George Kennan and the Challenge of Siberia



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George Kennan

and the Challenge of Siberia

N

ICHOLAS



D

ANILOFF


he small boy pressed his nose against the window. He could hardly pass up

the chance to see the doctor treat his playmate, whose arm had been man-

gled in the cogwheels of a mill. Through the pane, the boy spied the surgeon

unsheathe a saw and carefully draw its razor-sharp teeth across the injured arm

below the elbow. With horror, many years later, the boy at the window would

describe the amputation:

The surgeon accidentally let slip the end of one of the severed arteries and a jet of

warm blood spurted from the stump of the upper arm to the inside of the window

pane against which my face was pressed. The effect upon me was a sensation that

I never felt before in all my boyish life—a sensation of deadly nausea, faintness and

overwhelming fear.

1

The peeping boy of 1855 would grow up to be the adventurous traveler George



Kennan, a cousin twice removed of the twentieth-century George F. Kennan,

American ambassador to Stalin’s Russia. Years after the operation, the nineteenth-

century Kennan would succeed in amputating his own insecurities to brave the

wilds of Siberia, to expose the horrors of the Russian penal system, and to become

America’s first great authority on Russia.

George Kennan, the elder, first intrigued me when I worked in Moscow as a

journalist during the cold war over a hundred years later. I was drawn into the

search for Kennan’s traces when I began researching the life of my own great-

great-grandfather, a Russian exiled to Siberia for conspiring to overthrow the czar

in 1825. Siberia seemed to bring Kennan and me together. Kennan went to Siberia

seeking “perilous adventure”; my Russian ancestor went there in shackles, and I

journeyed across that land in search of their histories.

There was another thing that joined me to Kennan. Both of us were thrown

bodily out of Russia. Kennan was expelled in 1901 as an unreliable foreigner. I

was deported in 1986 on false charges of espionage. What I learned from this was

that we are all links in a chain. Our actions today are determined to some extent

601

T

Nicholas Daniloff, a former Moscow correspondent, now teaches in the School of Jour-

nalism, Northeastern University, Boston.



by the actions of our predecessors. Soviet police methods grew directly out of the

practices of the Russian police a century earlier. And we can expect today’s Rus-

sian bureaucracy to reflect the methods of the Soviet era.

Kennan’s long fascination with Russia began in 1865. Having sailed from New

York and trekked across the Isthmus of Panama, Kennan set sail from San Fran-

cisco on 3 July aboard the brig Olga for Russia’s Pacific coast. He had been hired,

along with others, to survey a telegraph cable route from the United States, across

Alaska and the Bering Straits, through northern Siberia, to Moscow and St.

Petersburg, and on to Paris and London. The line, the Western Union company

believed, would eliminate the need for a cable that engineers were having diffi-

culty laying across the Atlantic.

Kennan was an excellent choice for this work. Born on 16 February 1845 in

Norwalk, Ohio, the son of a lawyer, he had become infatuated with the fast-devel-

oping telegraph business. (The father of the telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse, was

in fact a distant relative who opened the new communications era with the famous

message, transmitted from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore on 24 May 1844:

“What hath God wrought?”) In 1851, the six-year-old Kennan punched out his

first telegraph message in Morse code. A decade later, he dropped out of high

school to become a military telegrapher during the Civil War. And when the war

ended, he was sailing across the Pacific. On 19 August 1865, the Olga  dropped

anchor at Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka, and Kennan’s love affair with Russia began.

During the next two and a half years, Kennan and his companions roamed

from the mouth of the Anandyr River, on the northerly coast of the Bering Straits,

surveying routes for the projected land line. Life was, indeed, perilous. They trav-

eled by dog sled, slept in the open in temperatures down to 50 degrees below

zero (Fahrenheit), and more than once were threatened with death by blizzards

and hunger.

