Peter Kropotkin

Russian geographer, biologist and anarchist-communist theorist (1842–1921), born in Moscow into one of Russia's oldest aristocratic families, a prince by birth who voluntarily renounced his title and the privileges of his class. Trained as an army officer and later as an explorer and geographer in Siberia, where he made original scientific contributions on Asian glaciation and orography, he abandoned a conventional scientific career to devote himself fully to revolution, following a crisis of conscience prompted by the social injustice he witnessed. Imprisoned in Russia and later in France for his anarchist activity, he spent decades in exile, chiefly in England, where he wrote most of his work. His most original and lasting theoretical contribution is Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), written as an explicit reply to Social Darwinist interpretations of the struggle for existence that emphasised competition alone: drawing on his own naturalist observations in Siberia and extensive zoological, anthropological and historical research, he argues that cooperation and mutual aid — no less than competition — are fundamental evolutionary factors, both among animals and in human societies from primitive clans to medieval guilds, and that modern civilisation, far from having outgrown these tendencies, has artificially suppressed them through the state and capitalism. In The Conquest of Bread (1892) he developed his economic vision of anarcho-communism, a society without private ownership of the means of production or centralised government, organised into federated communes meeting everyone's needs according to the principle 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs'. He returned to Russia after the February Revolution of 1917, but became deeply disillusioned with Bolshevik authoritarianism, and died in 1921 in Dmitrov, where his funeral was the last major public anarchist demonstration permitted in Soviet Russia.

6 works

• In Russian and French Prisons
• Memoirs of a Revolutionist
• Modern Science and Anarchism
• Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
• The Conquest of Bread
• The State: Its Historic Role