Kropotkin, Peter (1842–1921)

Peter Kropotkin [PYOTR Alekseievich], anarchist and geographer, was born in Moscow into a princely family. He was educated at the Corps of Pages (1857–62), an elite military school in St. Petersburg, and served as an officer in the Far East where he undertook important work in exploration, glaciation, and orography with the support of the Imperial Geographical Society, whose gold medal he was awarded. He resigned his army commission in 1867 to study mathematics at St. Petersburg University (1867–68) and then continued his geographical work on the Far East, extending his glacial studies to Finland and Sweden. He had already repudiated his title of prince, and on a visit to western Europe in 1872 he turned to anarchism, returning to Russia to join the revolutionary Tchaikovsky circle in St Petersburg. He was arrested in 1874 and held without trial, but escaped in 1876 and went into exile in the West. In 1878 he married Sofiya Grigoryevna Ananyeva-Rabinovich.

Under Kropotkin's influence, the international anarchist movement developed an ideology known as anarchist communism. Kropotkin was imprisoned in France in 1883, but was granted amnesty in 1886 and came to England where he stayed until 1917. He continued the work as a scientific journalist that he had begun on an earlier visit to England (1876–77) with the support of the geographer John Scott Keltie. He also continued to develop his social and political thought, which was influenced by geographical ideas of the interdependence of nature and society. His stress on the cooperation and mutuality evident in nature and in human history made his arguments attractive to many contemporaries, though some later commentators deprecated his [Page 993]lack of emphasis on class antagonism. Conversely, such commentators approved his argument that the final stages of his historical schema would come through popular revolution. He was influenced by his friend and fellow geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus, to whose Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (1875–94) he contributed. Some of Kropotkin's numerous articles were collected in books, of which The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) were the most influential. His books and articles were published in many European languages and commanded a wide audience. He contributed scientific articles to the Geographical Journal and Encyclopaedia Britannica, the 11th edition of which also contained his important article on anarchism (1910).

Kropotkin returned to Russia in 1917, the year of the revolution for whose success he had long worked. He settled in Moscow but moved to Dmitrov, where he died on February 8, 1921. His funeral in Moscow on February 13 brought together fellow anarchists in demonstration of their support of ideas for which the prevailing Bolshevik regime had no sympathy. Kropotkin was remembered in geographical circles for his work on glaciology, desiccation, and orography, where his discoveries and hypotheses, even where wrong, stimulated important subsequent research. His wider impact, however, was due to his work on anarchism which, under his influence, became an attractive ideology, though one that went unrealized after developments in his homeland took a very different ideological turn.

...