The Anarchist Prince, Part 1

History is replete with contradictions, often in the person of one individual.  Probably one of the starkest is the case of Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin.

The name may sound like a character from Nikolai Gogol’s farce The Government Inspector, but Kropotkin was a real person.  He was a prince, the descendant of a pre-Romanov noble family, and a member of the imperial court of Tsar Alexander II (1818-81; reigned: 1855-81).

His contradiction?  Prince Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921; Russian spelling: Пётр Алексеевич Кропоткин), aristocrat  and one-time officer of the Imperial Russian Army, was also . . . an anarchist.

I don’t mean one of those black-clad, caped, bearded, bomb-throwing characters in 19th- and early-20th-century cartoons.  I mean an honest-to-God political philosopher and theorist who espoused and promoted anarchist principles.

Pyotr Kropotkin was a page in the household of Alexander II in Saint Petersburg from the age of 14 and an imperial geographer who found court life repugnant and eventually adopted an anarchist philosophy.  He supported the rights of the peasants and workers decades before the Soviet Revolution, but opposed the Bolsheviks as much as he did the tsar. 

Kropotkin was born on 21 December 1842 (by the modern calendar) in Moscow into an ancient Russian princely family.  His father, Major General Prince Aleksei Petrovich Kropotkin, was a descendant of the Smolensky branch of the Rurik dynasty which had ruled Russia before the rise of the Romanovs. Aleksei Kropotkin owned large tracts of land and nearly 1,200 serfs in three provinces.

(Serfdom in Russia, a practice that dated back to the feudal middle ages, was a system of debt slavery and indentured servitude that was the lot of most peasants.  It was not unlike slavery in the United States and elsewhere.  The intractable system was finally ended in Russia by Alexander II in 1861 for privately owned serfs and 1866 for state-held serfs.)

Pyotr Alekseyevich’s mother, Yekaterina Nikolayevna Sulima (1811-46), who died of tuberculosis when her son was 3½ years old, was an active feminist.  She was also the daughter of a Cossack general.  Lieutenant General Nikolai Semyonovich Sulima (1777-1840) was a hero of the Patriotic War of 1812—what the Russians call Napoleon’s campaign on the territory of Russia.

(The Rurikid dynasty traces its lineage back to the 9th century and the Viking [Varangian] founders of Novgorod and the Kievan Rus’.  The Ruriks also established the Russian Tsardom, which they ruled until supplanted by the Romanovs in 1613. 

(The Rurikids, ruled in some part of Russia for 21 generations, a period of more than 700 years; they are one of the oldest European royal houses.  With such a heritage, the Kropotkins weren’t just aristocrats.  They were aristocrats’ aristocrats.)

Pyotr Kropotkin received his primary education at the First Moscow Grammar School and at the age of 12, influenced by republican teachings, he dropped the use of his noble title and, according to an early biography, even scolded his friends if they called him “Prince.”  Though others may have used the title in reference to him, Kropotkin is said never to have used it himself again.

In Moscow, Kropotkin developed what would become a lifelong interest in the condition of the Russian peasantry, possibly from having witnessed the lives of so many serfs on his family’s properties as he was growing up.  Although his work as a page for Alexander II would make the boy skeptical about the tsar’s vaunted “liberal” reputation, Kropotkin was greatly heartened by the tsar’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

In 1857, Kropotkin enrolled in the Page Corps in Saint Petersburg.  This was a sort of military academy-cum-prep school-cum court dormitory for pages of the imperial household.  Kropotkin became the tsar’s personal page in June 1861; he was 18 years old   Kropotkin graduated first in his class from the Page Corps in 1862 and was commissioned an officer in the Imperial Army—a tradition in his family.  

In Saint Petersburg, the young student had read widely independently, with special attention to French history and the works of the French Encyclopédistes. The years 1857 to 1861 witnessed a flowering of Russia’s intelligentsia, and Kropotkin came under the influence of the new liberal-revolutionary literature, which largely expressed his own aspirations.