Throughout, Kennan conversed with his diary, penciling observations in a

microscopic hand in notebooks bound in soft, tan leather, which are preserved

today at the Library of Congress. On occasion he wondered what his mother

would think if she could see him now. His handwriting is precise, although occa-

sionally the letters become sloppy as he complains about cold-induced numbness.

To  ward off extreme temperatures, Kennan wore fur-lined mittens, fur over-

stockings, fur-lined pants, and fur-lined parkas. He slept in a bearskin sleeping

bag, but all that couldn’t keep his extremities warm, or his nose from freezing.

New Year’s Eve 1865 was brutal. Kennan scribbled, “water froze solid in 4

minutes at a distance of just 12 inches from a huge blazing fire—my tea cup full

of boiling hot tea froze solidly to the saucer in my hands & the metal spoon with

which I was eating hot soup would freeze to my fingers at one end while the other

was in the hot liquid. Frost forms on hair and eyelids at a distance of only 3 feet

from a blazing cedar fire.”

2

During the winter months at latitude 65 degrees north, the sun hangs close on



the horizon for only three hours a day, bathing the bleak white landscape in a

golden glow. Most of the day passes in darkness. Kennan tells his diaries he wish-

es he could sleep sixteen hours straight, announces that he is turning in, and signs

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off as “Geo.” Occasionally he notes the one great compensation: the beauty of

the aurora borealis:

The heavens were spanned by an immense arch of red, yellow and green in the

most vivid colors every second—across the zenith there were continually passing

with the greatest rapidity, while yellow bands of light from north to south, like

spokes of a gigantic wheel revolving on an axis placed perpendicularly in the

northwest horizon.

3

Uncertain survival in these northern parts raised doubts as to the feasibility of



the projected land-line. Kennan found many of the Koryak natives difficult to

work with. Sometimes he had to threaten them with his revolver. To make mat-

ters worse, in the summer of

1866, famine struck the settle-

ment at the mouth of the

Anadyr River. Kennan noted

on 19 August 1866:

It seems as if everything was

against us in the construction

of this line. We have had noth-

ing since last spring but ill luck

and ill success—the company

does not support us, stores did

not reach us till too late, money

has not reach us at all, we have no workmen, no horses, the supply of dog food has

everywhere failed and now to crown all comes this bads news from Anadyrsk.

4

A full year later, word came from Western Union that the Russian-American



telegraph project had been canceled because the Atlantic cable had been suc-

cessfully completed. Kennan, now twenty-two, was devastated. Over two and a

half years, seventy-five Americans and hundreds of native workers had surveyed

the whole route from the Bering Straits to the Amur River; had cut 15,000 tele-

graph poles, built some fifty station houses, and carved out nearly fifty miles of

road around Gamsk and Okhotsk.

Abandoning all, Kennan left Okhotsk for home on 24 October 1867, traveling

by troika across Siberia. The first leg followed a track south to the Lena River,

then along the frozen flow to Yakutsk, a staging city for expeditions into the

remote northeast. As Kennan cruised along the frozen way, wider in places than

the Mississippi, his sledge crashed through thin ice and came to rest, suspended

by its stabilizing outriggers, in the frigid water.

Kennan and his native drivers rescued two horses, but the third died of shock.

After four days in Yakutsk, the travelers took the post road to Irkutsk, adminis-

trative center of the governor-general of Eastern Siberia. Irkutsk had been devel-

oped in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with help from the exiled

Decembrist conspirators of 1825 and their wives, Polish revolutionaries, crimi-

nals, dissidents, gamblers, trappers, and assorted carpetbaggers. Its wooden hous-

es, embellished with finely cut window carvings and gilded, onion-dome church-

es earned it the reputation of the “Paris of Siberia.”

George Kennan and the Challenge of Siberia

603


“I could not help thinking that Ken-

nan, object of my search, typified the

vitality of reckless youth, plunging

ahead without regard to the 

consequences.”


