Vagabond Life: The Caucasus Journals of George Kennan by Frith Maier George Kennan (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 363 Maier, Frith (ed.). Vagabond Life: The CaucasusJournalsof George Kennan. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, and London, 2003. xvi + 266 pp. Maps. Illustrations.Notes. Appendix. Bibliography.Index. C22-95. GEORGE KENNAN (i 845-I924) was the great uncle of another George Kennan, the twentieth-century American diplomat and scholar. The older George, too, was something of an expert on Russia. He travelled extensively in Siberia and the Caucasus, learned the language, took innumerable notes, and lecturedon his returnto his nativeland aboutpeoples andplaces of which his fellow countrymen had only the faintest idea. Although he began as an apologist for the Tsarist system, he became increasinglycritical of it, and his best-known and most influential work is still Siberiaand the Exile System, published in I89I. The core of Vagabond Lifeis Kennan's journal of his adventurousjourney acrossthe mountains of the Caucasusin the second half of I870. It startswith a description of his arrivalin Scotland, his seajourney to St Petersburg,and his voyage down the Volga. In September he finally reached Petrovskoein Daghestan, the port on the Caspian Sea now known as Makhachkala.From there he criss-crossed the mountains of Chechnya and Daghestan on horseback, down through Tibilisi, Vladikavkazand Grozny, until he finally left through the Georgian BlackSea port of Poti in November. Fortwo weeks he travelled in company with a Georgian nobleman, Prince Djordjadze, in whose house in the mountains he briefly stayed. But much of the time he travelledmore or less alone, apart from the company of guides. Of these the most picturesque was his interpreterAkhmet, a man endlessly involved in a relentlessconcatenation of blood feuds,which he retailedwith immense gusto. Kennan's curiosityis unquenchable, his eye for detail remarkable,and he reports what he sees in language both vivid and colourful. But after a while the story begins to pall. One wild mountain scene merges into the next. One minutely described ethnic costume is almost indistinguishablefrom another. There is some description of local customs. But Kennan says little about the historyand politicsof the area he is travellingthrough. He failsto bringto life, as the best travel writers do, the people whom he meets. Even Prince Djordjadze is left uncharacterized;even Akhmet is less a real person than a symbol of the perfect savage. So that what one is left with is, as it were, an album of snapshots of a journey remarkableenough, but with littlerealexplanationor even feeling for what the travellersaw. FrithMaier, the editor, has done a good job of going through Kennan's massive archive in the Library of Congress in order to clarify the background to his life and his travels. And she has tried to compensate for the thinnessof thejournal itselfby interpolatingpassagesfrom articleswhich Kennan wrote in later life. There are problems with that. It is not always entirely clear where the journal ends and where the subsequent writings begin. Incidents and people -such as Akhmet and the Russian Captain Cherkasov sometimes appear twice in apparently identical circumstances.One is leftwith an uneasyfeeling that some of Kennan's more interestingthoughts and incidents reflectthe benefitof hindsight. 364 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 Maier rounds the book offwith an account of thejourney she herselfmade in I996 in Kennan's footstepsin orderto make a film of his trip.Alas, shewas not able to reproduce his travelsin Chechnya: it is now too dangerousfor the foreigntraveller. The book is well-produced and a pleasure to handle. There are some adequate maps. Kennan seemsto have takenno photographs,but he was able to buy some on the spot, and these have been supplementedby photos taken by the editor. The photos and some reproductionsof contemporaryprintsare rather smudgily reproduced. But the book contains a number of delightful drawings taken from a collection of essays published in I904 by Evgeni Markovabout the life, landscape and historyof the Caucasus. London RODRIc BRAITHWAITE Zuckerman, Fredric S. 7he TsaristSecretPoliceAbroad.PolicingEuropein a ModernisingWorld. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York, 2003. xix + 277 pp. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography.Index. C5o.oo. THIs book covers a fascinatingand somewhat neglected subjectwith uncanny contemporary relevance. However, its appearance should not dissuade researchersfrom publishing on this topic in the future, as it is an incomplete study of the tsarist secret police (the Okhrana or okhranka) abroad. The...