(The Encyclopédistes were members of the Société des gens de lettres de France [French Society of People of Letters], a French writers’ society formed in 1838 by the notable French authors Honoré de Balzac, 1799-1850; Victor Hugo, 1802-85; Alexandre Dumas, 1802-70; and George Sand, 1804-76. 

(The Encyclopédistes contributed articles to the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers [Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts] between 1751 and 1765 under the editors Denis Diderot, 1713-84, and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 1717-83.  The Encyclopédie promoted the advancement of science and secular thought and supported the tolerance, rationality, and open-mindedness of the Enlightenment. 

(Contributors to the Encyclopédie included, among over a hundred others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-78, who wrote on music and political theory, and Voltaire, 1694-1778, who contributed articles on history, literature, and philosophy.  Diderot contributed essays on economics, mechanical arts, philosophy, politics, and religion, among others, and his co-editor d’Alembert wrote on science—especially mathematics—contemporary affairs, philosophy, religion, and other topics.)

                                

After graduating from the Page Corps, the young officer voluntarily chose service in Siberia in Cossack units.  (Remember that Kropotkin’s maternal grandfather was a general of a Cossack unit.)  On 8 October 1862, 19-year-old Kropotkin was promoted to the rank of esaul, the approximate equivalent of captain, as an officer on special assignment as aide-de-camp to the Governor of the Transbaikal Oblast, a mountainous region east of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. 

From 1864 to 1865, under the command of Major General Boleslav Kazimirovich Kukel (1829-69), the Governor-General of East Siberia, Kropotkin served in the Amur Cossack Army, part of the Cossack force in the Russian Far East.  He was appointed attaché for Cossack affairs to Kukel, a liberal and a democrat who maintained personal connections with various Russian radical political figures exiled to Siberia.

Among these was the writer Mikhail Larionovich Mikhailov (1829-65), whom Kropotkin, on the orders of General Kukel, once warned about the Moscow police investigation into his political activities while in internal exile.  

Mikhailov later gave Kropotkin a copy of a book by Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), the first political philosopher to call himself an anarchist; it was Kropotkin’s introduction to anarchist ideas.  Kukel was later dismissed from his administrative position and was transferred to state-sponsored scientific projects.

Kropotkin participated in expeditions in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria, rafting along the Ingoda, Shilka, and Amur Rivers, where he was engaged in studies of geology, mountain topography, mapping, and ancient glaciers and ice formations. These explorations resulted in valuable geographic achievements.

Kropotkin determined that attaining any real reforms in the governance of Siberia would be unlikely, so he decided to devote himself almost exclusively to scientific exploration, at which he was highly successful.  In 1866, he led several expeditions in Siberia and the Russian Far East, yielding a number of important geographical discoveries, including glacial deposits in the Lena River basin in Eastern Siberia, which helped prove the presence of the Siberian ice sheet during the Last Glacial Period (“last ice age”: ca. 115,000-ca. 11,700 years ago)..

Kropotkin published his notes on his exploratory travels through Siberia, Transbaikalia, and Manchuria in several Russian journals, magazines, and newspapers.  He also worked as a member of the commissions preparing a draft proposal on reforms of prisons and the exile systems.  Kropotkin, though, soon became disappointed with the existing administrative apparatus and lost confidence in the idea of ​​reformist modifications.

In June of 1866, there was an uprising of the Polish exiles in the Baikal region.  The regional administration called out the Transbaikal Cossack Army to suppress the uprising and the insurgency was suppressed.  The Poles surrendered and were tried in a Russian military court and seven Poles were sentenced to death; the others were sentenced to hard labor or had their exiles extended.

Kropotkin didn’t take part in the suppression of the rebellion, but in the spring of 1867, he resigned his army commission.  As a consequence of his break with his family’s military tradition, Aleksei Petrovich Kropotkin disinherited his son and Pyotr Alekseyevich was left without an income.

