Short answers, pulled from the story.
Peter Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist political philosopher and geographer, born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842. He is best known as the foremost theorist of anarchist communism and the author of Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), The Conquest of Bread (1892), and Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899). He co-founded Freedom, the first English anarchist periodical, in London in 1886.
Kropotkin's three most influential books were The Conquest of Bread (1892), Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899), and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). He also published In Russian and French Prisons (1887), Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), The Great French Revolution (1909), and Modern Science and Anarchism (1913), among many other works.
Kropotkin's conversion to anarchism happened in stages. While serving as a military officer in Siberia, the exiled poet Mikhail Larionovitch Mikhailov introduced him to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's essays. In February 1872, during a three-month visit to Switzerland, he met the Jura Federation's James Guillaume and Adhémar Schwitzguébel and described himself as immediately and fully converted by the group's egalitarianism and independence of expression.
Kropotkin argued in his 1902 book that cooperation, not competition, was the primary driver of evolutionary success in both animals and humans. He contended that species in which individual struggle had been reduced and mutual aid had developed to the greatest degree were the most prosperous and most open to further progress. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould later wrote that this view was consistent with modern biological understanding.
Kropotkin was arrested in March 1874 by the Third Section secret police for revolutionary agitation. He was held first in the Peter and Paul Fortress and later transferred to a military hospital at the House of Detention due to poor health. In June 1876, with assistance from friends, he escaped from the minimum-security facility and made his way through Scandinavia and England to Switzerland.
Kropotkin returned to Russia in June 1917 and refused a cabinet seat from the Provisional Government. His Moscow residence request in 1918 was approved personally by Vladimir Lenin. He met Lenin and wrote to him repeatedly, arguing against the Bolsheviks' hostage policy and centralization of authority, and in a 1920 letter described the desperate conditions he attributed to bureaucratic organization. He died on the 8th of February 1921; his writings were fully suppressed by the Bolsheviks later that year.