From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 54-57:
The first leg, to Yakutsk, took Kennan and his companions through a wilderness of mountains and evergreen forests inhabited by the Tungus, a nomadic tribe. The Russian government paid the Tungus in tea and tobacco to set up camps at intervals between Okhotsk and Yakutsk to supply government mail carriers, and the occasional private traveler, with food and transportation. At their first stop at a camp, where wolfish-looking dogs gnawed on the severed heads of reindeer, the Tungus stocked Kennan’s sleighs with reindeer meat, replaced their dogs with reindeer, and took over as drivers. On November 16, after twenty-three days of nonstop travel, Kennan sighted columns of smoke rising from the chimneys of Yakutsk and slept that night in a Russian merchant’s house. “The sensation of lying without furs and between sheets in a civilized bed was so novel and extraordinary that I lay awake for an hour, trying experiments with that wonderful mattress.”
The Russian government had set up a remarkably well-organized transportation system that operated year-round in Siberia. Ten thousand horses, several thousand drivers, and seven thousand sleighs and horse-drawn carriages were stationed at more than three hundred and fifty post stations. Typically, post stations were the homes of local villagers who earned money by keeping and feeding the horses and furnishing lodging and food to both drivers and travelers. Unlike the American stagecoach network, the sleighs and carriages did not depart and arrive at fixed times. Depending on the season, the traveler simply bought or hired a sleigh or carriage, changed fatigued horses and drivers at the post stations, and went as slowly or rapidly as the condition of the roads and the traveler’s physical endurance allowed. Kennan planned to travel day and night.
In Yakutsk, Kennan purchased two pavoskas, partly enclosed traveling sleighs resembling a “burlap-covered baby carriage on runners.” He and Price put their luggage at the bottom of their sleigh’s passenger compartment, which had no seats, spread on top of the luggage a seven-foot-long, two-person, wolfskin sleeping bag and soft feather pillows, and stowed their food under the driver’s seat. After a farewell toast of vodka and champagne with their merchant host, Kennan, Price, and the two Russians, dressed head to foot in thick furs, climbed into their sleighs. The drivers snapped their whips, and, in clouds of snow kicked up by the three-horse teams each pulling a sleigh, they raced out of Yakutsk to the merry jingle of the large bells hung from the wooden arches suspended over the middle horses in each team. The primary purpose of a sleigh’s bell was not musical but to warn other sleighs at night or in a snowstorm of its oncoming presence. A short distance past Yakutsk, the two sleighs descended a gentle slope and turned onto the frozen Lena River, which would be their road for nearly a thousand miles.
The Lena, one of the world’s longest rivers, flows twenty-seven hundred miles north to the Arctic Ocean from its mountain pond source near Lake Baikal. Traveling upriver, the party stopped every two or three hours at post stations on the riverbanks to change horses. “Boys! Out the horses! Lively!” the drivers shouted as the sleighs pulled up to the post stations. Kennan crawled out of his warm fur bag and went into the station. He displayed a padarozhnaya, a travel pass he had purchased in Yakutsk that directed post station masters to provide his party with fresh horses and drivers and, if needed, food and lodging. The nights were clear and cold, sometimes minus forty or minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and the snow-covered ice was smooth and fast. Kennan lay in his fur bag listening to the jingling bell and watching the moonlit silhouette of the river’s forested shoreline as it flew by.
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On December 13, 1867, leaving their two Russian companions behind in Irkutsk, Kennan and Price set out in a single sleigh on the Great Siberian Post Road, a central Siberian road extending three thousand miles from the Ural Mountains to the Amur River. Their sleigh overtook and passed slow-moving westbound caravans of two hundred sleighs loaded with tea from China and convoys of Cossacks transporting gold from Siberia. From the opposite direction came marching exile parties of convicts on their way east to hard labor prisons and mines. Their circumstances would become of intense interest to Kennan when he returned to Siberia eighteen years later, but now he paid them not much more attention than he did the white Yakut ponies in the fields pawing at the snow to uncover grass. They crossed the Ural Mountains, and on January 7, 1868, Kennan reached Nizhny Novgorod, which was then the eastern end of the Russian rail network. Kennan and Price sold their sleigh and boarded a train. Two days later, having traveled nearly six thousand miles since leaving the Sea of Okhotsk and changed horses, reindeer, and dogs two hundred and sixty times, they stepped off the train in St. Petersburg to behold a dazzling, snow-dusted, golden-trimmed fairy tale of a city, part architectural confection, part Potemkin village.
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