INTO SIBERIA

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.