This is the autobiography of the anarchist Peter Kroptkin, from his birth in Moscow in 1842 through his life in exile in London in 1899, having survived and escaped from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, as well as a two year prison stint in France for his revolutionary agitations. His anti-authoritarian leanings, if not his anarchism, began at a young age, “In 1859 or early in 1860, I began to edit my first revolutionary paper. At that age, what could I be but a constitutionalist?—and my paper advocated the necessity of a constitution for Russia.” At around this time, Kroptkin also refused to accept the honorific “Prince” before his name. Although he was admitted into the esteemed Corps of Pages by order of the Tsar himself, Kroptkin did not follow the typical career path, “That I should not enter a regiment of the Guard, and my life to parades and court balls, I had settled long before. My dream was to enter the university—to study, to live the student’s life. That meant, of course, to break entirely from my father, whose ambitions were quite different, and to rely for my living upon what I might earn by means of lessons…. My thoughts turned more and more toward Siberia.”
After serving with the Tsar’s army in Siberia, Kroptkin travelled for the first time to western Europe. He astutely sized up the differences in national characters, “Two days before I had left St Petersburg thickly covered with snow, and now, in Middle Germany, I walked without an overcoat along the railway platform, in warm sunshine, admiring the budding flowers…. I never before had realized so vividly what Russia’s northern position meant, and how the history of the Russian nation had been influenced by the fact that the main centres of its life had to develop in high latitudes, as far north as the shores of the Gulf of Finland. Only then I fully understood the uncontrollable attraction which southern lands have exercised on the Russians, the colossal efforts which they have made to reach the Black Sea, and the steady pressure of the Siberian colonists southward, further into Manchuria.”
By 1872, Kroptkin was a full-blown anarchist revolutionary. He was opposed to autocracy, but also to the centralizing tendencies of the communists and social-democrats. He refused to believe that infiltrating the government, even with good men, could produce a better life for the workingman. “The middle-class revolutionists of the old school who had entered the International, imbued as they were with the notions of the centralized, pyramidal secret organizations of earlier times, had introduced the same notions into the Workingman’s Association…. Marx and Engels were its leading spirits…. The general council was not satisfied with playing the part of a correspondence bureau; it strove to govern the movement…. In 1871, the general council, supported by a few delegates, decided to direct the forces of the association towards electoral agitation. It set people thinking about the evils of any government, however democratic its origin. This was the spark of anarchism.”
Kroptkin explains his anarchist philosophy, “Nihilism is confused with terrorism…. The Nihilist declared war upon what may be described as ‘the conventional lies of civilized mankind’. Absolute sincerity was his distinctive feature, and in the name of that sincerity he gave up, and asked others to give up, those superstitions, prejudices, habits, and customs which their own reason could not justify. He refused to bend before any authority except that of reason…. He broke, of course, with the superstitions of his fathers, and in his philosophical conceptions he was a positivist, an agnostic, a Spencerian evolutionist, or a scientific materialist; and while he never attacked the simple, sincere religious belief which is a psychological necessity of feeling, he bitterly fought against the hypocrisy that leads people to assume the outward mask of a religion which they continually throw aside as useless ballast…. Nihilism, with its affirmation of the rights of the individual and its negation of all hypocrisy, was but a first step toward a higher type of men and women, who are equally free, but live for a great cause.”
By 1875, Kroptkin had been arrested as a traitor to the Tsar and locked up in the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress. He describes a peculiar encounter, “The Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of Alexander II, who was inspecting the fortress, entered my cell, followed only by his aide-de-camp…. ‘How is it possible, Kroptkin, that you, a page de chambre, a sergeant of the corps of pages, should be mixed up in this business, and now be here in this horrible casemate?’ ‘Every one has his own opinions,’ was my reply…. Thoughts went whirling in my head. To play the part of Marquis Posa [from Verdi’s Don Carlos]? To tell the emperor through the grand duke of the desolation of Russia, the ruin of the peasantry, the arbitrariness of the officials, the terrible famines in prospect? To say that we wanted to help the peasants out of their desperate condition, to make them raise their heads—and by all this try to influence Alexander II? These thoughts followed one another in rapid succession, till at last I said to myself: ‘Never! Nonsense! They know all that. They are enemies of the nation, and such talk would not change them.’”
Kroptkin, having escaped from prison in Russia, was crisscrossing between Switzerland, France, and England, hounded by their respective security services and by Russian informers and infiltrators. Over the years, the split between the communists and anarchists had grown more distinct and hostile. “The conflict between the Marxists and the Bakunists was not a personal affair. It was the necessary conflict between the principles of federalism and those of centralization, the free Commune and the State’s paternal rule, the free action of the masses of the people and betterment of existing capitalist conditions through legislation—a conflict between the Latin spirit and the German Geist.”
Finally, Kroptkin summarizes his anarchist position and the long road ahead before the realization of his political dreams, “Long years of propaganda and a long succession of partial acts of revolt against authority, as well as a complete revision of the teachings now derived from history, would be required before men could perceive that they had been mistaken in attributing to their rulers and their laws what was derived in reality from their own sociable feelings and habits…. When I made a closer acquaintance with the working population and their sympathizers from the better educated classes, I soon realized that they valued their personal freedom even more than they valued their personal well-being…. For the very success of socialism the ideas of no-government, of self-reliance, of free initiative of the individual—of anarchism, in a word—had thus to be preached side by side with those of socialized ownership and production…. There is, in mankind, a nucleus of social habits, an inheritance from the past, not yet duly appreciated, which is not maintained by coercion and is superior to coercion. Upon it all the progress of mankind is based…. Anarchism represents more than a mere mode of action and a mere conception of a free society…. It is part of a philosophy, natural and social, which must be developed in a quite different way from the metaphysical or dialectic methods which have been employed in sciences dealing with man. I saw that it must be treated by the same methods as natural sciences.”
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