George Kennan


Kennan, George

 

Born Feb. 16, 1845, in Norwalk, Ohio, USA; died May 10, 1924. American journalist.

Kennan made frequent trips to Russia. In 1885–86 he inspected the convict prisons and places where Russian revolutionaries were exiled in Siberia. In a two-volume work (Siberia and the Exile System, 1891; in Russian, Siberia and Exile, 1906) and lectures delivered in the USA and Great Britain he gave a true description of the intolerable conditions in which political exiles lived. His book was translated into all the European languages and made a great impression on American and European public opinion. Kennan hailed the overthrow of the Russian autocracy and spoke out against the armed intervention in Soviet Russia.