Kennan, dressed in his blue telegraph uniform with brass buttons, joined in the

revelries of Irkutsk society, displaying his colloquial Russian. One official scold-

ed him for his speech, sprinkled with saucy words used by the Siberian Koryaks

and Chukchis. The official termed Kennan’s words “a little queer—that’s all—

bizarre—but it’s nothing.”

“That settles it!” riposted Kennan. “I will talk no more Russian to ladies in

Irkutsk!”

5

Seeking Kennan’s traces, I set out one summer for Siberia. That northerly ter-



ritory holds a special place in the Russian psyche. Cruel and unusuual punish-

ment is its ordinary face. But being far from the capital’s bureaucrats, Siberia’s

southern reaches are also the freest and potentially most productive areas of the

Russian landmass. To go to Siberia is either to die or to thrive on the old frontier.

Waiting to board the plane in Moscow, I found the airport teaming with mod-

ern-day adventurers—Indian diamond buyers, South African traders, old Russian

women with overflowing bags of consumer goods. On board, I met the grandson

of Roald Amundsen, explorer of Antarctica, who had been hit by his own Siber-

ian obsession: to drive four orange trucks across the Bering Strait because “no

one has ever done it.”

I could not help thinking that Kennan, object of my search, typified the vitali-

ty of reckless youth, plunging ahead without regard to the consequences. He

ranked, in my judgment, among such adventurers of the last century as Stanley

and Livingstone, who penetrated darkest Africa; Delong and others who sought

the Northwest Passage; Nansen, Peary, and Cook who vied to reach the North Pole.

In Yakutsk, Professor Vasily N. Ivanov, director of the Institute of Humanities

Research, recited what he knew of Kennan from graduate student days: “He

brought to Russia ideas about freedom, he had many friends, all of them pro-

gressive.”

6

Dmitry K. Sivtsev, the ninety-two-year-old director of the Sitinski



open-air museum, added, “Kennan was a great northern explorer who wanted to

promote freedom and democracy. We have none of his materials. Can you send

us some of his books?”

7

The director’s remarks were not surprising: the Soviet



government did all it could to expunge the memory of a man it considered a for-

eign troublemaker.

One question haunted me: How could an insecure youth, convulsed at the sight

of blood, leave the warm safety of an Ohio telegraph office to throw himself into

harm’s way? The traces in Siberia had become so faint they were hardly

detectable. It was only when I returned to America that I stumbled on Kennan’s

own explanation in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress.

“I happened to be born with a vigorous constitution, an active imagination, an

ardent love for the out-of-door life—particularly in the woods—a thirst for adven-

turous experiences, and a voracious appetite for books of travel,” Kennan wrote

in an unpublished autobiography that is preserved today in the Madison Building

of the Library of Congress. “Before I was five years of age, I had a whole fleet

of small wooden boats—cargo ships, warships and pirates—which had been

made for me by my father, or carved out of blocks by myself, and which I used

to sail over the carpet in the dining room to remote ports in the tropical zone

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behind the stove, or to the arctic regions in the spare bedroom, where there was

no fire.”

8

As a young man, Kennan had dropped out of high school to help his father



support six children. He was curious but sickly, deemed unfit for service with the

Union forces. In his quiet moments as a telegrapher, he brooded over his weak-

nesses. He became convinced that physical courage could be cultivated.

“Cincinnati,” he wrote, “toward the end of the Civil War was a much rougher

and more lawless city than it ever has been since. Fights, street robberies, and

murders were daily occurrences and all of the men in our office who had to do

night duty carried weapons as a matter of course. I bought a revolver and began

a course of experiment upon myself.”

9

Finishing work at 2 a.m., he would wander into the meanest parts of the city.



Once he rescued a man from being robbed; another time, he saw a hoodlum slash

a man’s throat. Writing a decade after the operation that so nauseated him, Ken-

nan now declared in 1864, “I did not get faint nor sick; and every time I went

through a street that I believed to be dangerous, or had an experience of this kind,

I felt a small accession of self-respect.”

