Into Siberia
George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"In Wallance’s bracing narrative, Kennan emerges as a cheerful, deeply decent companion, an uncompromising observer whose greatest strength was his ability to change his mind. He’s a welcome change from the callous imperialists who people most Victorian travelogues, and his humanity allows Into Siberia to delve into horror without succumbing to despair." — The New York Times Book Review
In a book that ranks with the greatest adventure stories, Gregory Wallance’s Into Siberia is a thrilling work of history about one man’s harrowing journey and the light it shone on some of history’s most heinous human rights abuses.
In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress dissent.
Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear. Prisoners in the mines were chained day and night to their wheelbarrows as punishment. Babies in exile parties froze to death in their mothers’ arms. Kennan came to call the exiles’ experience in Siberia a “perfect hell of misery.”
After returning to the United States, Kennan set out to generate public outrage over the plight of the exiles, writing the renowned Siberia and the Exile System. He then went on a nine-year lecture tour to describe the suffering of the Siberian exiles, intensifying the newly emerging diplomatic conflicts between the two countries which last to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Wallance (The Woman Who Fought an Empire) delivers a riveting biography of American journalist George Kennan (1845–1924), who traveled in Siberia and investigated czarist Russia's prison-exile system. Wallance describes Kennan braving subzero temperatures, uncharted taiga, bed bugs, and near starvation to map an overland telegraph route from St. Petersburg to the Bering Strait as part of the 1865 Russian-American Telegraph Expedition. During this journey, he became convinced the Russian prison system—which allowed families to follow convicted loved ones into exile—was more humane than Western penal systems. Years later, in 1885, he was commissioned by the Century Illustrated Monthly to document the Russian system. Traveling with artist George Albert Frost, whose sketches illustrate this book, Kennan gained unprecedented access to a vast network of imperial prisons and exile communities where he interviewed wardens, inmates, political exiles, and their wives, and uncovered, contrary to his expectations, "bureaucratic incompetence, corruption... and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering." Wallance contends Kennan's writings "left Americans so appalled and angry at Russia's mistreatment of its citizens that the relationship between the two countries was never the same." (According to Wallance, Kennan's works supposedly inspired Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov to write "their own books" on the exile system.) Resurfacing a mostly forgotten episode of Russian-American relations, this strikingly narrated adventure enthralls. Correction: A previous version of this review misstated the title of the author's previous book. It also had the incorrect year for George Wallance's death.
