Kropotkin, Peter (1842–1921)

Peter (Pyotr) Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a leading Russian anarchist, social philosopher, explorer, and geographer. He was born and died in the Moscow region, but he traveled very widely and spent half his life in exile. As a prince in a noble family, Kropotkin was selected by Tsar Nicholas I to study in the elite Corps of Pages, a military academy for courtiers. On graduation from the Corps, bored with military science and increasingly disillusioned with the extravagance and pettiness of the Court, he volunteered to serve as an army officer in Siberia and spent 9 years exploring the region, initially as a soldier and later as a civil servant working with the Russian Geographical Society. Subsequently, he wrote extensively about the physiography of Asia, the desiccation of extensive regions, and postglacial climatic change.

Despite his noble birth, from the age of 12 onward Kropotkin avoided using his title of prince and showed great admiration for the hard work, skills, and moral values of the common people. In European Russia, he observed the suffering of the peasants and the continuing exploitation of workers, even after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. He documented the brutal conditions endured by prisoners, peasants, and miners in Siberia; developed a passionate interest in anarchism, socialism, and communism; and read avidly about the triumphs and eventual annihilation of the Paris Commune. In 1872, he made a 3-month trip to visit the International Workingmen's Association in Switzerland and learn more about Western European experiences of revolution and social transformation. Returning to Russia, he helped build the fledgling anarchist communist movement until he was arrested and imprisoned. He escaped in 1876 and fled to England, where he spent most of the next 40 years, intermingled with shorter periods in France and Switzerland and an 1897 visit to North America. In May 1917, he returned to Russia, but he was soon marginalized by the October Revolution and Lenin's emphasis on tightly controlling political power.

Kropotkin's primary contribution to geography is his vision of an alternative future—decentralized, dispersed, integrated, and powered by renewable sources of electrical energy—and a new geography to counter the capitalist vision of globalized markets based on free trade and comparative advantage. He rejected the exploitation and alienation of labor associated with capitalist mass production, the environmental destruction associated with large-scale urbanization and the heavy use of fossil fuels and artificial fertilizers, and the enormous waste of energy associated with globalized commodity trading. Instead, he advocated the integration of manual and intellectual labor in villages and small towns, with a mixture of agriculture, handicrafts, and small industries. Local territories would be self-governing, cooperatively organized and moderately self-reliant, and loosely federated with neighboring communities and engaging in interregional trade. As well as contributing to the anarchist cause and critiques of capitalist globalization and Soviet authoritarianism, [Page 1669]his work strengthened the Arts and Crafts Movement and helped inspire the movements advocating garden cities, organic farming, community food security, appropriate technology, and bioregionalism. Kropotkin's close intellectual contacts included Élisée Reclus, Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, and William Morris.

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