they were recorded in the nautical chart under the name of "Russian Kamchatka Peninsula", and Russia completed the land ownership from scratch.
However, at that time, the Qing court was still stuck in the cognition of "the bitter cold land of the ghost country, the fire (volcanic eruption) for many years", and had no reaction to Russia's claim of the Kamchatka Peninsula, so that the Japanese General Tokugawa Ieharu at that time lamented: "The Qing court defeated the country as if it were a shoe, why not give it to me", which means: "The Qing court discarded the land as a broken shoe, it is better to sell it to me."
In 1854, britain, France and Russia broke out in the Crimean War, the two countries for the first time burned the war on the Kamchatka Peninsula, 6 battleships of 206 guns and more than 2,000 British and French soldiers besieged "Petertown" for half a month, while Russian soldiers with the assistance of thousands of Corians, stubbornly defended the main city.
After this battle, Russia set up a naval base on the Kamchatka Peninsula and recruited Ethnic Russians to settle down in response to the British and French covetousness of Alaska, but the Far East was originally very sparsely populated, and the climate and economy of the Kamchatka Peninsula were not very attractive to immigrants, so they had to sell Alaska to the United States in 1867, and the military port was also moved to the banks of the Amur River (later moved to Vladivostok), making the peninsula instantly become a "ghost city", and the Russians almost all moved away. Only more than 5,000 korillac natives remain at home.
In the eyes of the Russians at that time, the loss of alaska's Kamchatka Peninsula was equivalent to "wasteland", although this statement contradicted Putin's famous saying that "Russia does not have an inch of extra land", but Lenin in 1920 did offer to lease the Kamchatka Peninsula with an area of 370,000 square kilometers to the United States for 60 years to contain Japan, which shows its low status.
Although World War II did not affect the Kamchatka Peninsula, the life of the indigenous people was extremely difficult, and the Soviet Union ignored them, refusing to supply medicine, food, fuel and other materials, and the indigenous people had to brave the cold to fish in the ice and snow for a living. After World War II, it was used by the Soviet Union as a missile launch site for the seizure of the Kuril Islands, and was directly upgraded from a living area to a military restricted area until 1990, when Vladivostok lifted the ban.
So, what is the current situation of the Kamchatka Peninsula after the lifting of the ban? My answer is that the Kamchatka Peninsula is not what the Qing court considered to be a "bitter cold land", let alone a "wasteland" of the Soviet era, and it is not an exaggeration to describe it as a "paradise".
In the 19th century, the Russian geographer Semenov, who visited China and wrote the book "Travels in the Tianshan Mountains", detoured around the Kamchatka Peninsula on the way back to witness the coexistence of ice and snow fields and volcanoes, so he left a famous sentence: "This is the most unique place in the world, called the country of ice and fire", and at this time Iceland was not known, for a while, there were dozens of active volcanoes in the snowy mountains everywhere, and the "land of ice and fire" once spread throughout the European and American geography circles, attracting many species and geologists to visit.
But it wasn't until 2006 that Russia released official statistics, such as the peninsula has more than 800 plant species, the largest of which are tundra and musk, which are known as the third largest distribution points outside the North and South Poles; thousands of economic forests such as pine trees and birch trees; more than 600 species of wild animals, and 3-4 wild brown bears per 100 square kilometers.
However, Russia did not announce the economic scale of the Kamchatka Peninsula, but only vaguely explained that "there are estimated to be six kinds of Pacific salmon", but deliberately concealed the production of salmon, king crab, scallops, cod and other marine resources, until 2009, when the Norwegian Ocean Agency announced that "about 20% of the world's salmon, 25% of the world's cod and 18% of the king crab production" in the Kamchatka Peninsula, the world knows that Russia is holding its pockets for fear of being grabbed by others, and the Kamchatka Peninsula has since been crowned as a "hidden rich". As soon as the Kamchatka fishermen are mentioned, they feel that they must be rich.
Of course, the current situation of the kamchatka indigenous people is not only that, but more details are reserved for the next article (the living customs of the indigenous Corillac people, price consumption, tourism highlights, etc.).