Vagabond Life: The Caucasus Journals of George Kennan by Frith Maier; George KennanReview by: Rodric BraithwaiteThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Apr., 2004), pp. 363-364Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4213915 .

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REVIEWS 363 Maier, Frith (ed.). Vagabond Life: The Caucasus Journals of 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 lectured on his return to his native land about peoples and places of which his fellow countrymen had only the faintest idea. Although he began as an apologist for the Tsarist system, he became increasingly critical of it, and his best-known and most influential work is still Siberia and the Exile System, published in I 89 I.

The core of Vagabond Life is Kennan's journal of his adventurous journey across the mountains of the Caucasus in the second half of I 870. It starts with a description of his arrival in Scotland, his sea journey to St Petersburg, and his voyage down the Volga. In September he finally reached Petrovskoe in 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, Vladikavkaz and Grozny, until he finally left through the Georgian Black Sea port of Poti in November. For two 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 travelled more or less alone, apart from the company of guides. Of these the most picturesque was his interpreter Akhmet, a man endlessly involved in a relentless concatenation of blood feuds, which he retailed with immense gusto.

Kennan's curiosity is 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 indistinguishable from another. There is some description of local customs. But Kennan says little about the history and politics of the area he is travelling through. He fails to bring to 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 remarkable enough, but with little real explanation or even feeling for what the traveller saw. Frith Maier, 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 thinness of the journal itself by interpolating passages from articles which 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 left with an uneasy feeling that some of Kennan's more interesting thoughts and incidents reflect the benefit of hindsight.

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364 SEER, 82, 2, 2004

Maier rounds the book off with an account of the journey she herself made in I 996 in Kennan's footsteps in order to make a film of his trip. Alas, she was not able to reproduce his travels in Chechnya: it is now too dangerous for the foreign traveller.

The book is well-produced and a pleasure to handle. There are some adequate maps. Kennan seems to have taken no photographs, but he was able to buy some on the spot, and these have been supplemented by photos taken by the editor. The photos and some reproductions of contemporary prints are rather smudgily reproduced. But the book contains a number of delightful drawings taken from a collection of essays published in I904 by Evgeni Markov about the life, landscape and history of the Caucasus.

London RODRIc BRAITHWAITE

Zuckerman, Fredric S. 7he Tsarist Secret Police Abroad. Policing Europe in a Modernising World. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York, 2003. xix + 277 pp. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. C5o.oo.

THIs book covers a fascinating and somewhat neglected subject with uncanny contemporary relevance. However, its appearance should not dissuade researchers from publishing on this topic in the future, as it is an incomplete study of the tsarist secret police (the Okhrana or okhranka) abroad. The first three chapters summarize the concurrent development of security policing and the Russian political emigration in France, Italy, Britain and Germany before the Great War. The aim, Fredric Zuckerman writes, is to provide insight into 'Russia's place in Europe' (p. xv). His writing here, and throughout the book, is well organized and accessible. However, it is based on a narrow selection of secondary sources and ignores the police institutions in Imperial Russia's closest contemporary European state, Austria-Hungary. Con- sequently, Zuckerman's observations are often either too vague to be of any use -'Russia was part of Europe and yet it was not' (p. 2 I 6) or prone to unsupported generalizations and exaggeration for example, he asserts that tsarist spies 'flooded' into Zurich (p. 35) and 'seemed to be swarming' (p. 43) around London, while 'politically inspired terror spread panic across Europe' (p. 2 I 3), and '[t]he general public itself never knew when an innocent trip to a cafe or restaurant would end in tragedy as bombers became more daring and less discriminating [. . .] Bloodthirsty "Anarchists" appeared to be everywhere' (p. 5). An examination of European public opinion regarding terror and the Okhrana at the time would have been useful in this context. There is not enough relevant research here to support his frequent references to Interpol, 9/ I I and all that. Nor has enough been done to balance the exploration of counter-terrorism with a discussion of the broader counter-revolutionary role of the Okhrana abroad, which might have highlighted some of the differences between European security police organs.

The next three chapters focus on the development of the Paris Embassy- based Foreign Agency of the tsarist secret police from its foundation in I 883 to its closure in I917, followed by four chapters on the six successive tsarist spymasters in Paris and then a chapter on the struggle against the

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