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Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism.
Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended the Page Corps and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France (where he was imprisoned for almost four years) and England. While in exile, he gave lectures and published widely on anarchism and geography. Kropotkin returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917, but he was disappointed by the Bolshevik state.
Kropotkin was a proponent of the idea of decentralized communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899), with (1902) being his principal scientific offering. He contributed the article on anarchism to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and left an unfinished work on anarchist ethical philosophy.
With his father mostly absent, Kropotkin and his older brother, Alexander, were raised by their German nurse. Kropotkin developed an enduring compassion for the estate's servants and serfs who cared for him and relayed stories of his mother's kindness. He was raised in the family's Moscow mansion and an estate in Nikolskoye, Kaluga Oblast, outside Moscow.
At the age of eight, Kropotkin attended Tsar Nicholas I's Royal Ball. Commending the child's costume, the tsar chose Kropotkin for his Page Corps, an elite school in St. Petersburg that combined military and court education and produced the tsar's imperial attendants. Kropotkin joined the Page Corps as a teenager and began a 14-year epistolary relationship with his brother that charts his intellectual and emotional development. By the time of his arrival, Kropotkin had already shown a populist position towards the emancipation of serfs and a nature of revolt against his father and the school's hazing. Kropotkin began his first underground revolutionary writings at the school, where he advocated for a Russian constitution. He developed an interest in science, reading, and opera. As a top student, Kropotkin became a sergeant-major in 1861 and was thrust into court life, serving as the emperor's personal Page de Chambre. His views of the tsar and court life soured as imperial policy changed over the next year. Privately he was preoccupied with the need to live a societally useful life.
After Kukel's ouster in early 1863, Kropotkin found solace in geographical work. He led a disguised reconnaissance expedition to find a direct route through Manchuria from Chita to Vladivostok the next year. He explored the East Siberian Mountains in the north the year after. The mountain measurements from his 1866 Olekminsk-Vitimsky expedition confirmed his Manchurian hypothesis that the Siberian area from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean was a plateau and not a plain. This discovery of the Patom Plateau and won him a gold medal from the Russian Geographical Society and led to the commercialization of the Lena gold fields. A Kropotkin Range was later named for him.
Kropotkin covered Siberia for St. Petersburg newspapers since his arrival, including the condition of the Polish political exiles who participated in the unsuccessful 1866 Baikal Insurrection. Kropotkin secured a promise from the governor-general to suspend the prisoners' death sentences, which was reneged upon. Disillusioned, Kropotkin and his brother resolved to leave the military. His time in Siberia taught him to appreciate peasant social organization and convinced him that administrative reform was an ineffectual means to improve social conditions.
After five years in Siberia, Kropotkin and his brother moved to St. Petersburg, where they continued their schooling and academic work. Kropotkin took a position with the Russian interior ministry with no duties. He studied physics, math, and geography at the university. After presenting his Vitim expedition findings, Kropotkin accepted the Russian Geographical Society's part-time offer of its Physical Geography section Secretaryship. Kropotkin translated Herbert Spencer's work for additional income. He continued to develop a theory, which he considered his best scientific contribution, that the East Siberian mountains were part of a large plateau and not independent ridges. Kropotkin participated in an 1870 polar expedition plan that postulated the existence of what was later discovered as the Franz Josef Land Arctic archipelago.
In early 1871, he was commissioned to study the Pleistocene in Scandinavian geography, in which Kropotkin developed theories of the glaciation of Europe and the glacial lakes of its northeast. His father died later that year and Kropotkin inherited a wealthy estate in Tambov. Kropotkin turned down the Geographical Society's offer of its general secretary position, instead choosing work on his Ice Age data and interest in bettering the lives of peasants.
Back in St. Petersburg, Kropotkin joined the Chaikovsky Circle, a group of revolutionaries that Kropotkin considered more educational than revolutionary in their activities. Kropotkin believed in the inevitability of Social revolution and the need for stateless social organization. His Populism revolutionary program for the group focused on urban workers and peasants whereas the group's moderates focused on students. Partially for this reason, he declined to contribute his personal wealth to the group. He viewed professionals as unlikely to forgo their privileges and judged them to not live societally useful lives. His program emphasized federated agrarian communes and a revolutionary party. While he could speak powerfully, Kropotkin was not a successful organizer.
