Comrade Kropotkin

Comrade Kropotkin is a classic Russian political biography by Victor Robinson. Bernard Shaw calls us a nation of villagers. To a large extent this appellation holds good. We are so self-sufficient unto ourselves that the most important events in the world leave us cold if they take place outside of the realm of the star-spangled banner. Pyotr Alexeevich Kropotkin (December 9, 1842 - February 8, 1921) was a Russian activist, revolutionary, scientist and philosopher who advocated anarchism. Pyotr Alexeevich Kropotkin was born in Moscow, into the second-highest level of the Russian aristocracy. His mother was the daughter of a Cossack general.[12] His father, Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin, was a prince in Smolensk, [13] of the Rurik dynasty which had ruled Russia before the rise of the Romanovs. Kropotkin's father owned large tracts of land and nearly 1,200 male serfs in three provinces. "[U]nder the influence of republican teachings," Kropotkin dropped his princely title at age 12, and "even rebuked his friends, when they so referred to him." In 1857, at age 14, Kropotkin enrolled in the Corps of Pages at St. Petersburg.[15] Only 150 boys - mostly children of nobility belonging to the court - were educated in this privileged corps, which combined the character of a military school endowed with special rights and of a court institution attached to the Imperial Household. Kropotkin's memoirs detail the hazing and other abuse of pages for which the Corps had become notorious. In Moscow, Kropotkin developed what would become a lifelong interest in the condition of the peasantry. Although his work as a page for Tsar Alexander II made Kropotkin skeptical about the tsar's "liberal" reputation, [17] Kropotkin was greatly pleased by the tsar's decision to emancipate the serfs in 1861.[18] In St. Petersburg, he read widely on his own account, and gave special attention to the works of the French encyclopædists and to French history. The years 1857-1861 witnessed a growth in the intellectual forces of Russia, and Kropotkin came under the influence of the new liberal-revolutionary literature, which largely expressed his own aspirations. Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, he attended a military school 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 in England. He returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917, but was disappointed by the Bolshevik form of state socialism. Kropotkin was a proponent of a decentralised 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 and Fields, Factories and Workshops; and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition[11] and left unfinished a work on anarchist ethical philosophy.