Travels in Siberia (9 page)

The book mostly omits the rest of Kennan’s trip and concludes with him in St. Petersburg. Elsewhere he would describe how palatial and gilded and massive he found the city, with its extraordinary music and the sleighs dashing along the Neva and so on, all of it leaving him “in a state of boyish wonder.” In a letter from St. Petersburg to his parents, he wrote of the city’s sights, “You can imagine what an effect they produced upon me coming from the desolate steppes of Siberia.” (And therein resides a truth: St. Petersburg looks most like itself not when you come to it from the West, an approach that might lead you to think St. Petersburg is merely the West’s imitation; to be affected properly by St. Petersburg you must arrive from the vast East, where you have already conjured the city in your imagination over the course of four thousand desolate Siberian miles.)

By April 1868, Kennan was back in Norwalk. Since he had last been home three and a half years had gone by. Perhaps he felt strange, restored to his family and once again in his original town. He soon discovered that there really was not a lot for him to do. He tried being a traveling schoolbook salesman for a while. One career that no longer interested him was telegraphy; he had done all the sitting at a telegraph key that he wanted to. A few of the letters he had written to his family about the expedition had appeared in the
Norwalk Reflector
, and readers had praised them. Maybe writing was what he should do. At his father’s law office in the Whittlesey Building in the center of town, George worked on
Tent Life
. Back then, travelers with interesting stories to tell made their money not so much by writing as by lecturing. Starting in 1869, Kennan explored the Midwestern lecture circuit that brought speakers to cities and rural towns. He gave his first Siberia lecture to a gathering of about fifty farmers and their wives in a church in the neighboring hamlet of Monroeville, down the road from Norwalk about seven miles.

In Russia, meanwhile, dedicated young people kept trying to kill the tsar. As a teenager, Tsar Alexander II had been the most beloved Romanov ever. On a grand tour he made as tsarevitch in 1837 at the age of nineteen, the people were smitten by his handsome bearing, his dark, liquid eyes, and the aura of hope he emanated. Across the empire, even in Siberia (where no member of the Imperial family had ever been), weeping, cheering throngs ran after his carriage. Alexander assumed the throne in 1855, and in 1861, as progressive Russians had been urging (when they dared) since the reign of Catherine the Great, he ended serfdom by freeing forty-eight million serfs from their bondage to the government or private landowners. The monumental nature of this act—the American Civil War freed a mere four million slaves—led to equally big problems, mostly having to do with the redistribution of land. The land problem was, basically, never solved.

In fact, by the time of Alexander II, Russia had become such a mess, with corruption and systematic repression and avoidance of policy questions neglected for generations already, that it’s hard to see how any tsar would have known what to do. In his frustration, Alexander retreated to autocracy, believing finally that the mystical veneration of the people for their autocrat provided Russia’s foundation. As reformers saw that he wouldn’t change, and popular disappointment increased, he grew to be more hated than he had been loved.

Acts of antigovernment violence and terror soon became almost commonplace. In 1866, a young man named D. V. Karakozov fired point-blank at Alexander but missed. The American government, remembering Lincoln, sent a delegation to Russia to congratulate the tsar on his miraculous escape—but later did not repeat the gesture, due to redundancy. Other young men took shots at Alexander. In 1879, a member of the Land and Freedom Party fired five times at him; he again survived unhit. Other revolutionaries tried to derail his train. In February 1880, a conspiracy of violent radicals used inside contacts to plant a bomb in the Winter Palace in a room below a banquet hall, but unfortunately (from the conspirators’ viewpoint) the bomb exploded before the dinner it was to disrupt took place.

Finally, on March 31, 1881, a terrorist from the People’s Will movement, which was a more violent offshoot of Land and Freedom, threw a bomb at the tsar’s carriage as it went along a street in St. Petersburg. The
bomb killed some bystanders and Cossack guards but did not injure the tsar. Alexander, who by now was probably getting tired of this, stepped down from his damaged carriage to see how his coachman was. When he did, a Polish student named Grinevitsky, an accomplice of the first bomber, emerged from the crowd, threw another bomb, and blew the tsar apart.

His successor, Alexander III, responded as one would expect, by making the government far more repressive than it had been already. No one ever accused Alexander III of seeking popularity; all notion of reform was set aside, and emergency rule was declared in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other places, suspending if necessary civil liberties and the courts. That edict would remain in force until the upheaval of 1917. Under the new regime, arrests went way up, especially of young people who might conceivably be revolutionaries. Police pulled them in for plotting assassinations, for being present at meetings where authors such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer were discussed, and for offenses in between. Many ended up in Siberia under long sentences of prison labor or administrative exile.

Tent Life in Siberia
remained in print during these years. It did well with critics and the public and even received some favorable notice in Russia. The book, and Kennan’s widening recognition as a lecturer, put him at the top of American experts on Russia, the Arctic, and Siberia—admittedly not a crowded category at the time. In his thirties he made more trips to Russia (though not, then, to Siberia) and wrote articles for newspapers and magazines. But the Russia beat did not provide him with steady income, and so, like his father, he tried various jobs. His brother John had a bank in Medina, New York, and Kennan worked there. He then got a position in the legal department of the Mutual Life Insurance Company in New York City. He had married in 1879 but he and his wife had no children. Other members of his family kept needing money, though, and he helped them. Abruptly leaving Mutual Life and New York, he took a job with the Associated Press in Washington, D.C.; there he found himself suited to daily journalism and he stayed with the AP for more than ten years.

