The Forgotten George Kennan

There's more to the story than we learned by reading Tent Life in Siberia. Harry sends this link to "The Forgotten George Kennan". http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj02-4/maier.html. I have posted a short excerpt below. For more on Tent Life in Siberia, see the blog posts for Oct. 13 and 15.

It has been the posthumous misfortune of George Kennan (1845–1924), the American author and traveler, to share the name and even the same birthday (February 16) with his great-nephew, George Frost Kennan (born 1904), the distinguished diplomat and historian. By double misfortune, the two shared the same special association with Russia, its politics and culture, indeed the coincidence of birth helped incline the younger Kennan to take up Russian studies. As a result, few are aware that the elder and forgotten George Kennan did not simply chronicle Russian life, but became an assiduous campaigner for democracy and human rights in the tsarist realm, and that he contributed crucially to putting the issue on the American legislative agenda.

As a journalist and lecturer, Kennan reached a wide public. In the late nineteenth century, lectures served the purpose that educational television does today, and Kennan was among the most popular lecturers in the country. During the 1890– 91 season, he set the record for the most consecutive appearances—200 evenings straight, except for Sundays! These lectures drew crowds of as many as 2,000 people.

Kennan’s travels in Kamchatka and the Caucasus had left him impressed with Russian government policies, and he had subsequently publicly defended the tsar against criticism in the American press. But 14 months of research (10 months of it in Siberia, and some of the rest interviewing disaffected émigrés in London) convinced him he had been wrong about the Siberian exile system, and he now saw that the treatment of political dissenters proved the empire was rotten.

Kennan became a passionate crusader for Russian revolutionaries and a friend of émigré radicals, including Catherine Breshkovskaia, Peter Kropotkin, and the terrorist Sergei Kravchinskii (a.k.a. Stepniak), helping them raise money for their cause and assisting them personally.