10

The experiment succeeded.



Not only did Kennan survive Siberia, he capped his adventure with a first book

that he cast as a travelogue for the general public, Tent Life in Siberia. Published

in 1870, the book was an immediate success and launched his career as an author

and lecturer. It also prompted a second journey; this time his objective was the

Caucasus, that alpine ridge between the Black and Caspian seas that splits Rus-

sia from Asia Minor and divides Christendom from Islam.

Kennan caught the Caucasian bug while homeward bound in 1868. The Cau-

casus was then in vogue, made fashionable by the end of the Russian pacification

wars a decade earlier and popularized by Russia’s great writers, Pushkin and Ler-

montov. In the fashionable shops of St. Petersburg, Kennan saw the exquisitely

wrought shirts of chain-mail used by the tribesmen, daggers and swords inlaid

with gold and silver, and the scarlet and white hoods of Circassian horsemen,

which aristocratic ladies of the capital had adopted as their own.

Kennan sailed from New York for St. Petersburg on 11 June 1870. Ignoring

warnings from his Russian friends about the armed bandits he would encounter,

he sailed alone down the Volga River. He changed boats at Astrakhan, and arrived

at the Dagestani port of Petrovsk on 12 September. Following Kennan’s footsteps,

I too traveled to Dagestan as Russia waged war in Chechnya in 1995. My Rus-

sian friends, like Kennan’s, urged me to forget the venture. Like Kennan, I ignored

their advice.

Kennan soon discovered that Dagestan was a crossroads of travelers, armed

and malevolent. At first, Kennan was perplexed, not knowing how to begin. He

admitted in his notes that it was easier to sit at home and trace possible routes

than to confront the situation on the ground. Eventually, a Russian introduced him

to Akhmet Avarsky, the kind of cutthroat he had been warned against.

In articles published many years later, Kennan dubbed Avarsky “a tenth cen-

tury barbarian” but the horseman became his quide. Avarsky boasted that he

had killed fourteen men in revenge and an untold number of Russians in battle.

George Kennan and the Challenge of Siberia

605



This prompted Kennan to ask, “How did you come to kill the first man? Was it

a fight?”

11

“Not exactly a fight,” Avarsky replied. “We had a dispute, and he said a bad



word to me. I drew my kinjal [dagger]—and—batz! it was done.”

Avarsky then inquired what would happen in America in a similar case. Ken-

nan said he would call the police. Disappointed, Avarsky pushed further, “Then

don’t you ever kill anybody, or go on raids or avenge blood?” When Kennan

replied in the negative, Avarsky riposted, “Humph, yours must be a sheep’s life.”

Pursuing the life of a vagabond, Kennan roamed over the highlands for the

next two months. He was amazed at what he saw—a world of thirty different eth-

nic groups and languages,

stuck in the traditions of Julius

Caesar’s era. Here blood

revenge was still practiced,

and a man accused of crimes

could clear himself only by

ordeal. Here a murderer seek-

ing forgiveness had to wrap

himself in a shroud, win the

compassion of the victim’s

mother, kiss her breast, or sub-

mit to execution.

Kennan recorded the customs; noted the lavish entertainment and the superb

horsemanship. He sought out a Georgian Prince Djordjadze, in service of the Rus-

sians, to make the treacherous crossing over the main Caucasian ridge into the

Kakhetia region of Georgia. The reluctant prince tried to dissuade Kennan from

joining the party. But the stubborn American declared he was unafraid, little sus-

pecting that his old terrors would return on the descent.

“In five minutes more I found myself riding down a narrow shelf-like path cut

out in the face of a precipice,” Kennan wrote in his lecture notes,

my right shoulder brushing against a tremendous cliff, my left stirrup hanging over

a thousand feet of empty air, and my horse straining every nerve to keep from slip-

ping and getting under such headway as to run over the corner of a zig-zag before

he could turn.