Kropotkin's first political memo in November 1873 covered his basic plan for stateless social reconstruction including common property, worker control of factories, shared physical labor towards societal need, and labor vouchers in lieu of money. He emphasized living among commoners and using propaganda to focus mass dissatisfaction. He rejected the Nechayev conspiracy model. Members of the circle began to be arrested in late 1873 and the Third Section secret police came for Kropotkin in March 1874.
His arrest for agitation, as a former page de chambre and officer, was scandalous. Kropotkin had just filed his Ice Age report and had been recently elected president of the Geographical Society's Physical and Mathematical Department. At the society's request the tsar granted Kropotkin books to finish his glaciation report. Kropotkin was held in the Peter and Paul Fortress. His brother, who had also radicalized as a follower of Lavrov, was also arrested and katorga, where he committed suicide about a decade later.
Kropotkin was moved to the House of Detention prison military hospital in St. Petersburg for poor health, with the help of his sister. With assistance from friends, he escaped from the minimal-security prison in June 1876. By way of Scandinavia and England, Kropotkin arrived in Switzerland by the end of the year, where he met Italian anarchists Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta. He visited Belgium and Zurich, where he met French geographer Élisée Reclus, who became a close friend. "Historian Paul Avrich sees Kropotkin as the foremost libertarian theorist and most venerated figure of the anarchist movement" ... "Historian Alexander Gray maintained that Kropotkin was... 'probably the most representative, as he is certainly the most attractive and engaging, of the modern anarchist'" * :
Switzerland expelled Kropotkin at Russia's behest after the assassination of Alexander II in early 1881. He moved to Thonon-les-Bains, France, near Geneva, so that his wife could finish her Swiss education. Upon learning that the Holy League, a tsarist group, intended to kill him for his alleged association with the assassination, he moved to London, but could only bear to live there for a year. Upon his return in late 1882, the French arrested him for agitation, partly to appease Russia. He was sentenced to five years in Lyons. In early 1883, he was transferred to the Clairvaux Prison, where he continued his academic work. A public campaign of intellectuals and French legislators called for his release. Reclus published Words of a Rebel, a compilation of Kropotkin's Révolté writings while he was in prison, which became a main source of Kropotkin's thoughts on revolution. As Kropotkin's health worsened from scurvy and malaria, France released him in early 1886. He would stay in England through 1917, settling in Harrow, London, apart from brief trips to other European countries.
In London in late 1886, he co-founded Freedom, an anarchist monthly and the first English anarchist periodical, which he continued to support for almost three decades. His first and only child, Alexandra Kropotkin, was born the next year. He published multiple books over the next coming years including In Russian and French Prisons and The Conquest of Bread. His intellectual circle in London included William Morris and W. B. Yeats as well as old Russian friends Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky and Nikolai Tchaikovsky. Kropotkin contributed to the Geographical Journal and Nature.
After 1890, according to biographers George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović, Kropotkin became more of a scholarly recluse and less of a propagandist. His works' revolutionary zeal subsided as he turned to social, ethical, and scientific questions. He joined the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He continued to contribute to Freedom but was no longer an editor.
Several of Kropotkin's books began as journal articles. His writings on anarchist communist social life were printed in the French successor to Le Révolté and later revised into The Conquest of Bread in 1892. Kropotkin's writings on decentralizing production and industry against the countervailing trend of centralized industrialization were compiled into his Fields, Factories, and Workshops in 1899. His research throughout the 1890s on the animal instinct for cooperation as a counterpoint to Darwinism became a series of articles in Nineteenth Century and, later, the book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which was widely translated.
Following a scientific congress in Toronto in 1897, Kropotkin toured Canada. His experience there led him to advise the Russian Doukhobors who sought to immigrate there. He helped facilitate their emigration in 1899. Kropotkin entered the United States and met Johann Most, Emma Goldman, and Benjamin Tucker. American publishers published his Memoirs of a Revolutionist and Fields, Factories, and Workshops by the end of the decade. He visited the United States again in 1901 at the invitation of the Lowell Institute to give lectures on Russian literature that were later published. He published The Great French Revolution (1909), The Terror in Russia (1909), and Modern Science and Anarchism (1913). His 70th birthday in 1912 had celebratory gatherings in London and Paris.
