Travels in Siberia (10 page)

From Tyumen they went less strenuously to St. Petersburg, and thence to England. When Kennan’s wife met him in London, he was so sunken-faced and wrinkled she hardly recognized him. Barely able to walk, he could “hardly express much joy at our meeting,” she said. A doctor he saw feared Kennan would lose his mind.

Many observers of Russia in those days discussed the sad state of the country and debated (in the famous phrase) “what is to be done.” Kennan’s articles in the
Century
, appearing in nineteen consecutive issues starting in May 1888, poured a bucket of coal oil on those flames. Hundreds of thousands read the articles, or the book when it came out in 1891. In the auditoriums where Kennan lectured beginning in 1889, the crowds often
were standing-room only. Democracy-loving Americans cheered for the success of the Russian revolutionaries, and opinion ran against the tsar’s government so strongly that it enlisted anti-Kennan propagandists to counter the trend. People called Kennan’s book “the
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
of Siberian exile.” In American cities, societies were established to encourage Russian freedom and to help Russian exiles, and Kennan traveled to speak before groups of prominent supporters of the cause. When he addressed the luminaries of the Washington Literary Society and vividly depicted the Russians’ plight, Mark Twain, who was in attendance, stood up and said with tears in his eyes, “If dynamite is the only remedy for such conditions, then thank God for dynamite!”

Kennan kept his vow to Nathalie Armfeldt and spoke to Tolstoy about her troubles during a trip to Russia in 1886. Though he arrived unannounced, Tolstoy received him cordially, and the two talked from early morning until midnight, including during the evening when Tolstoy adjourned to his last and did his usual cobbling. The great man didn’t want to hear about the Armfeldts, however. Nor would he listen to accounts of exile suffering, or look at manuscripts Kennan had brought to show him. Tolstoy said he felt sorry for the exiles but did not approve of their methods. “They had resorted, he said, to violence, and they must expect to suffer from violence,” Kennan related in a footnote about the visit in
Siberia and the Exile System
.

But Tolstoy didn’t forget Kennan, and he read his articles in the
Century
when they were smuggled into Russia. What Kennan had to report about the exiles and prisons aroused him to “terrible indignation and horror,” Tolstoy wrote in his journal. Reading Kennan also inspired Tolstoy in his long piece of later fiction,
Resurrection
, which in an early draft has an Englishman who travels in Siberia in the attempt to refute Kennan.

Another Russian writer affected by Kennan’s work was Anton Chekhov. Soon after the articles began appearing in the
Century
, Chekhov decided to make a journey to the Siberian prison island of Sakhalin and examine the conditions there. In the introduction to the book Chekhov wrote about the Sakhalin journey, he said that he did not intend to make the kind of study Kennan had done. Oddly, Chekhov’s book is not nearly as good as Kennan’s, and probably would not be known today had it been written by somebody other than one of the greatest short-story
writers and playwrights of all time. Critics have wondered why Chekhov undertook this terrible journey, which occupied most of 1890 and exceeded the limits of his strength and no doubt shortened his life. For lack of a better, I offer this ham-fisted psychological explanation: Chekhov’s beloved brother Nikolai had just died; Chekhov read or heard about the investigations of Kennan; weighed down by survivor’s guilt, he resolved to use his art for the betterment of suffering humanity. Chekhov’s Sakhalin trip, one may argue, is the only known instance of a Russian writer sending
himself
to Siberia.

After John Kennan moved to Norwalk in 1828, his two brothers, Jairus and George, came west also. Jairus settled in Norwalk and raised a family. Brother George continued farther, to the Wisconsin frontier, where he stopped at the town of Menasha. From him a Wisconsin branch of the Kennan family descends. The Wisconsin George Kennan had a son Thomas who had a son Kossuth. In Milwaukee in 1904, Kossuth and his wife, Sophie, had a son they named George Frost Kennan, in honor of his famous Siberian-traveler relative (the baby’s first cousin twice removed, technically). By coincidence, George Frost Kennan was born on February 16, his namesake’s birthday.

