Before he was an anarchist, Kropotkin mapped Siberia's plateaus and won a gold medal
Peter Kropotkin was a prince's son and a page to the tsar, then an explorer whose Siberian surveys earned a mountain range his name. A trip to Switzerland converted him to anarchism. He escaped a Russian prison, spent 41 years in exile, and argued in Mutual Aid that cooperation drives evolution.
Kropotkin was born in Moscow on 9 December 1842 into a family descended from the princes of Smolensk; his father owned serfs in three provinces. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was three, and he was raised largely by a German nurse and the estate's servants, whose kindness left him with lasting sympathy for the poor. At eight he caught Tsar Nicholas I's eye at a ball and was chosen for the elite Page Corps, where he later rose to serve Alexander II as a personal page.
In 1862 he picked an unfashionable posting with the Amur Cossacks in east Siberia. There an exiled poet pointed him to Proudhon, and official promises broken to Polish prisoners convinced him administrative reform was futile. He led a disguised reconnaissance across Manchuria and, on an 1866 expedition, gathered measurements showing that the region between the Urals and the Pacific is a plateau rather than a plain. The Russian Geographical Society awarded him a gold medal, and the find helped open the Lena gold fields. He later studied glaciation in Scandinavia.
A 1872 visit to the Jura Federation in Switzerland, followers of Bakunin, converted him on the spot. Back in St Petersburg he joined the Chaikovsky Circle and drafted a plan for a stateless society with common property and labour vouchers instead of money. Arrested in March 1874, scandalously for a former page, he was held in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the tsar allowed him books to finish his glacier report. In June 1876 he escaped from a prison hospital.
In exile he married Sofia Ananieva-Rabinovich, founded the Geneva paper Le Révolté in 1879, and became the leading voice of anarchist communism: distribution by need, not by work. He spent nearly four years in a French prison and settled in England. The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid followed, and he wrote the Encyclopaedia Britannica's article on anarchism. Returning after the 1917 revolution, he was disappointed by the Bolsheviks and died on 8 February 1921.
Source: Peter Kropotkin
