Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel

John Wright is Documents Librarian at Queen’s University.

Peter Kropotkin was born in 1842 to one of Russia’s great aristocratic
families. A reluctant career officer, while in the army he became an
enthusiastic geographer and explorer, and a reform-minded administrator
who travelled in “liberal” company. However, by age 30, his
disenchantment with the Tsarist regime led him to renounce his career
and his nobility in favor of the struggle for political change. Caught
up in revolutionary circles, he was arrested. He escaped to the West,
not to return until the revolutions of 1917, some 40 years later. During
exile, he developed the tenets of Russian anarchism, best expressed in
Mutual Aid, The Conquest of Bread, and Fields, Factories and Workshops.
Kropotkin died in 1921, by which time the tide of the civil war had
turned in favor of the Bolsheviks.

That the anarchist Kropotkin is less well known than other members of
the Russian revolutionary pantheon is testimony to the maxim that the
victors write the history. This 1953 biography, of which this is a
re-issue, was the first real attempt to address this discrepancy.

Peter Kropotkin is an alloyed pleasure. The authors succeed in bringing
empathy and understanding to their subject. Recent biographical practice
too often substitutes length and overwhelming documentation for
character, theme, and analysis—the re-creation rather than the
observation of life. This book is a welcome counterpoint to the trend.
Unfortunately, however, this work has no documentation in the text.
Without the support of a scholarly apparatus, the chronology and context
of Kropotkin’s life and work becomes less clear; some of the
authors’ contentions lose weight. Another point: the text seems
unchanged from the previous (1971) edition. To have missed the
opportunity to incorporate new work and to redress the lack of footnotes
seems a shame. There is, however, a brief but good annotated
bibliography for 1990.

Nonetheless, it is an interesting and well-written account. It suffers
from only a touch of hyperbole, which Woodcock ascribes to the
pioneering enthusiasm of the 1953 original. Anyone interested in
nineteenth-century Russia, anarchism, or Russian revolutionary thought
will find this a lively read. But those needing documentary evidence may
have to turn elsewhere.