About half way to the bottom of the ravine we came to the worst part of the whole

descent, when the path narrowed to a mere shelf of rock, pitching downward across

the face of a black slate cliff at so steep an angle that a horse could barely maintain

his footing on it, and ending in the corner of a zigzag, where one must either turn

or slide off into empty space.

Suddenly my horse slipped a little on his hind feet over some loose sliding frag-

ments of slate. . . . The horse recovered himself, shortened his foot steps to about

two inches and continued to descend. . . . Again my horse slipped.

After sliding once or twice his own length without lifting a foot from the ground,

he finally stopped, stood still for an instant as if to make sure that he had recovered

his footing, and then began to take two inch steps downward. Keeping three feet

constantly on the ground and edging his way around the corner of that zigzag in a

manner that would have excited the admiration of a professional rope walker.

12

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“Kennan . . . was amazed at what 

he saw—a world of thirty different

ethnic groups and languages, stuck 

in Julius Caesar’s era.”


Kennan left the Caucasus in November by Black Sea steamer from Trebizond

for Constantinople. He was astounded by what he had seen: Barbarism had sur-

vived the centuries in the isolation of the highlands. It was Russia’s noble role,

he thought, to replace that barbarism with a European legal code and Western civ-

ilization. Yet in only a few years, a more mature Kennan would reverse his views

about Russia’s ability to shoulder the white man’s burden.

Returning to the United States in January 1871, Kennan took a job at the Union

Bank in Medina, in upstate New York, where he met his fiancee, Emiline Rath-

bone Weld. In 1877, he moved to New York, but left on short notice to take a job

with the Associated Press covering the U.S. Supreme Court. In Washington he

honed his skills as a journalist and sharpened his sense of justice by covering the

American court system. On 25 September 1879, at thirty-four, he married “Lena.”

I sought recollections of Emiline and George from his younger cousin Ambas-

sador George Frost Kennan, now in his nineties, living in Princeton, N.J. The

younger Kennan remembered Emiline as “difficult.” Possibly she was embittered

by the stillborn death of their only child, George Weld Kennan, in 1883. Of his

older relative, whom he met in 1910, Kennan added,

He really was in the intellectual sense a self-made man. He always had to do it him-

self with very little money. It is quite amazing for a boy of his background. I would

put him as a genteel, very brave Victorian of the school of Darwin. But very with-

drawn personally.

13

Reading Kennan’s letters to Emiline, I found the adventurer anything but with-



drawn in his private communications. Habitually, he began his missives, “my dear

little girlie” and “my dear Queenie” and “Sweetheart.” He inquired about her

health, her state of mind, and praised her lavishly for her support during his

lengthy trips away. He wrote of his loneliness without her, and, toward the end

of his life, of moments of depression.  In one letter in 1884 he came close to being

passionate: “I don’t realize what an ever fresh comfort and pleasure it is to be

taken close in your arms against your warm soft body, until I am separated from

you and can only experience it in remembrance.” In preserving these letters, Emi-

line left a handwritten note in the correspondence for 1901–09, saying, “GK had

a horror of endearments being published, so altho we wrote daily, often 2 or 3

times daily, I have destroyed nearly all.”

14

Among the surviving letters is one lav-



ishly praising her for encouraging him to make his great Siberia expedition in

1885–86.


During that fifteen-month journey, Kennan won an international reputation for

his exposé of the Russian penal system. His study forced him to revise his early

views of the benign nature of Russia’s “civilizing mission.” He turned from

admirer to bitter critic. In retrospect, it seems ironic that what prompted Kennan

to undertake the second Siberia trip was the picture his contemporaries were

painting of Russia as an evil empire—a picture that Kennan thought far too

dark—even after the assassination of the liberal Czar Alexander II in 1881.

In August-September 1884, backed by The Century Magazine, he returned to

Russia to explore the possibility of refuting dire accounts by his contemporaries

George Kennan and the Challenge of Siberia

607



of the anti-tsarist revolutionary movement and the prison system. In St. Peters-

burg, he won support from Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander G.