George Frost Kennan grew up to be a public figure so perspicacious and levelheaded that the twentieth century hardly knew what to do with him. He kept giving good advice and speaking the truth, often reviled or ignored, as events tumbled forward around him. He graduated from Princeton, joined the Foreign Service, observed the rise of Nazism from his posting in Berlin, and spent six months interned there after the United States and Germany went to war. When peace arrived, he helped design Allied policy for Europe and became deputy chief of the U.S. embassy in Moscow. A long memo he sent by telegram, later published anonymously in
Foreign Affairs
, provided the basis for NATO’s policy of containment, the anti-Soviet strategy pursued in various forms throughout the Cold War. As a State Department official in Washington, he saw the approach of the Korean War and offered sound suggestions (unheeded) for avoiding it.

Appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1951, he later made some overly frank comments about the virtual “house arrest” restrictions
he and his family had to endure in Moscow, a misstep that led to the Soviets banning him from the country. Ill-suitedness to bureaucracy in general caused him to leave the foreign service for a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lectured and wrote voluminously for decades. Before almost anybody in the policy establishment, he knew America shouldn’t be in Vietnam, and he stated his opinion publicly. At the age of ninety-eight he advised against the second invasion of Iraq. In his later years, an ability to restrain himself from constantly saying “I told you so” must be numbered among his most remarkable qualities.

He and the original George Kennan met only once, though their life spans had an overlap of twenty years. According to George F. Kennan’s recollection, as a boy he was brought to meet his famous cousin; but the Siberian traveler, and especially his wife, were unwelcoming. Perhaps they feared making the acquaintance of more relatives in need of money. Afterward, the boy wrote a thank-you note to the Kennans, and was stung, he said, by Mrs. Kennan’s opinion that it was the worst thank-you note she had ever received. Boy and man did not cross paths again.

The admiration George Frost Kennan had for his famous cousin remained great all the same. “I feel that I was in some strange way destined to carry forward as best I could the work of my distinguished and respected namesake,” he wrote in his memoirs. “What I have tried to do in life is, I suspect, just the sort of thing the latter would have liked a son of his to try to do, had he had one.” Being related to the traveler sometimes came in handy. During the younger Kennan’s time in Soviet Russia, his name provided him a conversation starter with the old Bolsheviks who had survived. Mikhail Kalinin, a member of the Politburo and chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet under Stalin, told him that his relative’s book about Siberian prisons “had been a veritable ‘Bible’ for the early revolutionists.”

George F. Kennan did not lose his usual clear-sightedness when evaluating his adventurous relative, however. In 1958, the University of Chicago Press published an abridged edition of the 1891 two-volume
Siberia and the Exile System
, and George F. Kennan wrote the introduction. In it he talked about “the relationship of Kennan’s work to the Russian political realities of the day.” He referred to the wide diversity among the revolutionaries Kennan knew, and to Kennan’s indiscriminate sympathy
with them all. The fact that Kennan had claimed he wanted only to explain the terrorists cut no ice with his younger relative:

One wonders today whether Kennan, moved as he was by the sufferings which befell these people in Siberia, took full account of the preposterous and indiscriminate campaign of terrorism they had waged against the government and of the extent to which they, by these reckless and certainly criminal actions, had provoked the regime and its police establishment to extremism of which many others, besides the terrorists themselves, were the victims. One wonders what would have been the effect in the United States of a secretly organized campaign of assassination of public officials comparable to that which was launched in Russia in the late 1870’s.

One indeed might wonder how the original Kennan could not have seen what madmen (and -women) many of the revolutionaries were. A prominent émigré revolutionary with whom Kennan became friendly and whose agenda he tried to advance was Sergei Kravchinskii, known by the nom de guerre of Stepniak; Stepniak had personally assassinated the head of the tsar’s secret police in 1878. Kennan welcomed Stepniak to America, raised money for him, introduced him around. As for the shy young women whose exile Kennan deplored, he must have been aware of individuals like (for example) Sophie Perovsky, involved in every one of the seven known attempts upon Alexander II’s life by People’s Will, the last made when she was still under thirty years old. And anyone who knew about Russia would have heard of Vera Zasulich, a woman from the lesser nobility who at the age of twenty-seven shot and mortally wounded General F. F. Trepov, military governor of St. Petersburg. Tried for the crime before a jury, she was acquitted and set free, her lawyer having argued that she acted politically and thus “had no personal interest in the crime.” As terrorist violence accelerated toward the end of the nineteenth century, upward of four thousand local and national officials in Russia were pointlessly wounded and killed. You’d never guess that from reading Kennan.

