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

Book Synopsis: In a book that ranks with the greatest adventure stories, Gregory Wallance's Into Siberia is the untold story of how one man's harrowing journey exposed the barbaric Siberian exile system that sent a million Russians into a vast prison without a roof. In the late nineteenth century, a close diplomatic friendship existed between the United States and Russia. That changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia wielded to suppress dissent.

Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs or on horseback. Into Siberia offers readers an immersive experience in Kennan's journey through suffocating summer sandstorms and fierce winter blizzards. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed that Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear. Prisoners in the mines who were chained day and night to their wheelbarrows as punishment and babies who 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 generated national outrage over the plight of the exiles by writing the renowned Siberia and the Exile System and going on a nine-year lecture tour, with consequences for the US-Russia relationship that are still felt today.