Vlangali, who believed his visitor was a friendly observer, one who would

improve Russia’s image in the West. Vlangali gave Kennan a letter requesting

local authorities to render every assistance.

On 2 May 1885, Kennan sailed again for Russia with George A. Frost, an artist

who would produce sketches for the ambitious study. Frost had worked on the

telegraph line in northeast Siberia and was a survivor of the second battle of Bull

Run. Kennan believed he would be a reliable companion, never anticipating the

crisis Frost would precipitate toward the end of their journey.

The pair left St. Petersburg on 31 May 1885 for a journey of more than eight

thousand miles by train, carriage, horseback, dog sled, and sleigh. They traveled

to Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Perm, Yekaterinburg, Tyumen, Omsk, Semipalatin-

sk, and as far south as the Altai mountains. From there they turned north to Bar-

naul, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and into eastern Siberia as far as the Kara

mines. They visited prisons, collected statistics, sought out official documents,

and interviewed political prisoners. They came face to face with all the repres-

sive mechanisms used to punish criminals and control dissent.

Their first shock came at the forwarding prison at Tyumen, where conditions

were worse than Kennan had expected. Overcrowding, filth, and lack of proper

medical care contributed to a high mortality rate. Kennan discovered that the inci-

dence of death at this prison between 1876 and 1886 ranged from 23.7 to 44.1

percent of inmates, compared to a prison death rate in the United States of 1.7 to

2 percent. He wrote,

The air in the corridors and cells, particularly in the second story, was indescrib-

ably and unimaginably foul. Every cubic foot of it had apparently been respired over

and over again until it did not contain an atom of oxygen; it was laden with fever

germs from the unventilated hospital wards, fetid odors from diseased human lungs

and unclean human bodies and the stench arising from unemptied excrement buck-

ets at the ends of the corridors.

15

Kennan had expected dissidents exiled to Siberia to be fanatic revolutionaries;



nihilists intent on assassination and the forceful overthrow of the established gov-

ernment. What he discovered was that both men and women opponents were often

well-educated people who sought constitutional government and rule of law.

Commenting on one dissident, Adam Bialoveski, Kennan wrote,

To brand such a man as a nihilist was absurd, and to exile him to Siberia as a dan-

gerous member of society was simply preposterous. In any other civilized country

on the face of the globe except Russia he would be regarded as the most moderate

of liberals.

16

What astounded me about Kennan’s account when I first read it was the extent



to which Russia’s Soviet leaders had adopted the czarist practices of administra-

tive imprisonment, torture, internal espionage, and press censorship—and elabo-

rated upon them all. As a correspondent in Moscow in the early 1960s and again

in the 1980s, I combated bugged apartments, walls with ears, “friendly” Russian

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journalists with surveillance agendas, and an unnerving feeling that whatever I

did must have violated some regulation. Evil empires, it seems, admire evil prac-

tices and improve on them.

As Kennan and Frost ventured further, they discovered a paradox that survived

into Soviet days: brutality mixed with unexpected generosity. Occasionally the

explorers received help from officials who secretly disliked the policies of St.

Petersburg. In Omsk, one functionnary shocked them when he said, “Mr. Ken-

nan, if you find it necessary to speak of me by name in your book, please don’t

speak of me favorably.”

Stunned, Kennan asked why. The official replied, “Because I don’t think your

book will be altogether pleas-

ing to the government; and if I

am mentioned favorably in it, I

shall be harried by officials

here more than I am now. My

request may seem to you ab-

surd, but it is the only favor I

have to ask.”

17

In ten years as a



Moscow correspondent, I met

officials who spoke the same

Alice-through-the-Looking Glass

language more than once.