But I don’t really wonder at Kennan’s credulity myself. I would have probably done the same as he did. In Siberia he was traveling far from
home, in the cold, bugs chewing on him, misery all around. Americans believe in democracy and they like to fix things. There had to be a happy ending in here somewhere, some grounds for hope, a fair repayment for all the suffering he saw. Then in the middle of Siberia he met the idealistic young exiles; and Katarina Breshkovskaya said to him, “Mr. Kennan, we may die in exile, and our children may die in exile, and our children’s children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last.” Hearing that, of course anyone would say, “Yes!” And if at that moment you knew that Katarina Breshkovskaya had also smuggled bombs across the country, you might mentally push the fact to one side.

When Kennan set out on his journey to Siberian prisons in 1885, Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the future Stalin, was six years old. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the future Lenin, was fifteen. In 1887, while Kennan was preparing his articles for the
Century
, Alexander Ulyanov, Vladimir’s older brother, a zoology student at Moscow University, pawned a gold medal he had won for his research on freshwater earthworms in order to buy dynamite, and then contributed the dynamite to fellow conspirators making a lead-pellet-and-strychnine bomb with which they hoped to kill Alexander III. Betrayed by an informer, Alexander Ulyanov and fifteen others were arrested. A court condemned five of them, including Ulyanov, to hang. Later the tsar offered to commute the death sentences if the perpetrators would say they were sorry and wouldn’t do it again. Ulyanov and the other condemned men refused; Ulyanov explained that to say what he was required would be “hypocritical.” And so Alexander Ulyanov and his comrades were hanged.

Did the tsar guess that the hanging of these young men would be an irrevocable step toward the end of his own line? Did he imagine that Alexander Ulyanov’s little brother must be out there, getting stronger, aimed unstoppably at the next tsar? A police mug shot of the younger Ulyanov in his early twenties shows an implacably focused young face with no sense of humor at all. Perhaps the tsar suspected that something like Lenin awaited the Romanovs. A number of Russian thinkers knew disaster was on the way, as the sage Tolstoy saw that violence from violence grew. Everybody imagined too tamely and too small, however, and the wrath to come, like so much in Russia, turned out to be grotesquely large scale.

The original George Kennan’s gift was not for prophecy. He had grown up in a young country pleased with the promising beginning it
had made and eager to spread the good news of its political system. For Americans like Kennan, a hopeful future was unthinkingly assumed, leaving the present as the main item of business at hand. The American Revolution had been relatively benign; his view of Russian possibilities bent under the weight of his native optimism. The slippery Stepniak himself described Kennan as “deeply interested in the country [Russia], which he truly loves.” But Russian politics and policy interested Kennan only on their surface. Better than any other American, or perhaps than any other non-Russian, Kennan registered the deeper Russian passions of his time.

The rest of Kennan’s life is daunting to think about, as he continued his career as an expert on Russia through that murky and mad period in its history. For a few years after the publication of
Siberia and the Exile System
, the woes of multitudes seemed to cross his desk, with letters from exiles, requests for help, plans for escape or for entry into America. He spent a lot of his money on charitable projects and even had exiles staying at his house sometimes. By the mid-1890s, the excitement in America about Russian freedom and the Siberian exiles had tapered off, and his lecture bookings as well. Kennan’s finances sometimes ran low. He wrote other articles and kept alert for opportunities. In 1901, he went back to Russia to collect information and was able to meet with liberals in St. Petersburg over a period of four weeks before the tsar’s government found out and expelled him.
THE FAMOUS NORWALKIAN
—
GEORGE KENNAN ORDERED TO LEAVE RUSSIA BY TEN O’CLOCK TONIGHT
, the
Norwalk Reflector
blared; elsewhere it had proudly referred to him as
THE PLUCKY AMERICAN WHO BEARDED THE CZAR IN HIS DEN
.