The book is too short and it needs more maps. But WOW it is super.

George Kennan and his friend, illustrator George Frost traveled to Siberia in 1885 to document the Siberian exile system that the tsars and the Russian state used to rid themselves of troublemakers and to exploit the mineral wealth of the region.

This book is a modern retelling of that trip, which was originally published in 29 magazine articles between 1886 and 1891 and collected in 1891 into a ~1000 page book. It is also a short biography of George Kennan, an extraordinary man, even given the heroic standards of adventurers of that era.

Kennan and Frost suffered horrifically on their trip: terrible cold, unsprung and dangerous transport, bad food, disease, and vermin. The brutal treatment and extreme privation suffered by the exiles and their wives and children weighed on the spirits and even the sanity of the two men. Frost almost didn't make it home.

Anyone who reads Russian history or about 19th century adventurers will enjoy this book. ( )

Russian enthusiast George Kennan traveled to Siberia in 1885 to explore the Siberian exile system. Expecting to find a humane and advanced imprisonment system, he saw the brutality, senselessness, and inhumanity of the system. After returning home to the US, he began to speak out against Russia, changing the landscape of American-Russian relations forever.

George Kennan was an interesting explorer and humanitarian. It was exciting to read about his life and travels. I was particularly interested in reading about Siberia, as I knew very little about the exile system before picking up this book. What a horror! The author did an excellent job weaving history into a story. Overall, highly recommended. ( )

The Publisher Says: In a book that ranks with the greatest adventure stories, Gregory Wallance’s Into Siberia is a thrilling work of history about one man’s harrowing journey and the light it shone on some of history’s most heinous human rights abuses.

In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress dissent.

Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear. Prisoners in the mines were chained day and night to their wheelbarrows as punishment. Babies in exile parties 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 set out to generate public outrage over the plight of the exiles, writing the renowned Siberia and the Exile System. He then went on a nine-year lecture tour to describe the suffering of the Siberian exiles, intensifying the newly emerging diplomatic conflicts between the two countries which last to this day.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Russia always seems to have vicious, cruel, authoritarian governments. George Kennan documented the horrifying repressions of the tsarist regime of Alexander III, father of the ill-fated Nicholas II. The adventurous man whose trip through Siberia Author Wallance is epitomizing first went to Siberia, governed by our then-close ally Russia, to lay a telegraph line across the country beginning in 1864 and eventually have it reach Western Europe. There was an Atlantic cable to England, but the Atlantic has these terrible, damaging things called "hurricanes" every so often, and then there's that big line of volcanoes up the middle of it that periodically erupts here and there...think Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull, 2010...so it has always made sense to have a backup.

Kennan spent a couple years doing the work, and was in love with Siberia by the end of it. The US and Russia, after a long period of close ties that peaked after we bought Alaska from them in 1867, began getting terrible reports about the political prisoners being abused in Siberian prisons. Kennan, by now a professional journalist, was widely thought to be the best possible person to investigate the situation on behalf of the US. He was vocal in his love for Siberia. He said publicly that he felt the complaints of terrible conditions were unlikely to be true...prisoners' families could join them there, after all!

Kennan and artist George Albert Frost traveled through the tsarist penal system, documenting conditions as they found them. Kennan wrote an eleven hundred-page exposé of the horrors they witnessed; Frost's drawings and photographs were included. Frost himself suffered a breakdown—what we would call today PTSD—and really was never quite the same again.

Kennan never lost his love for Siberia and its people but he became an implacable detractor of the Imperial Russian government. He had the evidence to back his outrage and disgust up. He devoted his next decade to a lecture tour enlightening audiences to the facts of what was euphemistically called "the Exile System" of political repression. When, decades later, the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, Kennan famously said that "the Russian leopard has not changed his spots."

I read this fascinating history of events I'd had only a passing awareness of in the context of Kennan's report to Woodrow Wilson about the Bolsheviks and his subsequent criticism of the Wilson Administration's pusillanimous response to them. His 1885 trip was touched on, but I now know why he was tasked by Wilson with preparing the ignored report. This book, not at all a long read, brings the full awfulness of Kennan and Frost's experiences to life. It is nothing short of gut-wrenching at times. It is extremely carefully footnoted and supplied with an admirable bibliography. I believe Author Wallance has done everything except invent time travel to bring us the best report of the facts possible. His contextualization was emotionally honest, but not of the sort that leads me to mutter, "don't try so hard."

I recommend it highly...but with the warning that delicate fleurs who don't enjoy details of physical cruelty should pass right by. I did, to be honest, feel as though these facts were rather more abundant than was strictly necessary. I had a half-star knocked off for feeling like I was being knocked in the teeth. As Frost's art exists, I wanted to see it, or some of the photos, just to see the realities behind the descriptions of the place itself, though not the abuses!

Not always an easy read, but a wonderfully immersive and interesting historical light on a country whose past binds it to the US. ( )

Very compelling. Well-researched and well-written, giving detailed, in-depth accounts of late 1800s researcher/journalist George Kennan's early life, his travels throughout Russia and his realization that conditions in the prison camps in Siberia were so much worse than his naïve mind could ever have imagined. Once his eyes were opened he was determined to reveal the truth whatever the cost. What follows in fascinating, even if it is very difficult to read about the brutal cruelty inflicted on the prisoners. Kennan sometimes seems like a bit of an odd duck but this only adds to the allure of this book. He is dedicated and single-minded, and his strength, endurance – and stubbornness – are amazing. This is not a book to be rushed through. I had to take a break now and again because it is heartbreaking and overwhelming at times, but well worth the read. Informative and thought-provoking.

Thanks to St. Martin’s Publishing Group for providing an advance copy of Into Siberia via NetGalley. I voluntarily leave this review; all opinions are my own. ( )

George Kennan was an America who romanticized Russia. In the late 19th c, Russia was considered an American ally. He had made one trip across Siberia as part of a team searching for a route for a telegraph service that would cross to America. A decade later, he wanted to return and study Russia’s prison system in Siberia, convinced that it was a more ideal solution than the American prison system. The families could go to Siberia with the men, and that seemed humane.

The journey was grueling, the hardships of travel rigorous. Kennan and his artist Frost spent days without sleep, plagued by bedbugs or tossed around in carriages traversing primitive roads. They crossed through Arctic cold and sandy deserts.

What they saw was disturbing. The overcrowded, stinking prisoner housing, the brutal work conditions. Prisoners forced to walk a thousand miles to reach the prison camps before their term even began. They heard stories of those who didn’t know why they were arrested, or who were falsely imprisoned. Women from elite families whose political actions landed them in exile.

They men returned with broken health and minds, but it didn’t stop Kennan from lecturing across the country to inform Americans about the truth. It shifted American sympathies away from Tsarist Russia.

The book is at once a travelogue, an adventure story, a biography, and the history of a cruel and unjust penal system.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. ( )