"It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us." - Anarchism It's Philosophy and Ideal (1898 ) - Peter Kropotkin
13th February 1921, marks the funeral of zoologist, evolutionary theorist, revolutionary and,Anarchist Philosopher Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin (Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин) which took place at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Kropotkin was born on 9 December 1842 into an aristocratic Russian family, and received a privileged education,as a member of the Russian ruling class but became recognised as a brilliant student. At he age of 15,he entered the Corps of Pages in St Petersburg, an elite Court institution attached to the imperial household. In 1862 he was promoted to the army and utilising the privilege that members of the Corps could choose their regiment, he decided to reject the career expected of him by his family and instead joined a Siberian Cossack regiment in the recently annexed Amur district.In Siberia he saw the horrors of the Tsarist penal system and witnessed the poverty and injustice, caused by it, and became frustrated by the central bureaucracy and local corruption in St Petersburg.
Around this time, he also became aware of anarchist ideas there, when the exiled poet Mikhail Mikhailov gave him a copy of Proudhon's System of Economic Contradictions to read. In 1871, he renounced his aristocratic heritage in 1871,abandoning material success and would spend his life in the Spirit of Revolt that is the title of one of his famous essays, he became convinced that the government was unable as well as unwilling to make meaningful change in the lives of peasants and workers. Kropotkin turned toward anarchism to find a viable path to social change. He believed that capitalism and authoritarianism creates artificial scarcity, which leads to privilege and inequality.
He worked with the Jura workers’ federation in Switzerland, smuggled forbidden radical literature back to Russia, and joined a workers’ circle in Russia, his political activities earned him a sentence in a St. Petersburg prison, which ended in a spectacular and risky escape in June 1876. Prison in Switzerland and France reinforced his views on repressive authority and helped forge his belief in the need for non-violent, humane, and less centralized forms of government. His 1877 plea for decent treatment in prisons, which he called “universities of crime,” was decades ahead of its time.
Like many an exile, after extensive travel across Europe, he ended up in England 1886 in the midst of radical debate across Western Europe. He moved between London, the south coast of England, and Switzerland, endlessly torn between debate in the city and clean country air for his prisonruined health. When not creating revolutionary theory, he wrote copiously, undertook technical translations, and contributed the definitive treatise on Anarchism for the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
He continued his writing on science in numerous journals at this time as well as contributing to the anarchist press. An expanded second English-language edition of Modern Science and Anarchism appeared in December 1912, published to mark Kropotkin’s 70th birthday by the group around Freedom. Age had not diminished his hopes or activity, and he still stressed that the task of anarchists was “to aid the people to display in full its creative powers for working out new institutions, leading to free Anarchist-Communism” against the “two enemies” of Capital and the State.Through his many writings he attempted to put anarchism on a scientific basis, and pointed out the economical and social value of the human being, and the failure of Capitalism to reach this objective.He saw human co-operation as ultimately being driven not by government, but by groups of individuals, working together, in order to make the world a better place. He combined the qualities of a scientist and moralist with those of a revolutionary organiser and propogandist. He lived completely by his words and deeds, and was also known for his kindliness and towering intellect.
Kropotkin was a man of his time, a man of 19th-century science, philosophy, who was one of the great naturalists of his day, a sensibility that developed in him in congruence not only with his cientific interests but through lived experience,.In his book Mutual Aid contended on the basis of his own naturalist research in Siberia that cooperation was as much a part of animal and human behavior as conflict. He was also in the forefront of challenging the prevailing Darwinian principle that evolution was strictly about competition and the survival of the nastiest.
Given Kropotkin’s belief that brutality, unbending repression, and inhumanity were the inevitable products of a centralized state, it is no coincidence that he was most impressed with commune -based democracy in Switzerland and with the self-help and cooperative movements in England.With the advent of the Russian Revolution, Kropotkin approved of soviets as giving the masses a voice but was appalled to see them subordinated to the direction of the Party. Like most anarchists, he held that replacing one autocracy with another, monarchy or republic, solves nothing, and that progress and justice for the working people can grow only from local power, cooperation, and equality. Returning to Russia after the 1917 Revolution, he was honored by the new government, who desiring to legitimize Bolshevik authority with the reputation of a universally respected anarchist, Lenin maintained cordial relations with Kropotkin; Bolshevik propagandists took advantage of this to publicize the lie that Kropotkin was more or less in favor of the Bolshevik program. In fact, Kropotkin opposed their authoritarian program, as he made clear in a series of statements and protests. Far from endorsing Lenin’s seizure of state power, Kropotkin is quoted as saying “Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none. He is a madman, an immolator, wishful of burning, and slaughter, and sacrificing.”
