Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian geographer and anarchist theorist. The son of a noble family who first entered the service of Tsar Alexander II, Kropotkin encountered anarchist ideas while working in the Jura region on the French–Swiss border. On returning to Russia he became involved in revolutionary activity through the Populist movement, leading to his imprisonment in St Petersburg, 1874–6. After a spectacular escape from prison he remained in exile in Western Europe, returning to Russia after the 1917 Revolution.
Kropotkin’s anarchism was shaped by both his Russian experience, and particularly his admiration for the popular self-management that he believe to operate in the traditional Russian peasant commune, and by the desire to give his work a secure rational foundation grounded in the scientific spirit. His scientific anarchism, outlined in his most famous book, Mutual Aid ([1897]1902), amounted to a reworking of the Darwinian theory of evolution, in which cooperation and social solidarity, rather than competition and struggle, were portrayed as the principal means of human and animal development. Kropotkin was a powerful advocate of anarcho-communism, regarding capitalism and the state as interlinked obstacles to humankind’s natural sociability. In works such as Fields, Factories and Workshops ([1901]1912) and The Conquest of Bread ([1906]1926), he envisaged an anarchic society consisting of a collection of largely self-sufficient communes, and also addressed problems such as how crime and laziness would be contained within such a society.
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