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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
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Book Review,
This review is from: George Kennan and the American-Russian Relationship, 1865-1924 (Hardcover)
The Atlantic February, 1991
We think of them as relatively new situations: Russia shaken from autocratic isolation by new forms of communications; the spread of concern for human rights and constitutional rule from West to East; America's efforts to maintain good relations with autocratic rulers while helping democratic protesters. Yet these are precisely the issues that defined the career of the first American Russia expert, George Kennan, a century ago. M ore than any other single American, this first cousin twice removed of our own era's George F. Kennan "discovered" and described Russia for America during the more than half a century between the American and Russian civil wars. Kennan was a child of the new communications revolution, first visiting Siberia as part of an ill-fated telegraphic expedition, then making Russia the subject of one of the great lecturing careers of the late nineteenth century and one of the great journalistic careers of the early twentieth. Having discovered Siberia as an adventuresome frontiersman trying to forge a European-American cable connection the long way, across the Bering Strait, Kennan returned to expose the czarist prisons of Siberia and to become perhaps the leading champion in the Western world of democratic revolutionary resistance to the czarist authorities. As such, he struggled against a well-established official American policy of friendship for that particular autocracy. He mobilized American popular opinion in behalf of Russia's suppressed political opposition, and eventually helped change U.S. government policy as well. IT IS A GREAT strength of this extensively researched new biography by Frederick Travis that we discover how little Kennan really studied Russia, how many mistakes (including deliberate ones) he introduced into his journalism, and yet how little challenged his authority remained within the United States. This was an age when America was absorbed in its own interests and inclined to read foreign countries, if at all, in terms of its own institutions and aspirations. Until the early twentieth century the study of Russia was almost totally absent from universities, and serious literature on Russia almost totally absent from libraries. Dilettantism could triumph if accompanied by the kind of arrogant tenacity and rhetorical panache that Kennan possessed. He presented a picture of Russia that was more a projection of characteristic American hopes, fears, and fantasies in an era of exuberant self-confidence than the product of had-earned knowledge. His authority was, however, based on firsthand observations, though they were largely focused on the exotic. Kennan first arrived in Russia in 1865, and only after spending two winters in hitherto largely unknown parts of Siberia (later described in his first major book, Tent Life in Siberia) did Kennan visit Moscow and St. Petersburg. On his second trip he passed rapidly through Petersburg in order to reach the Caucasus, describing himself as "a vagabond ... who travels without any definite utilitarian aim ... the vagabond is never a spcialist ... he is ready to become all things with all men and to make himself equally at home in all places." His early travels in Russia were thus a kind of romantic Wanderjahre for a young midwestern Calvinist who was losing both his boyhood religious faith and his adolescent enthusiasm for scientific and technical expeditions. But he developed what grew into a lifelong fascination with the Russian people. There was, initially, no political or social content to his interest, although he generally shared the vague Russophilia in some circles that followed Russian support for the Union in the Civil War and the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s Kennan defended Russian policy even when it proved expansionist, first in the Balkans and then in Central Asia, and he also tried to propagate the glories of Russian literature. His ten-month-long trip to Siberia in 1885 and 1886 turned him from a defender of official Russia into a self-appointed spokesman for the political exiles and prisoners that he discovered there. Romantic infatuation was part of it all, as Kennan himself acknowledged: "With many of them I simply fall dead in love as if I were a girl of eighteen." But he was also moved by the moral purity of the exiles--their continued intellectual earnestness under difficult conditions and their combination of inner dignity and outward affection for this mysterious visitor from distant America. Kennan was particularly impressed by Catherine Breshkovsky, the populist "little grandmother of the Russian Revolution." She bade him farewell in the small Transbaikal village to which she was confined by saying, "We may die in exile, and our grand children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last." One of the Russians explained that until they had met Kennan, "we had been talking either to acknowledged friends or to prejudiced enemies, but never to an impartial observer, who would take on himself to bring the case before the tribunal of universal conscience." Kennan devoted much of the next twenty years to pressing their cause, mainly from the lecture platform. He lectured before about a million people in the course of the 1890s, inspiring in one of them a "curious craving to see this gaunt land of Siberia and let my own eyes gaze on the starved wretches sent to a living death." Victorians loved to feel both superior to and shocked by distant outrages like those Kennan recounted. A taunt thrown at Victorian liberals--they "cross equinoxial lines in search of objects of charity"--brings to mind the "radical chic" of more recent times: North Americans incensed by events in Southeast Asia, South America, or South Africa. Travis astutely observes that Kennan "saw in the political exiles the same heroic spirit that had attracted him to Caucasian mountaineers, wandering Koriaks in northeastern Siberia, and reforming drunkards on New York's Water Street." It was something like the spirit that another great journalist, John Reed, later sought first in the Wobblies, then in Mexican revolutionaries, and finally in the Bolsheviks about whom he fantasized so appealingly in Ten Days That Shook the World. BUT KENNAN'S infatuation with Russia was informed by a sterner moral purpose, which Travis describes as a sense that Kennan was always on the side of civilization against barbarism. His long campaign in behalf of political prisoners was expanded to include persecuted minorities in the Russian empire--particularly the Jews--and the Japanese, who warred with the Russians in 1904-1905. He helped in a fascinating, little-known campaign to educate and politically mobilize Russian prisoners of war in Japan. And he attached great hopes to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and even greater to the democratic revolution of February, 1917. Kennan was a perceptive analyst of the practical need for democratic and constitutional reform. He was particularly distressed by the czarist repression of student activity after the upheavals of 1905. "A university is a barometer which shows the state of the public mind," Kennan quoted a Russian surgeon as saying. "A wise man does not break the instrument, but learns from it what the weather is likely to be." He accused the czars of breaking the barometers rather than read them. He saw that all russian involvement in modern wars concluded with a period of reform or revolution--in effect, "a recompense for their sacrifices and losses." All the more bitter, then, was the Bolshevik betrayal of a revolution that Kennan had encouraged in its democratic phase. Unlike John Reed, Kennan vehemently rejected the October Revolution, both because of the Bolsheviks' renunciation of the Allied cause in the war and because the Soviet government lacked the "knowledge, experience, or education to deal successfully with the tremendous problems that have come up for solutions since the overthrow of the Tsar." Kennan criticized Woodrow Wilson for being much too timid in intervening against Bolshevik power, and persisted longer than most Americans in the belief that the Siberians would hold out against the Bolsheviks, because they were a "bolder and more independent people than the Muzhiks of European Russia." Travis tends to be rather condemnatory both of Kennan's extreme opposition to the Bolshevik takeover and of his insistence on the moral obligation to defend the provisional government. Kennan's last epitaph on the Bolshevik Revolution was written in a small-town newspaper, the Medina Tribune, in July of 1923: The Russian leopard has not changed its spots... The new Bolshevik constitution ... leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years--in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control. He died not long after Lenin did, having just finished an article on Japanese education--finding more hope for the future in Japan than in Russia. ONE IS RELIEVED that Travis's biography does not include the kind of psychological probing or moralistic preaching that has too often been directed at Victorian figures, though his tendency to make this account an exhaustive inventory of Kennan's acquaintances and views results in a certain blandness. Kennan's larger-than-life and even heroic qualities--his physical endurance on Siberian trips and on lecture tours, the majesty of his moralism--never quite come across. But Travis perceptively identifies Kennan's flaws. There was more than a little blindness in the man. He was sympathetic chiefly to political prisoners, who represented a minute fraction of those in Russia's vast penal and exile system. As far as we know, he never visited any prison outside... Read more ›
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