Never the Twain Shall Meet?

Between the US Civil War and 1888, there was a golden era of good feeling between the US and Russia. Americans largely saw Russia as an ally (its neutrality aided the North during the Civil War), albeit a backward one led by a benevolent tsar.

But that year the mood in the US began to change when Century Magazine began publishing a series of essays by George Kennan (cousin and namesake for the twentieth century diplomat who coined the notion of “containment”). Kennan’s stories, based on ten months of travel across Russia in 1885-1886, were investigations and observations of prison life in Siberia. So horrific were the stories that they inflamed public opinion against Russia (where, in 1881, the “benevolent” Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated) in a way only superseded by Kennan’s subsequent book (Siberia and the Exile System), and his national speaking tour.

“No one critic,” wrote the historian Thomas A. Bailey, “did more to rip away the veil of fancy from Russian despotism… than George Kennan. No one person did more to cause the people of the United States to turn against their presumed benefactor of yesteryear.”

Mark Twain, who had visited Russia in 1867 and addressed the tsar in Crimea, attended one of Kennan’s speeches in 1888. Reportedly, he was so moved he wept. It turned Twain into an avid Russophobe, and an advocate of violent revolution in the country. In 1906, he described Russia in vivid and memorable terms:

Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery, and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long enough in Russia, I should think. And it is to be hoped that the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end to it and set up the republic in its place. Some of us, even the white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven.

Twain did not live to see the Bolshevik Revolution that ushered in an even more inhumane government. But he did live to see his daughter Clara marry Osip Gabrilowitsch, a Russia-born concert pianist and conductor who emigrated to the US.

What is the point of this history lesson? Well, there are two: First, the battle for Russia’s future is not new, and it won’t be won easily. For proof, read the “last words” of Ilya Yashin on page 11, and compare them with Twain’s summary of 117 years ago. Second, people and a nation are not the same thing. You can hate a nation and what it does, but still love its people. And so we have to cling firm to the hope that Russia’s people will continue to battle for their future, finding a way to build one free of tyranny, militarism, and war.