Profile for Pyotr Kropotkin from The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (page 1)

[close] Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842 - 1921) was a Russian activist, scientist, and philosopher, who advocated anarchism.

Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, he attended a military school and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France (where he was imprisoned for almost 4 years) and in England. He returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917 but was disappointed by the Bolshevik form of state socialism.

Kropotkin was a proponent of a decentralised communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, and left unfinished a work on anarchist ethical philosophy.