As America was recovering from the Civil War, it seemed unusually disposed to daydream about places far away. In 1879, James Gordon Bennett of
The New York Herald
, the same man who had sent Henry
Stanley to Africa in search of Dr. Livingstone, sponsored a voyage of a ship called the
Jeannette
to find the North Pole. Unlike Stanley, the
Jeannette
failed in her objective; she became frozen in sea ice north of the Siberian coast, drifted, broke up, and lost most of her men. A few survivors landed at the delta of the Lena River in 1881, from which after further hardship they eventually reached civilization and returned home. Continuing coverage of the fate of the
Jeannette
kept the idea of Siberia prominent in people’s minds.

Newspapers regularly called on Kennan for advice and commentary when questions came up about Russia. Often he was asked about the Nihilists, a disturbing new phenomenon that sent half-pleasurable tremors down America’s spine. The tone of Kennan’s public discourse in those years was fully confident and scornful of any criticism of the Russian government. In his opinion, reports of the government’s incompetence, and of its cruelty to Siberian prisoners and exiles, were worse than misinformed. In the early 1880s, he fought several battles in the editorial columns over these questions.

Because he thought a second book about Siberia would make the money he needed for his own financial security and that of his family, and because he believed that in Siberia he could talk to the frightening, fascinating Nihilists more easily than in Moscow or St. Petersburg, and because he wanted to see for himself how the Russians treated their exiles and prisoners, Kennan decided in 1884 to make an extended investigative tour. The
Century
magazine, circulation two hundred thousand, offered a contract of $6,000 for the articles he would write. His public championing of the Russian government meant that he had no trouble obtaining its official permission and letters of bona fides for the journey. He made a trip to St. Petersburg in early 1885 to set things up, came back, and in May set out again in the company of a traveling partner, George A. Frost, of Massachusetts, an artist who would do the illustrations of their journey. He had met Frost years ago on the telegraph expedition.

Kennan’s first Siberian trip had been hard, but this one seriously challenged his health and shattered his nerves. Later he called it “the hardest journey and the most trying experience of my life.” He and Frost covered eight thousand miles of Siberia visiting prisons, talking to prison officials, observing prisoners on the march or in transport barges or in the barracks or at work. The good credentials Kennan had been able to
obtain from the government forestalled most interference from local officials and gave him a chance to visit political exiles of all kinds. Sometimes he and Frost traveled on the main road, the Siberian Trakt, and sometimes far off it, to places one could not reach today without helicopter assistance. They suffered from cold, lack of sleep, jolting of the wagons, poor food, and bugs. For almost four months, Kennan had bugs on his body or in his clothes. In the trans-Baikal city of Selenginsk, his face became so disfigured by bedbug bites that he was ashamed to go on the street.

None of these hardships wore him down as badly as did the constant exposure to human misery. He had started the journey ostensibly in sympathy with the government. A month or so into it he was wondering why a powerful country couldn’t protect itself from shy young women seminarians of whatever political stripe without exiling them to the middle of an Asiatic desert. His progovernment sympathies reversed themselves, his indignation and painful empathy grew; hearing the exiles’ tales he found himself weeping “almost for the first time since boyhood.” Into this emotional fissure, the unhinging, reason-obscuring passion for Russia inserted its crowbar end. In
Tent Life
, Kennan had kept his tone jovial and wry throughout, but in
Siberia and the Exile System
, the book he wrote about this journey, strong feelings began to show, for example when he said of his meeting with the revolutionary (and terrorist) Katarina Breshkovskaya, “All my standards of courage, of fortitude, and of heroic self-sacrifice have been raised for all time, and raised by the hand of a woman.”

Toward the end of
Siberia and the Exile System
, Kennan calls the revolutionaries he met in Siberia “the flower of Russian young manhood and young womanhood,” and goes on, “I am linked to them only by the ties of sympathy, humanity, or friendship; but I wish that I were bound to them by the tie of kindred blood. I should be proud of them if they were my brothers and sisters, and so long as any of them live they may count upon me for any service that a brother can render.”

Alongside his emotional involvement and growing fervor, Kennan kept his eye for Russian detail. He noticed the peddlers selling “strings of dried mushrooms, and cotton handkerchiefs stamped with railroad maps of Russia,” and the outlandish colors the people loved (houses painted metallic green, shirts of violet and blue and crimson and purple and pink,
gowns of lemon yellow, brightly colored fences even in graveyards), and the chained parties of convicts with one side of their heads shaved to identify them, their chains sounding like “the continuous jingling of innumerable bunches of keys,” and the smell inside the prison barracks, a foulness so intense that the carbolic acid sprayed on him after he came out seemed like spirits of cologne by comparison, and the whitewashed wall around the barracks sleeping platform stained red by the blood of smashed bedbugs, and the glorious air of the steppes with its smell of wild honey, the carriage wheels crushing scores of flowers at every rotation.

Past Baikal, onward by horseback into untraveled places, Kennan and Frost continued to the farthest-flung exiles, finally reaching a remoteness known as the Kara mines, where prisoners and exiles in the dreariest of surroundings moiled in the silver diggings. Once when I was in Siberia and within (I thought) the vicinity of Kara, I looked it up on the map. No roads led to it; it really is the earth’s end. Kennan found a few well-educated people there, and a copy of
Punch
in prison. Among the exiles he visited was a quiet, well-spoken young woman named Nathalie Armfeldt, who lived in a small room with her mother. Nathalie Armfeldt had been a friend of Tolstoy’s, and she asked Kennan to see Tolstoy when he returned to western Russia and tell him what she was going through. Kennan promised he would. At Kara, Kennan and Frost had come to the turnaround. Kennan had been suffering for weeks with fever, and both men were weak and exhausted. From that point they retraced their steps, making their way back toward western Russia, encountering more physical and emotional trials. After much journeying, they gratefully boarded the train at its eastern terminus in the Ural city of Tyumen.