Peter Kropotkin

Pyotr Kropotkin (Moscow, 1842 - Dmitrov, 1921) was a Russian prince who became one of the leading theorists of anarchism. He is remembered above all as a champion of anarchist communism and for his theory of mutual aid, but he first made his name as a geographer and naturalist. His importance lies in joining the scientific rigour of his era to a political project of a society without a state.

He was born into a noble family of landowners. By order of Tsar Nicholas I he entered the Page Corps in St Petersburg, an elite military academy, where he disliked the discipline but received an intense scientific and liberal education. After serving as an officer, he chose a posting in Siberia in 1862, partly to escape court life. There he took part in geographical expeditions through Manchuria and northern Siberia, and saw at close quarters the cruelty of the penal system and the corruption of the administration. An exiled poet, Mikhail Mikhailov, introduced him to the ideas of Proudhon, which shaped much of his later thinking.

His scientific work was notable. He argued that eastern Siberia formed part of a large plateau rather than a set of independent ridges, and he challenged the speculations of Humboldt, which relied on an Alpine model. He also held that the ice sheet had reached central Europe, a view that at first provoked controversy. By about 1872, however, he had decided to leave active science for politics. He travelled to Switzerland, came into contact with the Jura Federation, which was inspired by Bakunin, and became an anarchist.

Back in St Petersburg he joined the Chaikovsky Circle, but in 1874 the political police arrested him. He was held in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he was able to continue his work thanks to the efforts of his colleagues at the Geographical Society and of his brother. He escaped in 1876 and spent the next forty-one years in exile, in Switzerland, in France, where he was imprisoned for almost four years, and in England. In those decades he wrote, lectured and published widely on anarchism and geography.

His central idea was a decentralised communist society, without a central government, made up of voluntary associations of self-governing communities and enterprises run by their workers. For Kropotkin, the state was not needed to organise social life, and cooperation was a driving force of progress. In The Conquest of Bread he argued that material abundance could support distribution according to need. In Fields, Factories and Workshops he proposed combining agriculture and industry to end the division between manual and intellectual labour. In Mutual Aid, his principal scientific work, he contended that cooperation matters to evolution as much as competition, against harsher Darwinian readings. He also left an unfinished study of anarchist ethics.

He returned to Russia after the February Revolution of 1917, but he was disappointed by the Bolshevik version of state socialism, which he saw as incompatible with his project. He died in 1921. His influence reached European anarchism and the debate about cooperation in nature, and his writings are still read as a reference point for anarchist communism.