In the early autumn of 1867, Kropotkin returned to Saint Petersburg and entered the Saint Petersburg Imperial University to study mathematics.  At the same time, he joined the civil service on the Statistical Committee of the Ministry of the Interior. 

In 1868, Kropotkin was elected to membership in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and later that year, he was elected secretary of the Physical Geography Department of the Geographical Society.  He was awarded a gold medal for his report on the May 1866 expedition on which he discovered the Siberian glacial deposits.

The young intellectual kept up his political reading, including works by such prominent liberal thinkers as British philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill (1806-73) and Russian writer Aleksandr Herzen (1812-70), known as “the father of Russian socialism.”   He also continued to meet with the exiled convict revolutionary Mikhailov as well as the Decembrists Dmitry Irinarchovich Zavalishin (1804-92) and Ivan Ivanovich Gorbachevsky (1800-69).

(The Decembrists were members of the 19th-century Russian anti-government movement that organized a revolt on 26 December 1825.  Russian army officers led about 3,000 soldiers in a protest against the ascension to the imperial throne the day before by Tsar Nicholas I, 1796-1855; reigned: 1825-55, whose elder brother, Grand Duke Konstantin, 1779-1831, had abdicated.  The uprising, which was suppressed by Tsar Nicholas, took place in Peter’s Square in Saint Petersburg.)

Kropotkin made translations of writers such as English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and German educator and liberal politician Adolph Diesterweg (1790-1866).  At the same time, he wrote scientific articles and essays for newspapers.  Meanwhile, he’d been engaged for several years in scientific research on the structure of the mountains of Asia and the location of their ridges and plateaus (orography).

In 1870, while preparing for an expedition that was never funded, the young geographer concluded that there must be a land mass north of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, that was undiscovered.  By analyzing the geologic and oceanographic data of the region, he calculated the land’s location. 

The land Kropotkin predicted was discovered in 1873 by an Austro-Hungarian expedition to the North Pole.  The Russian archipelago of 192 islands in northernmost Archangelsk Oblast was named Franz Josef Land for Emperor Franz Josef I of Austro-Hungary (1830-1916; reigned: 1848-1916).

In the summer of 1871, Kropotkin travelled to Finland and Sweden for the Geographical Society to study glaciers—but the conditions of the world he saw around him forced him to put science aside.  While on this exploration, the geographer also studied the writings of the leading political theorists.  When he returned to Moscow from his journey in 1873, Pyotr Kropotkin learned that Prince Aleksei Kropotkin had died on 7 September 1871.

The next year, Kropotkin received permission to travel abroad.  In Belgium and Switzerland, he met with representatives of Russian and European revolutionary organizations, and in the same year joined the Jura Federation of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association, or IWA), from which the Jurassians broke away.

The Jurassian leader was Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) and the Jura Federation, which held anti-state, egalitarian views on work and social emancipation, was formed in 1872 in Saint-Imier, Switzerland, a small town in the Bernese Jura region (whence the name).

The readings in politics and philosophy he’d been doing, along with his experiences among the peasants in Siberia, ultimately led Kropotkin to declare himself an anarchist by 1872.  Accordingly, when he returned to Saint Petersburg, he joined a secret revolutionary society named after Nikolai Tchaikovsky (1851-1926), one of its prominent members.

Also known as the Grand Propaganda Society, the Tchaikovsky Circle was founded in Saint Petersburg during student unrest in 1868-1869.  A literary society for self-education, its initial purpose was to share books and knowledge that had been banned in the Russian Empire.  Besides self-education, the circle’s main tasks were to unite the students of Saint Petersburg and other cities, and spread propaganda among the workers and peasants to foment a social revolution.

In 1873, Kropotkin published an important contribution to science: a map and paper in which he showed that the existing maps entirely misrepresented the physical features of Asia. During this work, he was offered the secretariat of the Geographical Society.  He decided, however, that it wasn’t his duty to work on new discoveries, but rather to aid in disseminating existing knowledge about geography.  This and his growing political commitments compelled him to turn down the position.

