Peter Kropotkin Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) is principally known as a revolutionary anarchist and is particularly regarded as an inspiration to green anarchists. He was born to a land-owning aristocratic family in Moscow, Russia, in 1842. He was educated at home and later the Moscow gymnasium before entering the prestigious Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg, a military school whose students served as pages to the imperial court. In 1861, the same year as the emancipation of the serfs, Kropotkin, as the best student in his class, served as personal page to Emperor Alexander II.

Kropotkin then chose to join an obscure Cossack regiment in eastern Siberia. His letters from this time to his brother, to whom he was especially close, indicate that Kropotkin was already critical of the government and was keen to be useful to his fellow man. In Siberia, he undertook studies of the surrounding geography and nature and involved himself in (largely unsuccessful) reform projects. His later writings would continue this twin focus on the natural and political environments. In 1867, Kropotkin resigned from the military and entered St. Petersburg University, where he studied mathematics and worked for the Russian Geographical Society. In 1872 Kropotkin travelled to Switzerland, then home to a number of radical Russian émigrés, but to his regret failed to meet the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, by whom he was greatly influenced.

On his return to St. Petersburg, Kropotkin joined the radical Tchaikovsky circle, which held to the principles of collective landholding, autonomy, and egalitarianism. He rejected the Western route to socialism via industrialization and proletarianization. Instead, the principal influences on Kropotkin’s thought would remain French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s antistatism; Bakunin’s emphasis on mass insurrection, which might include violent revolution; and the example of the peasant communes.

In 1874, Kropotkin was arrested and imprisoned for his political activities, but through family influence he was transferred from a political prison to a less harsh hospital prison when he became seriously ill. After his recovery he was able to escape, seeking refuge first in Britain and then Switzerland, where he married fellow radical Sofia Ananeva-Rabinovich. He was later expelled from Switzerland and imprisoned in France before eventually settling in London. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Kropotkin returned to Russia, where he was treated with toleration by the Bolshevik regime and was apparently admired by Lenin.

During Kropotkin’s long exile, he wrote and lectured extensively. His work appeared in an impressive range of outlets such as the anarchist paper Le Révolté, which he cofounded; the Atlantic Monthly; the respected scientific journal Nature; and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His books include a study of the role of the masses in the French Revolution (1789–1799), an examination of the tsarist tyranny in Russia, and Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902), in which he refutes the primacy of the competitive drive in social Darwinist theory. His best-known work is Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1899), but his clearest and most detailed descriptions of anarchist society are The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899).

Bibliography:

Cahm, Caroline. Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Crowder, George. Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Kropotkin, Peter. Kropotkin: Selections from His Writings. London: Freedom Press, 1942.
Shatz, Marshall S., ed. The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Woodcock, George. The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin. London:T.V. Boardman, 1950.

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