Into Siberia George Kennan's epic journey through the brutal, frozen heart of Russia

Nineteenth-century America was enamored with Russia, which was viewed as a colorful, exotic land with a romantic culture. It was a time when the two countries were the closest diplomatically that they'd ever be (incidentally it was also when America acquired Alaska from Russia). Journalist George Kennan bought into this common perception of the land of the tsars, which is why he made several trips to Russia to see it first hand. In 1885, on assignment for The Century Magazine, he embarked on an expedition to investigate the system that exiled criminals and dissidents to the vast, frozen wasteland of Siberia. Kennan was quickly disabused of any romantic notions about Russia as he witnessed the cruelty and privations endured by Russian exiles. Kennan's reports from Siberia forever changed America's perceptions of Russia, and relations between the two countries have been, at best, dodgy ever since. Wallance's recounting of Kennan's journeys reads like a classic adventure odyssey, a man vs. nature epic, as well as an exposé of a horrendously brutal political system. It is history at its most compelling.

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. (Dec.)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.

An American explorer in 19th-century Siberia. When George Kennan entered Siberia in 1885, it wasn't his first time in the remote region. In the 1860s, the young American had undertaken similarly punishing journeys there and in the Caucasus, first as a telegraph scout on a doomed Western Union expedition, and then on a free-wheeling adventure of his own. A popular book and lecture tour came out of those earlier trips, but the 1885 voyage had a more serious goal: Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine had commissioned Kennan to investigate Siberia's prisons, labor mines, and settlements, where numerous political exiles lived under surveillance. The practice of transporting prisoners to Siberia had been in use for centuries, but the emergence of revolutionary resistance to the autocratic leaders of the 19th century had caused the network to swell with new inmates. Wallance, who has written prolifically on law and human rights, draws heavily on Kennan's own books (Tent Life in Siberia and Siberia and the Exile System), and he supplies useful context with modern historical scholarship. As the author shows, the prison investigation caused a significant shift in Kennan's thinking. He entered Siberia as a "friend of Russia," eager to defend the exile system to the international community, but the horrific conditions he witnessed and the sympathetic political exiles he met made him reconsider everything he thought he knew. Once Kennan returned to the U.S. and published the results of his investigation, formerly friendly American public opinion shifted, and the relationship between the U.S. and Russia changed forever. Wallance does not trace out in detail the larger history of oppression and exile that the book's dedication to Alexei Navalny only hints at, but readers curious about crime, punishment, and political resistance in 19th-century Russia will find much of interest. A page-turning history of a harrowing investigation that upended Russian--American relations. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.