Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia

"Kennan went into Siberia twice. The first time was in 1865 when, as a member of a Western Union–backed venture called the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, he explored a route for a telegraph line through the subzero wilderness of northeastern Siberia. It was a classic young man’s adventure filled with challenges and hardships and driven by Kennan’s quest to prove his courage. Twenty years later he returned to Siberia with George Frost to investigate the exile system and found himself on a moral journey. By then he had become one of America’s most prominent defenders of Russia and its centuries-old practice of banishing criminals and political dissidents to Siberia. Kennan, who spoke Russian fluently and was regarded as a leading expert on Russia, believed that a thorough, objective investigation would vindicate his contention that the exile system, while hardly without flaws, was more humane than penal systems in European countries. He also hoped that his articles about the Siberian exile system would make him rich and famous."

"...Ghosts of convicted criminals haunted the clearing in the forest. In an earlier era, the convicts, bearded and gaunt after months of marching from European Russia, had been allowed by their guards a brief stop at the pillar.
Some kissed the European side of the pillar while others pressed their tearsoaked faces to it. Convicts collapsed to their knees and buried their faces in the earth. Some hugged each other or dug up handfuls of dirt to take with them. A few scraped their names or inscriptions on the pillar. “Farewell life!” The exile convoy commander shouted an order to form ranks. With a clinking of their chains and shackles, the convicts assembled, crossed themselves, and resumed their march to the east.
Of those who survived to reach their Siberian destinations, few managed to return to Mother Russia after their sentences ended, which is why convicts wept at the pillar. A few years before Kennan’s investigation, the Russian government had completed a railroad line that transported convicts across European Russia and over the Ural Mountains, apparently without stopping at the boundary pillar. But since the Russian rail network did not yet penetrate far into Siberia, the convicts still had to march thousands of miles from the railhead to Siberian prisons, mines, and factories. Like their predecessors at the boundary pillar, few saw their homes again..."

"The Siberian exile system was not planned to be loathsome and vile. For much of its existence, little planning went into it. The system was the product of imperial ambitions, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and inadequate funding; Siberia’s vast size and harsh terrain and climate; and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering. Centuries of grotesque penal evolution had spawned disease-ridden prisons, exile parties driven like cattle, virtual enslavement, and lunacies like the punishment of the Bell of Uglich. Other countries have exiled their criminals, but none on the scale of the Russian exile system. Between the 1780s and 1860s, the British transported about one hundred and sixty thousand convicts to Australia. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the French overseas penal population was between five and six thousand.
Russia stands out because between 1801 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the tsarist regime exiled more than a million of its subjects to far flung destinations within its own vast borders, creating what has been called “an enormous prison without a roof.”
As Siberia’s vast natural resources became apparent, the regime began employing the penal code as a tool for supplying Siberia with a labor force because too few Russians would go voluntarily. The offenses punishable by Siberian exile grew to include not just common-law crimes but political offenses, religious dissent, army desertion, and vagrancy. In 1753, the death penalty was formally abolished, and instead of being hanged, capital offenders underwent a public mutilation followed by “eternal penal labour” in Siberia. The death penalty would reclaim a place in the Russian judicial system in the nineteenth century, most notably in cases involving assassination plots against tsars.
Abolition of the death penalty did more than free up laborers for Siberia. As historian Andrew A. Gentes points out, abolition emphasized the divine-like power of the ruling Romanovs to either execute their subjects or show them mercy:
'I could kill you, but I choose instead to spare you out of Christian mercy (milost). Therefore, although you have been flogged nearly to death and have had your face branded and your nose cut off, you should be grateful that you have been allowed to commence a two year, three thousand mile journey in chains for the purpose of sowing grain in His Majesty’s fields near the Arctic Circle.'"

"On his return to the United States in August 1886, he became an ardent critic of the Russian autocracy and began to espouse the cause of Russian democracy. Kennan devoted much of the next twenty years to promoting the cause of a Russian revolution, mainly by lecturing. Kennan was one of the most prolific lecturers of the late 19th century. He spoke before a million or so people during the 1890s, including two hundred consecutive evening appearances during 1890–91 (excepting Sundays) before crowds of as many as 2000 people. His reports on conditions in Siberia were published serially by Century Magazine, and in 1891, he published a two-volume book Siberia and The Exile System. It, with first-hand interviews, data, and drawings by the artist George Albert Frost, had an influential effect on American public opinion."

"...Breshkovsky’s powerful imagery of sacrifice and suffering at the hands of a brutal regime that was succeeded by an even more brutal regime created what one historian called a “sturdy narrative bridge” between the Siberian exile system and the gulag system under Stalin. After taking power, the communist regime began converting parts of the Siberian exile system’s infrastructure into what eventually became known as the Gulag Archipelago, a forced labor camp system whose scale and lethality far exceeded anything Kennan had witnessed in his 1885–86 investigation. In the mid-1930s, Stalin launched the Great Terror whose countless victims included more than a hundred members of the Russian Society of Former Political Penal Laborers, which had been formed by the now elderly revolutionaries who had fought to overthrow the tsar. They had survived hard labor in Siberia only to be executed by Stalin. Today, the Russian penal system and its nearly seven hundred penitentiaries have features that can be traced to the Siberian exile system. These include use of penal colonies with large inmate barracks, convict organizations that resemble the brutal artels that Kennan found in the tsarist-era Siberian exile parties and prisons, and the state’s use of the judicial and penal system to silence and punish its political opponents.
George Kennan grasped the nature of the new regime, unlike some of his fellow journalists. Lincoln Steffens, a prominent investigative reporter, after returning from a visit to the Soviet Union in 1919, famously proclaimed that “I have seen the future, and it works.” By contrast, when the communist government enacted a “constitution” for the newly formed USSR in 1923, Kennan observed that the constitution left power in a small group of self-appointed rulers without accountability to the Russian people, where it had always been since the Bolshevik takeover. With a hint of bitter realism, he warned, “But let no one be deceived. The Russian leopard has not changed its spots.”