Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia

by Gregory J. Wallance

Here was a world all its own, unlike anything else; here were laws unto themselves, ways of dressing unto themselves, manners and customs unto themselves, a house of the living dead … —Notes from the House of the Dead (Notes from the Dead House), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s semiautobiographical account of the four years he spent in a prison fort in the Siberian town of Omsk1