From the very start of their journey, Kennan and Frost encountered the suspi-

cious gaze of the police regime that I came to know a century later. At Perm, they

were stopped by four gendarmes who questioned them intensely about their activ-

ities. In so doing, the police displayed an unnerving knowledge of their move-

ments over the last twenty-four hours.

“Both in going and returning,” one of the gendarmes noted, “you devoted all

your attention to the prison. This morning it was the same thing over again. Now

what were you looking at that prison in that way for?”

18

Such encounters, which



happened often enough in the Soviet Union, inevitably prompted paranoia among

visitors. In Kennan’s case, the police backed off only after he produced Vlangali’s

assistance letter.

The official penchant for spying on visitors is disconcerting for anyone who

becomes an intimate observer of the Russian scene. Who is looking over your

shoulder? What law have you unwittingly violated? Why do you feel unease,

guilt? As Kennan and Frost neared Tobolsk, Frost began to suffer from paranoia.

Everywhere he saw enemies; for nine days he could not sleep.

Kennan’s notes—written in his own shorthand and occasionally Morse code—

are interspersed with observations about Frost’s frequent delusions. On 2 March

1886, Kennan recorded in his notebook:

He hs bn in a state of perfect panic at Tobolsk without t slightest apparent cause.

He didn’t want to drink tea for fear of being drugged so tt he cld . . . be more eas-

ily murdered on the road. He saw in t hall leadg 2 our room today a bottle of chlo-

ral which probably gv h t idea of bg drugged . . . at about 4. am He crept over to

George Kennan and the Challenge of Siberia

609

“To be expelled, after a long career 

of observing Russia, is to have your

life’s work repudiated; your person

violated.”



me. I was lying on t floor, clutched my arm thus waking me & putting his lips close

agt my ear whispered to me in tones of great agitation & terror tt tr ws a man and

a woman just outside of our door takg abt murdering us.

19

And in a letter to Lena, mailed from Tyumen the following day, he expanded



on Frost’s hallucinations:

I asked what was the matter and he whispered with his lips still close againt my ear

that there were people just outside our door in the entry who intended to murder

us—that he had heard their footsteps coming up the stairs and has since been lis-

tening to their low conversation outside the door. That the man who was to murder

us had lost courage a little at the door but that a woman who was with him was urg-

ing him on saying, “What are you afraid of—the servants are all drunk,” and then

he heard them say something about “mogeela” [a grave].

20

Although Kennan described Frost’s behavoir as unbearable, he never lapsed



into self-pity or neglected his professional observations. He did decide, however,

to speed up their return to London. On 13 April 1886, Kennan put Frost on a

steamer from England to America. Then, exhausted but unwilling to give in, he

returned for several more months in Russia, this time accompanied by Lena, who

had traveled to England to meet him.

This was Kennan’s last major trip to Russia. His critical articles about the

Siberian prison system in The Century magazine in 1887 (and in his 1891 book

Siberia and the Exile System) infuriated the Russian government. Nevertheless,

Kennan returned to St. Petersburg for yet another visit in early July 1901. He

wondered in a letter to Lena whether he was being followed.

21

On 24 July, after



several weeks in the capital, he was arrested, thrown into prison for thirty hours,

and expelled as “politically untrustworthy.” He left by train 16 July 1901 for

Berlin and London.

Kennan’s expulsion sealed the bond between him and me. To be expelled, after

a long career of observing Russia, is to have your life’s work repudiated; your

person violated. When it happened to me, I was crushed, believing that I would

never return to Russia. I wondered how Kennan reacted and hunted in vain for a

comment. I found a single note posted to Emiline from London on 3 August 1901,

referring in passing to his expulsion. It gave no hint of his feelings. Perhaps he

did not realize what a blow he had been dealt, a blow worse than the one I suf-

fered, because in my case the Soviet empire collapsed and I have returned.