In order to provide cover for his radical political activities, though, Kropotkin retained his membership in the Geographical Society.  With the Tchaikovsky Circle, the geographer helped spread revolutionary propaganda among the peasants and workers.  He was also the liaison between the Circle and the aristocracy.

In March 1874, the 31-year-old Kropotkin was arrested for subversive political activity and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the original citadel of Saint Petersburg which by the early 18th century also served as a prison for high-ranking or political prisoners.   

Because the significance of his work in science was so great, Kropotkin received special privileges in prison by the personal order of the tsar, such as permission to continue his geographical work in his cell.  The conditions of imprisonment in a damp and isolated cell and his intense mental labor, however, undermined the prisoner’s health. 

He was transferred to the low-security prison ward of the Nikolayev Military Hospital from which, on 30 July 1876, Kropotkin escaped with the help of some friends.  On the night of the escape, Kropotkin and his accomplices celebrated by dining in one of Saint Petersburg’s finest restaurants.  They assumed, correctly as it turned out, that the police wouldn’t think of looking for their escaped prisoner there.  

Afterward, he made his way through Finland and Sweden to Christiania (now Oslo), Norway, where he boarded a ship bound for England.  In January 1877, he moved on to Switzerland, where he joined the Jura Federation and in 1877, he moved to Paris to help start the socialist movement there. 

He also engaged in many activities on behalf of the Jura Federation, including a demonstration in Bern, Switzerland, and congresses in Verviers and Ghent, Belgium.  In Ghent, the Belgian police sought to arrest him, but he escaped to London and then returned to Paris where he met with French socialists.

On 1 July 1876, Mikhail Bakunin, the de facto leader of the Jurassian branch of anarchists, died at 62 in the Swiss capital of Bern; his successor as the face of European anarchism was Pyotr Kropotkin.  In 1878, Kropotkin and the Jurassians witnessed a surge of repressive acts that included the banning of the Federation’s newspaper, L’Avant-Garde.  The Russian expatriate left Paris unwittingly just ahead of another arrest attempt, and returned to Geneva where he edited the Jura Federation’s new revolutionary newspaper Le Révolté (“The Radical”) and published revolutionary pamphlets.

Before he left Paris, the 36-year-old Kropotkin married Sofya Grigoryevna Ananyeva-Rabinovich (1856-1938) on 8 October 1978.  Fourteen years Kropotkin’s junior, Sofya Ananyeva Kropotkina, born in Kiev, the Ukraine, into a bourgeois Jewish family, grew up in Tomsk, Siberia, where her father’d been exiled for revolutionary activities.  She took up revolutionary activism in 1873 and had come to Switzerland to recover her health.

Soon after their marriage, the Kropotkins moved from Geneva to Clarens, a village in Montreux in the Swiss Canton of Vaud.  (Vaud is the canton of which Lausanne is the capital.  It abuts the Canton of Geneva to its south along the shore of Lake Geneva.)  Sofya Grigoryevna was a loyal helpmeet to Pyotr Alekseyevich for the rest of his life; she outlived him by 17 years and bore him a daughter, Aleksandra Petrovna (1887-1966), their only child.

After two unsuccessful attempts on April 1879 and February 1880, a radical socialist faction known as Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will) assassinated Tsar Alexander II in Saint Petersburg on 13 March 1881. 

Alexander II was succeeded by his oldest surviving son, who became Tsar Alexander III (1845-94; reigned: 1881-94).  Tsar Alexander II had begun some significant governmental reforms which, while being conservative by most standards, were nonetheless seen as promising.  (We should remember that Alexander II had freed the serfs in 1861.)

But Tsar Alexander III not only abandoned his father’s plans for further reforms, he became an even more autocratic ruler than his predecessor had been.  He also had a long reach.

In the very year in which he ascended to the imperial throne, the Russian emperor requested that the Swiss government order Kropotkin, as a dangerous revolutionary, to leave the country.  The Russian anarchist and his wife moved back to France.

