Gregory Wallace’s book “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia” was fascinating. Wallace details Kennan’s journeys in the 1880s and 1890s in Russia’s vast region of Siberia. I am interested in all things about Russia and the name George Kennan was familiar to me. George Kennan’s younger cousin was a famous diplomat and the foremost expert on the Soviet Union during and after World War II. They met each other in 1910 when the future diplomat was six years old. It was a symbolic changing of the guard, with the older George Kennan being the great 19th century expert on the Russian Empire and his namesake, the younger Kennan becoming the foremost expert on the USSR. The younger Kennan founded the Kennan Institute in honor of his older cousin.
George Kennan first went to Russia to search for a route for Western Union Telegraph lines from St. Petersburgh through to Alaska. At the time, it was not thought that an undersea cable across the Atlantic was possible. Western Union was looking for a land route through Siberia to Alaska instead. He wrote a riveting account of how hard travel was in the far east Siberian winter. The native people helped his crew through. Kennan loved the adventure, much better than his boring life as a telegraph operator in an Ohio town. Plans for a cross Atlantic telegraph line eventually worked and Western Union called off the plan for lines across Russia. It was cool that there were Pony Express-like stations across Siberia where travelers could change horses and rest before moving on.
After the Telegraph experience, Kennan went back, traveling through the Caucasas region. He eventually did an expose on the Exile System under the Tsar. He thought it was a good system because families could move out east with the convicts. Kennan also thought they were truly criminals, but when he did a tour of the prison system, he found otherwise. He became a Human Rights advocate in the US after his observations, which eventually turned the USA away from being friendly with Russia. I didn’t know the gulags and Siberian work prisons were part of the Tsar’s playbook. Stalin the Soviets just kept up the tradition, and probably enhanced it. Other interesting notes are below.
- Tsar Alexander II in 1861 publicly supported Abraham Lincoln which made Russia the only European country to openly support the Union.
- George Kennan grew up in Ohio and was one generation away from when it was on America’s frontier. “Mortality among children on the Ohio frontier was high. Simply wandering off and getting lost in the forest could mean death for a child.”
- According to Caucaus historian Charles King, in Greek mythology the Caucasus was “the far edge of the world where Prometheus the fire stealer was exiled by the Gods.”
- Kennan noticed in Dagestan that the men slept late, socialized and smoked in mosques and although some men worked in the fields, it was mostly a male dominated society that depended on the near enslavement of women.
- I love Fyodor Dostoevsky’s observation when he candidly wrote, “By capturing Asia our spirits and strength will lift…in Europe we were hangers-on whereas in Asia we will arrive as masters.”
- I need to find “Notes from the House of the Dead” by Dostoevsky, an account of his time in Omsk.
- Checkov wrote of a steppe crossing that “on and on you travel but where it all begins or where it ends you just cannot make out.”
- Kennan noticed the unendurable smell of the exiles’ prisons.
(refering to Dostoevsky’s exile) The wooden floor of his prison on Omsk was covered by a slippery, inch-thick layer of filth. He wore chains day and night and shared an excrement tub with hundreds of convicts, many of whom hated the elite inmates. ‘They would hae eaten us alive given the chance.’
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