Unable to travel to Russia anymore, Kennan worked on the periphery. He cov-

ered the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05 from the Japanese side and promoted

democracy among Russian prisoners of war held in Japan. As a foreign corre-

spondent, he covered many crises, including the volcano eruption on Martinique

and the Philippines insurrection, for The Century. As his reputation grew, he was

sought after for advice by leading political figures, including President Theodore

Roosevelt and Secretary of State Robert Lansing.

His expulsion would undermine his position as an expert, however. It deprived

him of contact with this complex nation and forced him to rely on Russian dissi-

dents abroad. Inability to visit Russia prevented him from viewing the political

scene at close quarters and acquainting himself directly with the Marxist revolu-

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EMOKRATIZATSIYA




tionaries who replaced the more liberal dissidents of the 1880s. As a result, he

underestimated the ferocity with which the Bolsheviks would wield power; he

could not foresee how the Bolsheviks would improve on the repressive mecha-

nisms of the czarist regime. More important, he overestimated the chances of

democracy in Russia.

It is hardly surprising that Kennan could no longer be a dispassionate observ-

er. His knowledge and sense of justice prompted him to struggle for constitutional

reform. If the czarist regime could be overthrown, he predicted, popular democ-

racy would follow. He was wrong. In March 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated

and for some months it seemed that democracy might take root as Kennan hoped.

But Lenin and his cohorts overthrew the provisional government on 7 November,

and Kennan soon found himself denouncing Russia’s return to authoritarianism.

Kennan died in 1924, the same year as his nemesis, the founder of the Soviet

state Vladimir I. Lenin. During his twilight years, his interests shifted away from

Russia to domestic American issues. His last major contribution was an autho-

rized, two-volume biography of Edward H. Harriman, builder of the Union Pacif-

ic railroad.

Today, George Kennan the elder receives mixed reviews. Some academics see

him as an acute observer but a mere journalist; a specialist without systematic edu-

cation, even “a snake-oil salesman.” He is, nevertheless, the namesake of the Ken-

nan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington. But for me, he is more

than some honorable historical figure. He is America’s first great Russia expert;

the passionate but discreet Victorian gentleman. Most of all, he is the indomitable

investigator who rose to the Siberian challenge, an example for us all.

“Man carries on, for months or years, an almost incessant fight with a hostile

and pitiless environment, “ he wrote. “ He is alone—or almost alone; he has lit-

tle sympathy or encouragement from the outside world; he is deprived of the facil-

ities and appliances of material civilization; most of nature’s laws and forces are

arrayed against him; and he backs his own unaided body and brain against cold

storms, ice, deep snow, hunger, desolation, and all the depressing influences of

darkness and solitude. . . . In such a situation, personal character rises into

absolute predominance, and success, when achieved is due almost wholly to the

courage, forethought, and steadfastness of the individual actor.”

22

NOTES

George Kennan’s papers are housed at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Con-

gress. I would like to thank the library and its personnel for help in examining the papers.

1. George Kennan, Box 88 (unpublished) Autobiography, 63

2. Box 19, First Siberian trip notebooks, 31 December 1865

3. Ibid., December 1865

4. Ibid., 19 August 1866

5. Box 88, Autobiography, 265–68

6. Author’s interview, July 1996

7. Ibid.

8. Box 88, Autobiography, 6–7

9. Ibid. 65 et seq.

10. Ibid.

George Kennan and the Challenge of Siberia

611



11. George Kennan, “A Tenth Century Barbarian,” in The Century magazine, 24 May

1916, 205

12. Box 63, undated lecture notes, 71–74

13. Author’s interview with George F. Kennan, Princeton, N.J., 5 June 1996

14. Correspondence File for 1901–09

15. George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (New York: The Century Press, 1891),

Volume I, 87–89

16. Ibid., 241

17. Ibid., 141

18. Ibid., 28

19. Box 20, Notebook 20, 2 March 1886, 158

20. Box 15, GK letter dated 3 March 1886

21. Correspondence File for 1901-1909: GK letter dated June 1901

22. Box 88, Autobiography, 161 et seq.



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