It can be hard to imagine now, but there was a time, about 150 years ago, when Americans had a favorable and amicable view of Russia, “a ‘distant friend’” of the United States, a colorful but mysterious land filled with tragically romantic characters,” as Gregory Wallance writes in Into Siberia, his engrossing account of, as the subtitle has it, “George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia”.
This, one needs to clarify, is not that George Kennan, he of the “long telegram” and Soviet containment policy, but rather a relative from a previous generation. This Kennan was an erstwhile telegram operator who found himself on an expedition to Siberia in 1865 to survey the route for a telegraph line that would connect the US to Europe via still-then Russian Alaska, the Bering Strait and Siberia. (The trans-Atlantic cable kept on snapping in case you were wondering why anyone would think this remotely sensible.) The project was a failure (the trans-Atlantic stopping snapping), but Kennan (who had dreamed as a boy of being an explorer) found—in the snow, wilderness and several near escapes from death—his calling.
Wallance has a flair for dramatic pacing and timing.

Upon his return, he also found he had a bent for writing (authoring his first book, Tent Life in Siberia: A New Account of an Old Undertaking; Adventures among the Koraks and Other Tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia) and lecturing. He returned to Russia in 1870 to visit and write about the northern Caucasus, which had only recently been annexed by the Russian Empire. He joined the Associated Press in 1878. In 1885, set off for Siberia again:
By then he had become one of America’s most prominent defenders of Russia and its centuries-old practice of banishing criminals and political dissidents to Siberia. Kennan, who spoke Russian fluently and was regarded as a leading expert on Russia, believed that a thorough, objective investigation would vindicate his contention that the exile system, while hardly without flaws, was more humane than penal systems in European countries. He also hoped that his articles about the Siberian exile system would make him rich and famous.
It didn’t turn out as expected.
Kennan’s investigation discredited his own defense of the exile system, as he was the first to admit, and changed him as a person. When he returned to the United States his overarching goal was no longer wealth and fame, but to end the suffering of the exiles and bring freedom to Russia. His concept of courage, his attitudes toward women, his views on the Russian government’s oppression of its Jews, had all changed.
Kennan returned to write and lecture about all he had seen and experienced; he almost single-handedly turned American public opinion against Russia and the brutality of its government.
His articles for the Century magazine, a nearly one-thousand-page, two-volume book, Siberia and the Exile System, and a nine-year lecture tour about the exile system left Americans so appalled and angry at Russia’s mistreatment of its citizens that the relationship between the two countries was never the same.
Wallance has written a ripping yarn, actually three of them.
It is not to diminish the significance of the subject matter to say that Wallance has written a ripping yarn, actually three of them: both Siberian trips plus a shorter account of Keenan’s knocking about the Caucasus with Prince Giorgi Davidovich Jorjadze, a noblemen into whose care he deposited himself. During the titular Siberia trip,
Kennan and [his accompanying artist, George Albert] Frost traveled eight thousand miles in Siberia in horse-drawn carriages, river steamers, sleighs, and on horseback. They suffocated in sandstorms in the summer and endured winter temperatures of minus forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. They inspected dozens of prisons, observed the marching parties of exiled convicts, spoke with Siberian officials, and met with more than a hundred exiled opponents of the tsarist regime. Both men were plagued by disease, vermin that infested their clothing and luggage, the jolting and pounding of carriages without springs or seats (they had to sit on their luggage), and by the stress of police surveillance.
Much, perhaps most, of the account is undoubtedly taken from Keenan’s own writing, but Wallance has a flair for dramatic pacing and timing, while linking the events both to Keenan’s life and personality and the wider history. The imagery and descriptions are compelling and there is a large supporting cast of fully-fleshed out characters ranging from Russian political dissidents (a good number of whom were aristocrats) and prison officials to his American traveling companions and heroically supportive (but also, one imagines, long-suffering) wife. Even Tolstoy as a cameo.
Keenan admitted he had been dreadfully wrong.
In taking on the Russian penal system, Wallance writes that Kennan was
essentially was doing the work of modern-day global human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, except that he was doing it alone.
Wallance’s telling of Kennan’s story has a couple of additional present-day echoes. The first is how unusual it would be today for a pundit of Keenan’s stature to admit he (or she) was so dreadfully wrong. The second is that the indignation of his American audiences has contemporary resonance:
George Kennan … would likely not have attracted the same attention had his topic been Black sharecroppers in the South or Native Americans, which would have raised uncomfortable questions about American violations of the human rights of its own citizens. The woes of the Siberian exiles did not trigger American guilt …
Plus ça change, one might think, but Wallance is perhaps too polite to say so.
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