by Frazier
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 k
ept 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.
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 fr
om 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.”