Kropotkin's support for Western entry into World War I, siding with Britain and France, divided the anarchist movement, which had been anti-war, and damaged his esteem as a luminary of socialism. He exacerbated this by insisting, with returning to Russia, that Russians support the war as well.
In 1919, Emma Goldman visited his family there. Kropotkin met Lenin in Moscow and corresponded by mail to discuss political questions of the day. He advocated for workers' cooperatives and argued against the Bolsheviks' hostage policy and centralization of authority, while simultaneously encouraging Western comrades to stop their governments' military interventions in Russia. Kropotkin ultimately had little impact on the Russian revolution, but his advocacy work for political and anarchist prisoners in Russia, and for the Russian revolution, during the last four years of his life replenished some of the goodwill he had lost due to his support for the Western powers in World War I.
Kropotkin died of pneumonia on 8 February 1921. His family refused an offer of a state funeral. With his Moscow funeral, the Bolsheviks permitted the diminished Russian anarchist movement an official, restrained occasion to memorialize their figurehead. It was the last major anarchist demonstration of the period in Russia, because the movement, and Kropotkin's writings, were fully suppressed later that year.
Kropotkin disagreed in part with the Marxist critique of capitalism, including the labor theory of value, believing there was no necessary link between work performed and the values of commodities. His attack on the institution of wage labor was based more on the power employers exerted over employees, and not only on the extraction of surplus value from their labor. Kropotkin claimed this power was made possible by the state's protection of private ownership of productive resources. However, Kropotkin believed the possibility of surplus value was itself the problem, holding that a society would still be unjust if the workers of a particular industry kept their surplus to themselves, rather than redistributing it for the common good.
The economic change which will result from the Social Revolution will be so immense and so profound, it must so change all the relations based today on property and exchange, that it is impossible for one or any individual to elaborate the different social forms, which must spring up in the society of the future. ... Any authority external to it will only be an obstacle, only a trammel on the organic labor which must be accomplished, and beside that a source of discord and hatred.
Kropotkin believed that any post-revolutionary government would lack the local knowledge to organize a diverse population. Their vision of society would be limited by their own vindictive, self-serving, or narrow ideals. To ensure order, preserve authority, and organize production the state would need to use violence and coercion to suppress further revolution, and control workers. The workers would be reliant on the state bureaucracy to organize them, so they would never develop the initiative to self-organize as they needed. This would lead to the re-creation of Social class, an oppressed workforce, and eventually another revolution. Thus, Kropotkin wrote that maintaining the state would paralyze any true social revolution, making the idea of a "revolutionary government" a contradiction in terms:
We know that Revolution and Government are incompatible; one must destroy the other, no matter what name is given to government, whether dictator, royalty, or parliament. We know that what makes the strength and the truth of our party is contained in this fundamental formula — "Nothing good or durable can be done except by the free initiative of the people, and every government tends to destroy it;" and so the very best among us, if their ideas had not to pass through the crucible of the popular mind, before being put into execution, and if they should become masters of that formidable machine — the government — and could thus act as they chose, would become in a week fit only for the gallows. We know whither every dictator leads, even the best intentioned, — namely to the death of all revolutionary movement.
Rather than a centralized approach, Kropotkin stressed the need for decentralized organization. He believed that dissolving the state would cripple counter-revolution without reverting to authoritarian methods of control, writing, "In order to conquer, something more than guillotines are required. It is the revolutionary idea, the truly wide revolutionary conception, which reduces its enemies to impotence by paralyzing all the instruments by which they have governed hitherto." He believed this was possible only through a widespread "Boldness of thought, a distinct and wide conception of all that is desired, constructive force arising from the people in proportion as the negation of authority dawns; and finally—the initiative of all in the work of reconstruction—this will give to the revolution the Power required to conquer."
