Into Siberia

Starred review from October 2, 2023
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.