Non-fiction Review: Into Siberia, by Gregory J. Wallance
I owe the author and publisher of Into Siberia an apology, as I apparently got this book through NetGalley, not from the library as I assumed by the time I got around to reading it. So I'm overdue with the review.
Title: Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia
Author: Gregory J. Wallance
Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2023. 304 pages.
Source: Netgalley ARC
Publisher's Blurb:
In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed
between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George
Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his
eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress
dissent.
Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles,
mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs or on horseback. He endured
suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His
interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on
the fuel of inflicted pain and fear. Prisoners in the mines were
chained day and night to their wheelbarrows as punishment. Babies in
exile parties froze to death in their mothers’ arms. Kennan came to call
the exiles’ experience in Siberia a “perfect hell of misery.”
After returning to the United States, Kennan set out to generate public
outrage over the plight of the exiles, writing the renowned Siberia and the Exile System.
He then went on a nine-year lecture tour to describe the suffering of
the Siberian exiles, intensifying the newly emerging diplomatic
conflicts between the two countries which last to this day.
My Review:
This book was a fascinating view into a bit of history I knew little about. My regular readers will know that I love that stuff.
The book tracks Kennan's visits to Siberia, first in 1865 with the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, an ambitious project to connect the Americas with Europe via Siberia and Russia (spoiler alert: didn't happen). That was when the young man discovered his love of Siberia--and a fondness for wilderness travel, through which he may have finally put to rest his inner doubts that he had courage.
At that time, the US was on the best of terms with Russia, and Kennan, like (most of)the rest of the world, believed that the Siberian exile system was both humane and effective. When he returned to Russia in 1885, it was with the intention of researching the system in order to demonstrate to the world that it was better than the US prison system (an admittedly low bar).
Probably what I most admire about Kennan is that though he left the US with his mind made up and his opinions already set, when he got to Siberia and began to uncover the horrors and inhumanity, and the one-way nature of the system--for wives and children as well as convicts--he was able to change his mind. He became, by the end of his trip, the loudest voice calling for the end of the system, especially perhaps as it was used against political prisoners. All prisoners were condemned not just to exile, but to a specified number of years of hard labor--a sentence which began only after they reached their destination, which could take years of walking, usually in chains. The mortality rate was appalling. When the sentence was up, they might be free--to remain in Siberia and continue to labor for a pittance.
One of the features of the system that Kennan had originally thought was humane, that it permitted families to go with convicted husbands and fathers, proved to be, in reality, one of the most horrific. The women who went labored, starved, and died often with little contact with their men but in equally inadequate prison quarters. And they were too often forced to prostitute themselves to the guards in order to survive at all.
In addition to the grim accounting of what Kennan learned, Wallance's book also tells of Kennan's own trip into Siberia, which might be called Adventure Travel, of the extreme sort which meant discomfort, privation, and repeated near-death experiences. Kennan thrived on it, and he was in love with the land, despite the horrific things he saw there.
When he returned to the US, Kennan went on speaking tours and campaigns against the exile system, calling loudly enough for change that he was eventually banned from entering Russia. The fallout of Kennan's discoveries--and his campaign--are felt to this day, in our nation's difficult relations with Russia (I'm not sure any of it made any difference to the exile system). This book makes a lot of things clear to me, some more clear than I might have wanted them.
My Recommendation:
This isn't reading for the faint of heart, but I definitely learned a lot from reading it!
Yikes-- apparently, brutality didn't start with the Soviets.
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