Faces of the Russian Empire, 1870-1886 years

• Persons of the Russian Empire, 1870-1886 years

In 1864, a young American, a native of Ohio, George Kennan joined the team of researchers who were planning an expedition to explore the possibility of laying telegraph route from the Bering Strait through Siberia to Europe as an alternative to cable across the Atlantic.

Emperor Alexander II

Faces of the Russian Empire, 1870-1886 years

Two years Kennan spent on the study of wild and cold spots, dealing with a variety of local residents, then the telegraph route lining the idea was abandoned.

Exhausted Kennan returned to the United States to no avail, except for his diary, from which later became popular book Tent Life in Siberia (camp life in Siberia) and a series of highly successful lectures.

Then he returned to Russia in 1870 and made a trip to the water from St. Petersburg down the Volga to the Caspian Sea, wandered around the mountain Caucasus, spoke to Georgians, Armenians, and dozens of other ethnic groups.

After that, having worked for over ten years as a journalist in his home country, Kennan returned to Russia in 1885, starting his journey from St. Petersburg, traveled Altai on the border with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, drove the whole of Siberia to the gold mines to the Kara river .

In addition to descriptions of the cruel conditions of the local prisons and labor camps in Siberia (which is why his government, as a result, and expelled), Kennan has collected hundreds of photo cards, gives an idea of the wide variety of living in the vast territory of the empire, and classes - ranging from urban bureaucrats to recently liberated serfs, from priests to soldiers. Highlander African-Abkhaz origin