Peter Kropotkin: The Life of an Anarchist

 

Prince Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin mastered the art of being himself, living according to his own beliefs and, if necessary, swimming against the tide. Despite the integrity of his character, Kropotkin's personality combined all that is most incompatible. A civil servant... with special assignments, a promising administrator, a talented military intelligence officer, he rejected a government career, initially for the sake of science. A philosopher, memoirist and journalist, geographer, geologist, biologist-naturalist, economist, ethnographer, sociologist, historian, literary scholar - this is all him, Kropotkin, almost a second Lomonosov. However, his true destiny became revolutionary agitation, arrests and prisons, a famous escape, and decades of life in exile. He became an enemy not only of the Russian autocracy but also of the "democratic" rulers of Europe, one of the true leaders of world anarchism and a leading theorist of anarchist communism, a thinker who can be considered a precursor to the theory of post-industrial society... The book by contemporary Russian historians Dmitry Rublev and Vadim Damye tells the story of a man who, in the late 19th - early 20th century, was a moral authority not only for many Russians but for people from all continents of the globe.