Kropotkin applied this criticism to the Bolsheviks' rule following the October Revolution. Kropotkin summarized his thoughts in a 1919 letter to the workers of Western Europe, promoting the possibility of revolution, but also warning against the centralized control in Russia, which he believed had condemned them to failure. Kropotkin wrote to Vladimir Lenin in 1920, describing the desperate conditions that he believed to be the result of bureaucratic organization, and urging Lenin to allow for local and decentralized institutions. Following an announcement of executions later that year, Kropotkin sent Lenin another furious letter, admonishing him for the terror which Kropotkin saw as needlessly destructive.
Contrary to popular belief, he did not deny the existence of selfishness or competitive struggle among organisms in nature, that is, "mutual struggle". He viewed cooperation and sociability among members of the same species as the best means to survive.
Biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that Kropotkin's view was consistent with modern biological understanding. He agrees with Kropotkin's observations, noting that while Kropotkin did not deny the concept of competitive struggle, he believed that cooperative interactions were too often overlooked within it. He also points out that if cooperation increases the survival rate of an individual, there is no reason why it should be ruled out by natural selection, but rather, as he said, encouraged.
Kropotkin did not deny the presence of competitive urges in humans, but did not consider them the driving force of human history. (2025). 9781412946728, SAGE. ISBN 9781412946728 He believed that seeking out conflict proved to be socially beneficial only in attempts to destroy injustice, as well as authoritarian institutions such as the state or the Russian Orthodox Church, which he saw as stifling human creativity and impeding human instinctual drive towards cooperation.
Kropotkin claimed that the benefits arising from mutual organization incentivizes humans more than mutual strife. His hope was that in the long run, mutual organization would drive individuals to produce. Anarcho-primitivists and anarcho-communists believe that a gift economy can break the cycle of poverty. They rely on Kropotkin, who believed that the he had visited implemented mutual aid.
Kropotkin believed that Mikhail Bakunin's collectivist economic model was just a wage system by a different nameKropotkin wrote: "After the Collectivist Revolution instead of saying 'twopence' worth of soap, we shall say 'five minutes' worth of soap." (quoted in ) and that such a system would breed the same type of centralization and inequality as a capitalist wage system. He stated that it is impossible to determine the value of an individual's contributions to the products of labor and thought that anyone who was placed in a position of trying to make such determinations would wield authority over those whose wages they determined.
According to Kirkpatrick Sale, "with Mutual Aid especially, and later with Fields, Factories, and Workshops, Kropotkin was able to move away from the absurdist limitations of individual anarchism and no-laws anarchism that had flourished during this period and provide instead a vision of communal anarchism, following the models of independent cooperative communities he discovered while developing his theory of mutual aid. It was an anarchism that opposed centralized government and state-level laws as traditional anarchism did, but understood that at a certain small scale, communities and communes and co-ops could flourish and provide humans with a rich material life and wide areas of liberty without centralized control."
Kropotkin admired Christianity and Buddhism, along with the figures of Jesus Christ and Buddha and their ethical teachings. Ethics: Origin and Development. The Anarchist Library. (1922). Kropotkin did not see that Christianity introduced anything new in its defense of brotherhood and mutual aid, but he did (along with Buddhism) in forgiveness. Compared to the ethics of the vengeful culture of other peoples, the doctrine of Christ repudiates persecution and revenge, saying that “the true greatness of Christianity lies in the words «do not take revenge on your enemies.»”. Ethics: Origin and Development. The Anarchist Library. (1922). Kropotkin also saw the Christian God as an improvement over the pagan gods, whom he considered vengeful and to whom one should submit. Ethics: Origin and Development. The Anarchist Library. (1922). Kropotkin's Ethics stated:
As an individual, Kropotkin was known for having exceptional integrity and moral character that matched his beliefs. Henry Hyndman, an ideological adversary, recalled Kropotkin's charm and sincerity. These traits, wrote Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, contributed to Kropotkin's power as a public speaker. As a thinker, Kropotkin focused more acutely on issues of morality than of economics or politics and carried himself by his own principles without imposition on others. In practice, this made him more of a "revolutionary humanitarian" than a revolutionist by deed. He was also known for being exceptionally kind and for forgoing material comforts to live a revolutionary, principled life by example. Gerald Runkle wrote that "Kropotkin with his scholarly and saintly ways ... almost brought respectability to the movement."
Emma Goldman regarded Kropotkin as her "great teacher" and as among the greatest minds and personalities of the 19th century.
