Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin: The Prince Who Mapped Cooperation

In 1871 the Russian Geographical Society offered him its general secretaryship. He had earned it: his expedition through eastern Siberia had established that the land from the Urals to the Pacific was not a jumble of ridges but a plateau, a finding that redrew the map of Asia and won him a gold medal. A range in the Patom Highlands carries his name. He turned the post down to devote himself instead to the welfare of the peasantry. He was twenty-eight, a prince of the Rurikid line, and he had just decided to spend the rest of his life as an anarchist.

The Page and the Serfs

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was born on 9 December 1842 in Moscow, into the princely Kropotkin family of Smolensk. His father Alexey was an army officer who owned serfs across three provinces. His mother Ekaterina died of tuberculosis when he was three; a stepmother with a streak of jealous vindictiveness raised him and his older brother Alexander.

At eight, Nicholas I noticed him in costume at a court ball and marked him for the Corps of Pages in St Petersburg, the empire's most exclusive school. He emerged from it writing underground tracts arguing for a Russian constitution. In 1862, offered his pick of postings, he chose one nobody wanted: the Amur Cossacks in eastern Siberia.

Siberia made him twice over. The 1866 Olekminsk–Vitim expedition produced the plateau discovery and identified the Patom and Vitim Plateaus, which opened the Lena goldfields to commercial exploitation. He also worked on glaciation in Scandinavia, advancing theory on the Ice Age's reach across Europe. And it was in Siberia, through the exiled poet Mikhail Mikhailov and the writings of Proudhon, that he first encountered anarchism.

Conversion

The real turn came in 1872, on a three-month tour of Switzerland. Among the watchmakers of the Jura Federation — James Guillaume, Adhémar Schwitzguébel — he found an egalitarianism and independence of expression he described as an instant conversion. He narrowly missed Bakunin.

Back in St Petersburg he joined the Chaikovsky Circle and in November 1873 wrote a programme for a stateless society: common property, workers' control of factories, shared labour, labour vouchers instead of money. He rejected the conspiratorial methods associated with Nechayev, preferring propaganda that focused mass dissatisfaction. In March 1874 the Third Section arrested him — a scandal, given that the prisoner had been a page de chambre. He escaped from custody in June 1876.

Exile, Prison, and Freedom

In Switzerland he met Cafiero, Malatesta and the geographer Élisée Reclus, a lifelong friend, and in 1878 married Sofia Ananieva-Rabinovich. He founded *Le Révolté* in 1879 and used it to build anarchist communism: not payment by labour contributed, as Bakunin's collectivists proposed — that, he said, was a wage system under another name — but distribution according to need. "An Appeal to the Young" (1880) became his most-read pamphlet.

Switzerland expelled him in August 1881 over an article praising propaganda of the deed. France then tried him, in the mass Trial of the 66 in January 1883, and gave him the maximum five years. At Clairvaux he worked through scurvy and malaria; Reclus published his collected journalism as *Words of a Rebel*. He was released early in 1886, his health broken.

He settled at Harrow and stayed in England until 1917. He co-founded *Freedom*, the first English anarchist periodical, and sustained it for nearly thirty years. His daughter Alexandra was born in 1887. He wrote *In Russian and French Prisons*, *The Conquest of Bread* (1892), *Fields, Factories and Workshops* (1899), *Memoirs of a Revolutionist* and, in 1902, *Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution*. He kept publishing in the Geographical Journal and *Nature*, joined the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and moved among William Morris and W. B. Yeats.

The Argument With Darwin's Bulldog

*Mutual Aid* was written against the social Darwinists, and against Thomas Huxley in particular. Kropotkin's claim, drawn from field observation rather than metaphor, was that most animal species survive through association, and that in the struggle for existence the best weapon is cooperation rather than individual combat. Sociability, on this account, is an evolutionary factor, not a moral decoration on top of one.

The politics followed. Feudalism and capitalism, he argued, manufacture poverty and artificial scarcity to protect privilege; the alternative already exists in embryo in the mutual aid people practise anyway. He broke with Marxism over the labour theory of value and over the state: any post-revolutionary government, lacking local knowledge and needing to survive, would suppress further revolution and rebuild classes. "Revolution and Government are incompatible," he wrote; "one must destroy the other, no matter what name is given to government, whether dictator, royalty, or parliament."

Russia Again

His support for the Allied side in the First World War split the anarchist movement and cost him standing on the left. He returned to Russia in June 1917 and refused a cabinet seat from the Provisional Government. Lenin personally approved his residence in Moscow in 1918; he soon moved to Dmitrov. He warned Western workers in 1919 that centralised control would condemn the revolution. In 1920 he wrote to Lenin describing desperate conditions produced by bureaucratic organisation, and again to admonish him for a terror he considered needlessly destructive.

He died of pneumonia on 8 February 1921. His family refused a state funeral; the Bolsheviks permitted a public one, and it became the last major anarchist demonstration in Russia before the movement was suppressed.

Why Peter Is Called a Genius

Kropotkin has an unusually strong claim to the word in its literal sense, and contemporaries used something close to it: Emma Goldman called him her great teacher and one of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century, and Paul Avrich judged him the foremost libertarian theorist of the anarchist movement.

The distinctive quality is method transfer. He was a working scientist with genuine discoveries to his name — the plateau structure of northern Asia, contributions to glacial theory — who then applied a field naturalist's evidentiary discipline to a political question everyone else was arguing metaphorically. *Mutual Aid* is not a sermon about kindness; it is an argument from observed animal and human societies that cooperation is a selective advantage. Stephen Jay Gould later judged the position consistent with modern biological understanding, which is more than can be said for most Victorian political science. He also wrote systematic doctrine in plain language, which is why the books travelled from Makhno's Ukraine to Zapata's Mexico and into the town-planning of Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard.

The counter-case is real. *Mutual Aid* is a corrective and reads like one; its evidence is selected to answer Huxley, and it underweights competition rather than integrating it. His economics — the abolition of money and wages, distribution purely by need — was never tested and rests on an assumption of abundance he asserted more than demonstrated. His political judgement failed twice, badly: backing the Allies in 1914 fractured his own movement, and his return to Russia in 1917 produced letters to Lenin and no influence whatever. And there is an awkwardness in the origin story, since the surveys that made his scientific name also opened the Lena goldfields for the empire he despised.

Legacy

Mutual aid entered the language, and the biology stayed respectable. Anarchist communism as he formulated it — decentralised, voluntary, hostile to any revolutionary state — remains the reference version of the doctrine, and his prediction that a workers' government would recreate a ruling class was tested within his own lifetime, in the country where he died. Gerald Runkle thought his scholarly, near-saintly manner almost brought respectability to the movement. That is not nothing, for a prince who gave up a gold medal's worth of career to argue that ants and peasants know something about survival that empires do not.

Achievements

• Educated at Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Saint Petersburg University and Page Corps