16 February 1845 year
Born in Ohio (USA) George Kennan — American journalist, author of books about Siberia and the Russian exile. An opponent of the Russian autocracy.
He dropped out of school at the age of 12. He worked as a messenger at the railway telegraph office, then as a telegraph operator.
At 20, he got a job at the Russian-American Telegraph Company to prepare the laying of a communication line from the USA to Russia - through Siberia и Alaska. Spent two years traveling around Chukotka и Kamchatka.
In one village, he was mistaken for the emperor: the local mayor read that "Yegor Kennan, telegraph operator and operator," was coming to visit and assumed the "operator" was a close relative of the emperor. The American was greeted like royalty, with a rifle salute.
It was thanks to the telegraph that I first went to Siberia; it made me a traveler, an explorer, and aroused in me an interest in Russia.
In 1867, the need for his services disappeared when a telegraph cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean floor. He returned home via Moscow and Europe. In the United States, he published a book, "Nomadic Life in Siberia."
At 25, he went to Russia again and traveled around for a year. The Volga и Caucasus.
For the next seven years, he worked as a bank and insurance clerk in the United States, but continued to dream of a career as a writer. At 33, he found a job as a correspondent for the Associated Press. At one of his public lectures, he mentioned the Siberian exiles, but tried to justify the Russian authorities' punitive policies by citing the need to combat "nihilists" and terrorists. To verify his claims, the New York magazine Century sent him to Siberia.
40-year-old Kennan traveled to Russia with a Boston artist Frost. For 16 months, he studied the systems of Siberian penal servitude and exile. He met many political prisoners. Breshko-Breshkovsky, Volkhovsky, Lazarev.
American travelers Kennan and Frost visited Minusinsk in mid-January. They were among the first travelers interested not only in dead nature, but primarily in living people.
(Siberia newspaper, 1886)
Upon returning to the United States, he published a series of articles criticizing the tsarist government and supporting Russian revolutionaries. This brought him fame: he was published in major publications and gave public lectures in the United States and Europe, appearing on stage in shackles and convict clothing.
The situation of an administrative exile becomes extremely difficult and abnormal due to its complete uncertainty. An exile is neither a free citizen living under the protection of the country's laws, nor a convicted criminal deprived of his rights. He bears all the obligations of a citizen, but does not even enjoy the rights of a criminal; he is subject to the absolute arbitrariness of administrative authority.
In Russia, Kennan's works were translated underground.
In the early 1890s, the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom was founded in Boston. Kennan himself regularly donated small sums to its periodical, Free Russia.
In 1891 his book “Siberia and the System of Exile” was published.
In 1901, 56-year-old Kennan came to Petersburg, but was soon expelled from the country.
During the Russo-Japanese War, he conducted anti-government propaganda among Russian prisoners of war in Japan. He published articles on the socio-economic problems of the Russian Empire.
He assessed the October Revolution of 1917 with sharp disapproval. He believed that the new government lacked the "knowledge, experience, and education to successfully address the enormous problems that had arisen since the overthrow of the Tsar."
The new Bolshevik constitution leaves all power where it has been for the past five years – in the hands of a group of self-appointed bureaucrats whom the people can neither remove nor control.
In 1974, in memory of Kennan, his great-nephew, diplomat and American ambassador to the USSR (also George Kennan), helped found the Kennan Institute for Russian Studies.
The Russian government exiled so-called nihilists to Siberia, calling them "failed seminarians." Such deliberate distortions deceived no one in Siberia. Siberians are knowledgeable people, and they immediately realized that the right people would be found not among the official representatives of the crown, but among these very same "failed" ones.
