Peter Kropotkin
Peter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842. He entered the Page Corps, an elite school for imperial attendants, at age eight after Tsar Nicholas I commended his costume at a royal ball. The school combined military training with court education and produced the tsar's personal staff. Kropotkin became a sergeant-major by 1861 and served as the emperor's personal Page de Chambre. His views soured as imperial policy shifted over the following year. Privately he felt preoccupied with the need to live a societally useful life.
In 1862 he chose to serve with the Amur Cossacks in east Siberia. This undesirable post allowed him to study artillery mathematics while living in nature. He developed a firm worldview of compassion for the poor during these years. He contrasted the pride of yeoman peasant farmers against the indignities of serfdom. The exiled poet Mikhail Larionovitch Mikhailov introduced him to anarchism by recommending an essay by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Kropotkin's brother came to live with him in Irkutsk.
After Governor-General Boleslav 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. He explored the East Siberian Mountains in the north the next year. Measurements from his 1866 Olekminsk-Vitimsk expedition confirmed that the area was a plateau rather than a plain. This discovery won him a gold medal from the Russian Geographical Society and led to the commercialization of the Lena gold fields.
Kropotkin's arrest for agitation occurred in March 1874 when the Third Section secret police came for him. He had just filed his Ice Age report and been elected president of the Geographical Society's Physical and Mathematical Department. His arrest as a former page de chambre and officer caused a scandal. The tsar granted him books to finish his glaciation report while he was held in the Peter and Paul Fortress. His brother was also arrested and exiled in Siberia where he committed suicide about a decade later.
He was moved to the House of Detention prison military hospital in St. Petersburg for poor health with help from his sister. Friends assisted his escape from the minimum-security prison in June 1876. By way of Scandinavia and England, Kropotkin arrived in Switzerland by the end of the year. There 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.
Switzerland expelled Kropotkin at Russia's behest after the assassination of Alexander II in early 1881. He moved to Thonon-les-Bains in France so that his wife could finish her Swiss education. Upon learning that the Holy League intended to kill him for 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.
Kropotkin participated in a 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 Ice Age in Scandinavian geography. During this work he 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.
He turned down the Geographical Society's offer of its general secretary position instead choosing to work on his Ice Age data. Kropotkin continued to develop a theory which he considered his best scientific contribution regarding the East Siberian mountains being part of a large plateau rather than independent ridges. The mountain measurements from his 1866 Olekminsk-Vitimsk expedition confirmed his Manchurian hypothesis about the region between the Ural Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
A range of mountains in this region was later named for him. He covered Siberia for St. Petersburg newspapers since his arrival including the condition of 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, he and his brother resolved to leave the military.
Kropotkin became increasingly revolutionary in his writings though he was not known for activism until spurred by the 1871 Paris Commune and the trial of Sergey Nechayev. He set out to see Switzerland and Western Europe in February 1872. Over three months he met Mikhail Sazhin in Zurich and worked with Nikolai Utin's Marxist group in Geneva before joining the Jura Federation. The Jura were the main internal opposition to the Marxist-controlled First International as followers of Mikhail Bakunin.
He was quickly impressed and instantly converted to anarchism by the group's egalitarianism and independence of expression. His first political memo in November 1873 covered his basic plan for stateless social reconstruction including common property and worker control of factories. He emphasized living among commoners and using propaganda to focus mass dissatisfaction while rejecting the Nechayev conspiracy model. Members of the circle began to be arrested in late 1873 leading to his own arrest in March 1874.
In 1902 Kropotkin published his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution which gave an alternative view of animal and human survival. At the time some proponents of social Darwinism such as Francis Galton proffered a theory of interpersonal competition and natural hierarchy. Instead Kropotkin argued that it was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species including humans.
Kropotkin associated with the Jura Federation and began editing its publication there. In 1879 he started Le Révolté, a revolutionary fortnightly, in Geneva that published his personal articulation of anarchist communism. The philosophy became part of the Jura program in 1880 at Kropotkin's advocacy. Le Révolté also published his best-known pamphlet An Appeal to the Young in 1880. France released him in early 1886 after he had been sentenced to five years in Lyon following his 1882 arrest.
He would stay in England through 1917 settling in Harrow London apart from brief trips to other European countries. 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 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. 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.
With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution Kropotkin returned to Russia in June 1917. He refused the Petrograd Provisional Government's offer of a cabinet seat. In August he advocated for defending Russia and the revolution at the National State Conference. Kropotkin applied for a residence in Moscow in 1918 which was personally approved by Vladimir Lenin head of the Soviet government.
Months later finding life in Moscow difficult in his old age Kropotkin moved with his family to a friend's home in the nearby town of Dmitrov. 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 replenished some goodwill lost due to his support for Western powers in World War I. He died of pneumonia on the 8th of February 1921. His family refused an offer of a state funeral.
As the anarchists' leading theorist in his lifetime Kropotkin wrote their most systematic doctrine in an accessible way. His works were the most read anarchist books and pamphlets with translations into major European and Eastern languages that influenced revolutionaries like Nestor Makhno and Emiliano Zapata. Much of Kropotkin's impact was in his intellectual writings prior to 1914 though he had little influence on the Russian revolution despite returning for it.
After Kropotkin's 1921 death the Bolsheviks permitted his Moscow house to become a Kropotkin Museum which closed in 1938 with his wife's death. 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 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 a peak in East Antarctica. Emma Goldman regarded Kropotkin as her great teacher and among the greatest minds of the 19th century. Historian Paul Avrich sees Kropotkin as the foremost libertarian theorist and most venerated figure of the anarchist movement.
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Common questions
When and where was Peter Kropotkin born?
Peter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842. He entered the Page Corps, an elite school for imperial attendants, at age eight after Tsar Nicholas I commended his costume at a royal ball.
What scientific discovery did Peter Kropotkin make during his 1866 Olekminsk-Vitimsk expedition?
Measurements from his 1866 Olekminsk-Vitimsk expedition confirmed that the area between the Ural Mountains and the Pacific Ocean was a plateau rather than a plain. This discovery won him a gold medal from the Russian Geographical Society and led to the commercialization of the Lena gold fields.
Why was Peter Kropotkin arrested in March 1874?
Peter Kropotkin's arrest for agitation occurred in March 1874 when the Third Section secret police came for him. He had just filed his Ice Age report and been elected president of the Geographical Society's Physical and Mathematical Department before being held in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
How did Peter Kropotkin contribute to anarchist theory with Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution published in 1902?
In 1902 Kropotkin published his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution which gave an alternative view of animal and human survival by arguing that it was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species including humans.
When did Peter Kropotkin die and what happened to his Moscow house after his death?
He died of pneumonia on the 8th of February 1921. After Kropotkin's 1921 death the Bolsheviks permitted his Moscow house to become a Kropotkin Museum which closed in 1938 with his wife's death.