Post by Deleted on Jan 24, 2017 16:00:38 GMT
In 1864, young Ohioan George Kennan joined a crew of explorers scouting a possible telegraph route from the Bering Strait across Siberia to Europe as an alternative to a cable across the Atlantic.
After Kennan spent two years surveying frigid wilderness and encountering myriad indigenous peoples, the planned telegraph was abandoned with the completion of the Atlantic cable.
A devastated Kennan returned to the US with nothing but his diaries, which he adapted into a popular book, Tent Life in Siberia, and a successful lecture series.
He returned to Russia in 1870, sailing from St. Petersburg down the Volga to the Caspian Sea and roaming the highlands of the Caucasus, meeting Georgians, Armenians and dozens of ethnic groups.
After spending over a decade back in the US as a journalist, Kennan once again returned to Russia in 1885, heading east from St. Petersburg and exploring the Altai Mountains on the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, all the way through Siberia to the gold mines along the Kara River.
In addition to recording the atrocious conditions of prisons and labor camps in Siberia (which would later get him expelled by the government), Kennan collected hundreds of cartes de visites — picture postcards which displayed the vast diversity of the emperor's subjects, from urban bureaucrats to recently-emancipated serfs to religious leaders and soldiers on the periphery of the sprawling empire.
Much more here, including tons of pictures