After Kropotkin's 1921 death, the Bolsheviks permitted Kropotkin's Moscow house to become a Kropotkin Museum. This closed in 1938 with his wife's death.
Kropotkin is the namesake for multiple regional entities. The Konyushennaya district in Moscow, where Kropotkin was born, is now known by his name, as the Kropotkinsky district, including the Kropotkinskaya metro station. He is the namesake for a large town in the North Caucasus (southwest Russia) and a small town in Siberia. The Kropotkin Range he was first to cross in the Siberian Patom Highlands was named for him, as was Mount Kropotkin in East Antarctica.
Self-sufficiency
Kropotkin's focus on local production led to his view that a country should strive for autarky by manufacturing its own goods and growing its own food, thus lessening the need to rely on imports. To these ends, he advocated irrigation and to boost local food production.
Religion
Although in the past he harshly criticized religious morality, Anarchist Morality. The Anarchist Library. (1897) Kropotkin recognized the Christian anarchism of Leo Tolstoy as one of the four schools of thought in anarchism. Anarchism. The Anarchist Library. (1910). Kropotkin and Tolstoy maintained, despite never meeting in person, a relationship of mutual respect. The Anarchist Prince by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović. (1950) Kropotkin saw the origins of anarchism in Europe as found in various Christian movements, such as the Anabaptists and Hussites, mentioning figures such as the Italian Catholic bishop Marco Girolamo Vida and the German Anabaptist theologian Hans Denck. Anarchism. The Anarchist Library. (1910).
Personal life
Kropotkin married Sophie Kropotkin, a Ukrainian Jewish student, in Switzerland in October 1878. She was over a decade younger than Kropotkin. Kropotkin references her as a primary source of criticism and feedback. Her published story, "The Wife of Number 4,237", was based on her own experience with her husband at Clairvaux prison. She created an archive in Moscow dedicated to his works before her death in 1941. Their only child, Alexandra, was born in London in 1887. Kropotkin was reserved about his private life.
Legacy
As the anarchists' leading theorist in his lifetime, Kropotkin wrote their most systematic doctrine in an accessible way; and led the development of anarchist-communist social doctrine. His works, inventive and pragmatic, were the most read anarchist books and pamphlets, with translations into major European and Eastern languages that influenced revolutionaries (e.g., Nestor Makhno and Emiliano Zapata) and non-anarchist reformers alike (e.g., Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard), as well as a wide range of intellectuals (including the writers Ba Jin and James Joyce). Much of Kropotkin's impact was in his intellectual writings prior to 1914. He had little influence on the Russian revolution, despite returning for it.
Works
Books
Pamphlets
Articles
See also
Notes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
Books on Kropotkin
Periodical articles
External links
Categories: 1842 Births, 1921 Deaths, 19th-century Atheists, 19th-century Essayists, 19th-century Explorers From The Russian Empire, 19th-century Memoirists From The Russian Empire, 19th-century Non-fiction Writers From The Russian Empire, 19th-century Philosophers From The Russian Empire, 19th-century Zoologists From The Russian Empire, 20th-century Anarchists, 20th-century Atheists, 20th-century Russian Essayists, 20th-century Russian Male Writers, 20th-century Russian Non-fiction Writers, 20th-century Russian Philosophers, Anarchist Theorists, Anarchist Writers, Anarcho-communists, Anti-consumerists, Burials At Novodevichy Cemetery, Contributors To The Encyclopædia Britannica, Emigrants From The Russian Empire To France, Emigrants From The Russian Empire To Switzerland, Emigrants From The Russian Empire To The United Kingdom, Historians Of The French Revolution, Historians Of The Renaissance, Human Geographers, Members Of The International Workingmen's Association, Narodniks, People From Moskovsky Uyezd, Philosophy Academics, Prisoners Of The Peter And Paul Fortress, Russian Anarchists, Russian Anti-fascists, Russian Atheists, Russian Communists, Russian Exiles, Russian Geographers, Russian Newspaper Editors, Russian Non-fiction Writers, Russian Political Writers, Russian Revolutionaries, Russian Science Writers, Russian Socialists, Russian Untitled Nobility, Social Philosophers, Writers From Moscow
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