Kropotkin Centenary

Who was Petr Kropotkin? It is sad that someone who was so deservedly well known throughout Europe, in his day, is now neglected and almost forgotten.

Kropotkin was, and is, a founder of the doctrine and movement of anarchism, perhaps the founder of communist-anarchism.

He was also a real Russian prince, so regal in fact that his family was said to have had more right to the Russian throne than the Tsar. That was of course not an achievement, but a birthright, which he repudiated. But achievements he had many. He was an excellent soldier and horseman, a member of the mounted Cossack regiment who passed out with the highest distinction.

He was a scientist: a geographer, an ethologist, an anthropologist, and a social and political theorist, indeed the very ideal of a modern interdisciplinary thinker.

Yet Kropotkin was no academic, not even a public intellectual avant la lettre. He was a journalist and author, who published in the Times among many other places; an essayist and a pamphleteer who wrote for ordinary people. He was a polyglot who spoke and wrote fluently in several different languages. Among other things, in 1886 he co-founded the Freedom Press, the anarchist press still going to this day. (Nowadays that's called outreach or public engagement.)

Intellectually speaking he was a Darwinist, a scientific naturalist, a materialist, an anti-Hegelian and anti-idealist.

The philosopher Daniel Dennet once wrote a book on evolution called Darwin's Dangerous Idea. He should have read Kropotkin's ideas. They were dynamite. He argued for the complete abolition of the state, of law, including Marx's 'dictatorship of the proletariat', the socialist worker's state, and Lenin's vanguard party. He was implacably opposed to private property, to capital and capitalism, to religion and the church, and to all kinds of social hierarchy and oppression.

Kropotkin was a political activist and a revolutionary. He was arrested in St Petersburg in 1874, after lecturing on glaciers to the Russian Geographical society. He became a political prisoner - both in Russia and in France, one who escaped from prison in St Petersburg before making his way to Europe, Britain, eventually settling in Brighton for health reasons.

Kropotkin was well known in radical circles throughout Europe. In England he counted Keir Hardie and William Morris among his close friends. He counted George Bernard Shaw and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin among his admiring readers. At the same time, he was a husband and a father, a keen gardner, and a handy carpenter. A man of conviction, and a deeply moral man, who practiced what he preached: self-reliance, self-help, cooperation, hard work, and the virtues of manual labour and healthy eating.

He left Brighton during the war and returned first to London then to Russia. On his return to Petrograd he was welcomed by a crowd of 60,000. In 1919 he had an audience with Lenin, who though an admirer, largely ignored his ideas. He died on February 8, 1921. In England, where he had achieved fame and notoriety in equal measure, the Times announced his death a week before it occurred. A crowd of 100,000 mourned at his funeral. It was the last time that the black flags flew in Moscow.