Two Centuries of Discovering Russia: Six Heroes of American Journalism

"The story of my generation was Russia, the Soviet Union," said Murray Seeger at a Kennan Institute talk on October 2, 2006. Seeger, an author and former Moscow Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times, discussed his new book Discovering Russia: 200 Years of American Journalism.

In the course of his research, Seeger said he was surprised at how much reporting had been done by Americans in Russia prior to the Revolution. Writing this book was one way he felt he could bring these names to light once more. One of the earliest Americans to write about Russia was a 14-year-old John Quincy Adams, who served as an interpreter on an American mission to Russia in 1781-82. John Ledyard, who was one of the first Americans to travel to and report on Russia, was possibly the first to be accused of spying when he was expelled by Catherine the Great.

Seeger also praised the travel reporting of George Kennan "the Elder," who described the exile system in Siberia in the late 19th century. Kennan's work built on an interest developed after his initial experience in Russia, which came when he worked for a telegraph company on a failed project to lay cable from America to Europe through Siberia.

Januarius Aloysius MacGahan covered the conquest of Khiva—the last Khanate in Central Asia—by the Russian army in the 1870s. Harold Frederic became one of the first correspondents to write about the plight of Russian Jewry in describing the Pale of Settlement in 1891.

Seeger mentioned several other journalists who were in Russia after the turn of the 20th century. Bessie Beatty was in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, which she covered more evenhandedly than other correspondents, according to Seeger. During the 1921 famine in the Soviet Union, Floyd Gibbons was the first correspondent to get into famine-ravaged areas and write about the suffering there.

Marguerite Harrison went from the Society Page at the Baltimore Sun to entering Russia on foot during the Civil War. She was expelled, and was later arrested twice more before writing two books about her experiences.

In the discussion that followed his presentation, Seeger said that developments in American journalism in Russia mirrored contemporary developments in journalism generally. The writers in his book were part of this process, and their writings influenced how Americans thought about Russia for 200 years.