From the frying pan into the fire.  On 22 December 1882, the French police arrested Kropotkin on charges of organizing explosions in Lyon . Once again under pressure from the Russian government, Kropotkin was tried in Lyon in January 1883 on charges of being a member of the International (which was dissolved in 1876) and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Protests by left-wing members of the French parliament didn’t help and a petition signed by prominent public figures such as Herbert Spencer; Victor Hugo; Ernest Renan (1823-92), French philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar and critic, and historian of religion; English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), and others, didn’t help either.

Before the trial, and for two months after it, Kropotkin was in a Lyon prison, then in mid-March, he was transferred with a number of other prisoners from the Lyon action to the central prison in Clairvaux in Ville-sous-la-Ferté in northeastern France.  

During his first year of imprisonment, Kropotkin’s health deteriorated with pain in his side, scurvy, and malaria. Thanks to the efforts of Sofya Grigoryevna, who took care of her husband throughout the entire four years of his internment, the conditions of his detention soon improved. 

He had the opportunity to work while interned and wrote an English article, “What Geography Ought To Be,” first published in 1885 in The Nineteenth Century, a British monthly literary magazine.  In mid-January 1886, prompted by the protests of the leftist French Deputies and a number of public figures, Kropotkin was freed.

In the spring, he was invited to Britain by British anarchists Henry Seymour (1861–1938) and Charlotte Wilson (1854-1944) and he moved with his family to England, where he lived until 1917.  The three worked on Seymour’s newspaper The Anarchist.  Soon, Wilson and Kropotkin split with Seymour and founded their own anarchist newspaper, Freedom, which still publishes in London to this day.

I think it’s time to make a distinction I was saving until a brief discussion of Pyotr Kropotkin’s politics and writings.  I’ve passed over an introduction till now because it seemed interruptive before.  It has to do with the underlying cause of Kropotkin’s split with Henry Seymour. 

Both men were anarchists, entirely committed to the philosophy.  The hitch is that there are many kinds of anarchism—sects, if you will.  Now, I’m not going to go into the details of the differences among them; I will save that for the broader political discussion [see Part 2, coming up]. 

I don’t even want to define anarchy more than very superficially yet.  I’ll just say now that anarchism is a political philosophy that posits that all forms of involuntary rule or government are undesirable, unnecessary, or unethical, and that society could function without a ruler or involuntary government, that is, a state. 

In every issue of Freedom, a newspaper Kropotkin co-founded in 1886, the editors printed this mission statement (italics are mine):

Anarchists work towards a society of mutual aid and voluntary co-operation.  We reject all government and economic repression.

Under the rubric of “anarchism,” there are variations.  Pyotr Kropotkin was, for instance, an anarcho-communist, or anarchist communist.  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the Frenchman whose writings were Kropotkin’s introduction to anarchism, was a mutualist and Mikhail Bakunin followed collectivist anarchism.    

The Englishman Henry Seymour was an individualist anarchist while his erstwhile colleague, Charlotte Wilson, subscribed to anarchist socialism—she was once described as “the one ascertained anarchist Fabian.”  (Wilson was a member of the Fabian Society, a British socialist organization of which Irish  playwright George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950, was also a member.  It was Shaw to whom Wilson’s sobriquet was ascribed.)

Those are only the forms of anarchism espoused by people who’ve been mentioned prominently in this profile.  There are probably dozens of permutations of anarchism in the western world.  And it will probably surprise no one that the world of anarchism was like the Balkan Peninsula before World War I. 

With 11 little nations or parts of nations, all kingdoms or duchies, crammed together in one tiny area, all with conflicting interests and alliances, they were always squabbling with one another. That was called balkanization—and that’s what went on among anarchists.  Since any kind of overall authority, even just a coordinating committee, was anathema to the very concept of anarchism, internecine disputes festered and eventually (if you’ll pardon the expression) blew up.