Kropotkin died of pneumonia on February 8,1921 in the city of Dimitrov in Russia. In the 1920s Roger N. Baldwin summed up Kropotkin this way.
“Kropotkin is referred to by scores of people who knew him in all walks of life as “the noblest man” they ever knew. Oscar Wilde called him one of the two really happy men he had ever met…In the anarchist movement he was held in the deepest affection by thousands–“notre Pierre” the French workers called him. Never assuming position of leadership, he nevertheless led by the moral force of his personality and the breadth of his intellect. He combined in extraordinary measure high qualities of character with a fine mind and passionate social feeling. His life made a deep impression on a great range of classes–the whole scientific world, the Russian revolutionary movement, the radical movements of all schools, and in the literary world which cared little or nothing for science or revolution.”
Kropotkin’s funeral, on February 13, 1921, was arguably the last anarchist demonstration in Russia against Bolshevik tyranny, until the fall of the Soviet Union with thousands in attendance with the tacit approval of Lenin himself,making this funeral ceremony into a demonstration of unmistakable significance.Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman and many other prominent anarchists from abroad participated. They managed to exert enough pressure on the Bolshevik authorities to compel them to release seven anarchist prisoners for the day; the Bolsheviks claimed they that would have released more but the others supposedly refused to leave prison. Victor Serge recounts how Aaron Baron, one of the anarchists who was temporarily released, addressed the mourners from Kropotkin’s graveside before vanishing forever into the jaws of the Soviet carceral system.
When Kropotkin died, a few weeks before the Kronstadt rebellion, the repression of anarchists in Russia had not been completed yet.but in the course of the same year, this movement was to be smothered by the Bolshevik party, its leaders arrested, killed, on the run or deported.
Being the foremost opponents of tyranny, the anarchists were among the first victims of Soviet prisons and firing squads. Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and many others tried to warn the world of the horrors of Lenin and Stalin, but most people only learned about the gulag archipelago much later from Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn.
Deportation befell Grigori Maximov (1893-1950) who had represented the Russian Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists at Kropotkins burial. Maximov arranged for a photo report of the ceremony that started at the home of the deceased in the village of Dmitrov and ended at the graveyard of the Novodevičy monastery, with an in-state and procession in Moscow in between. The photo report was meant to become a memorial album (Berlin 1922) to 'make humanity acquainted with the work of Kropotkin'.
In the video footage above, the film shows the procession from Kropotkin’s home to his final burial place. in one of the country’s great monasteries. The subtitles name the Anarchist great and good attending the funeral, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. There were also delegates from the Ukrainian Federation of Anarchists, exiled Anarchists from America, whose banner, in English, can be seen, and even some Mensheviks and, I think, Socialist-Revolutionaries. It was a truly mass meeting, perhaps the most touching moment of the documentary is at 7:40, which has footage of anarchist political prisoners temporarily released in order to attend the funeral. A number of them never had another free day in their lives.
Kropotkin's message that mutual aid and social cohesion should be encouraged over massive social inequity and the exaltation of the individual over society is as relevant to the central debates of our time as it was to the debates of his time. His legacy lives on, in the actions of the many who have been inspired by him and in his many writings, all of which are freely available online, a rich source of ideas for libertarians today.
Kropotkin, Emma Goldman summarised, “gave up his title and wealth for the cause of humanity. He did more: since becoming an anarchist he had forgone a brilliant scientific career to be better able to devote himself to the development and interpretation of anarchist philosophy. He became the most outstanding exponent of anarchist-communism, its clearest thinker and theoretician. He was recognised by friend and foe as one of the greatest minds and most unique personalities of the nineteenth century.”
Further Reading :-
Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel" (1996) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, Black Rose Books, 1996
Cahm, Caroline. 1989. Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism 1871-1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
See also Emma Goldman's Death And Funeral Of Peter Kropotkin