While living in London in the latter part of the 1880’s, Kropotkin became friendly with a number of prominent British socialists, including William Morris (1834-96), a textile designer, poet, novelist, translator, and socialist activist; James Mavor (1854-1925), a Scottish-Canadian economist and chairman of the Scottish district of the Socialist League; and Shaw, who, in addition to his renowned writings, was a polemicist and political activist.  During this period, Pyotr Alekseyevich and Sofya Grigoryevna’s daughter Aleksandra Petrovna was born on 15 April 1887.

In 1897, Kropotkin’s friend Mavor, who had moved to Canada in 1892 to take a post at the University of Toronto, invited him to speak at a conference there.  Kropotkin proposed the idea of ​​a geological relationship of Canada and Siberia.    

The Russian expatriate crossed the border into the United States in October 1897 to meet with fellow anarchists and in Jersey City, New Jersey, on 23 October, a group of journalists asked Kropotkin for a statement on his political beliefs.  He replied:

I am an anarchist and am trying to work out the ideal society, which I believe will be communistic in economics, but will leave full and free scope for the development of the individual.  As to its organization, I believe in the formation of federated groups for production and distribution.  The social democrats are endeavouring to attain the same end, but the difference is that they start from the centre—the State—and work toward the circumference, while we endeavour to work out the ideal society from the simple elements to the complex.

In New York City, Kropotkin spoke to an audience of thousands on the dangers of state socialism at a meeting on 24 October 1897 chaired by John Swinton (1829–1901), a Scottish-American journalist, newspaper publisher, and orator. One member of the audience remarked that “his evident sincerity and his kindness held the attention of his audience and gained its sympathy.”

The talk, entitled “Socialism in Its Modern Development,” took place at Chickering Hall on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 18th Street in the entertainment district around Union Square (in what’s now known as the Flatiron District).  In the words of one reporter, Kropotkin stated, in a simple expression of his core belief: “Mankind was not so bad but that it could be trusted; and if left alone people could take care of themselves.”

Upon being asked several questions by socialists in the audience, the anarchist responded:

I do not see how Socialist government can be successful.  The Socialists copy the capitalistic form of government, and the difference between Communism and Socialism is the difference between day and night.

Kropotkin spoke at a large number of venues during his tour of the U.S.  Aside from his lecture at Chickering Hall in New York City, he spoke about his Siberian expedition at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., and the Odd Fellows Temple in Philadelphia.  He delivered a series of lectures on mutual aid (the basic principle of his political philosophy and the title of his best-known book) at the Lowell Institute in Boston.

In April 1901, the Russian anarcho-communist poked fun—in the words of Czech-American anarchist Hippolyte Havel (1871-1950), an associate of Emma Goldman (1869-1940)—at the “the porkocracy of Chicago” while a guest at that city’s famous Hull House, founded by settlement activist, reformer, social worker, and first female winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1931) Jane Addams (1860-1935).  He then gave a series of talks on mutual aid at the Twentieth Century Club, a women’s institute with affiliates in many U.S. cities. 

[This has been the first installment of my profile of the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin,  I pick up with Part 2, which continues Kropotkin’s biography and then covers his political philosophy and some of his writing, on Tuesday, 16 June.  Please return for the completion of “The Anarchist Prince.”

[A word or two about my spellings of Russian words and names.  It’s my practice to transliterate the Cyrillic spellings as closely as I can using the Latin alphabet.  Hence I write Aleksandr because it’s closer to the Cyrillic spelling than Alexander.  I make an exception for words or names that have become commonly rendered in a familiar way, such as the names of the Russian tsars like Nicholas or Alexander.

[Readers will find that many Russian words and (especially) names have multiple spellings in English, such as Pyotr Kropotkin, whose first name is also rendered as Piotr and even Peter.  (I won’t even go onto the additional variations that occur when transliterating Russian into other languages such as German or French!)  I try to be consistent, but the variations make looking the figures up difficult and confusing.]