Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (67 page)

While elaborating his anarchist philosophy in England, Kropotkin did not change any of his fundamental ideas about anarchy or communism. He did however shift his ground on two traditional anarchist principles — internationalism and anti-militarism. He had espoused both as a young man, and both had played a key part in the European anarchist movement. In the 1890s however he began to emphasize the importance of national character, and argued that the Marxist Social Democrats and the political regime in Germany expressed the country’s militaristic and authoritarian nature. At the same time, he showed a marked preference for France, with
its revolutionary tradition, and Britain, with its liberal culture which tolerated political refugees. He always considered France and Britain to be the two nations most likely to have a social revolution, while he put down Germany’s defeat of France in 1871 as the chief cause of the failure of revolution in Europe. He wrote to a friend that ‘Since 1871 Germany has become a standing menace to European progress … the chief support and protection of reaction.’
⁸⁶

After 1905 Kropotkin began to call for further military conscription in preparation for war against Germany. When the war broke out in 1914, he gave immediate support for the allies. He wrote to Jean Grave, editor of
Les Temps Nouveaux
: ‘Arm yourself! Make a superhuman effort — this is the only way France will reconquer the right and strength to inspire the people of Europe with her civilization and her ideas of liberty, communism and fraternity.’
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As a result, he isolated himself from the mainstream of the anarchist movement which wanted nothing to do with this ‘ruling class’ conflict. His old friends at
Freedom
in London tried to remind anarchists of their principles of anti-militarism, arguing that supporting the allied governments in the war was tantamount to supporting Statism, patriotism and nationalism. As late as 1916, Malatesta accused Kropotkin, along with Grave and others, of being ‘Pro-government Anarchists’ in their wish to see the complete defeat of Germany.
⁸⁸
Trotsky noted drily that ‘the superannuated anarchist Kropotkin, who had a weakness ever since youth for the populists, made use of the war to disavow everything he had been teaching for almost half a century.’
⁸⁹

Unrepentant, the ailing geographer turned increasingly towards his homeland for inspiration. He had not returned to Russia since his escape from prison in 1876, but had kept up his contacts. His works, especially
The Conquest of Bread
, had been widely distributed there.

To most of his contemporaries, Kropotkin appeared mainly as a European, but during his two visits to North America, he appeared very much a representative of Russian culture. After the first trip in 1897, when he travelled as a delegate of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to a convention in Toronto, he helped the persecuted Dukhobors find a home in Canada. During his second visit in 1901, he gave a series of lectures which were later published as
Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature
(1905). He was enthusiastically received in North America and lent considerable impetus to the burgeoning anarchist movement there; his
Appeal to the Young
was particularly influential. During both tours, he took every opportunity to make his views known to the Press, who seemed more interested in his aristocratic roots than his philosophy. To reporters in Jersey City in 1897, he insisted:

On hearing of the outbreak of the Revolution in 1905, Kropotkin was ready to return to Russia immediately to support the revolutionary cause, and even practised his marksmanship at the age of sixty-three. He wrote a long article ‘The Revolution in Russia’ for the prestigious
Nineteenth-Century
journal describing the situation in his homeland and hoping that it would spark off a social revolution which would lead to anarchism. After the crushing of the revolt, he worked with the Parliamentary Russian Committee in London to help the victims of the reaction and produced a booklet called
The Terror in Russia
(1909).

By this stage, he was working mainly with the Social Revolutionary Party, a member of which married his daughter. The events inspired him to finish
The Great French Revolution 1789–1793
(1909) which he had been working on and thinking about for twenty years. In its final form, it focused on popular action during the period and spelled out the dangers of the Jacobin dictatorship.

When the revolution broke out again in 1917, there was nothing to hold him back. He returned to his homeland after more than forty years of exile. He contacted the liberals in the Provisional Government and was even offered a cabinet post as Minister of Education by the moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky, although he was still enough of an anarchist to reject the offer. At the all-party State Conference in Moscow in August 1917, he called for a federal republic in Russia and a renewed offensive against Germany. But when the Bolsheviks seized power in November, he commented prophetically: ‘This buries the revolution.’

The growing dictatorial powers of the new regime led Kropotkin to renew contact with the Russian anarchist movement. He wrote to the Danish critic Georg Brandes in April 1919 that the Bolsheviks were acting like the Jacobins by socializing the land, industry and commerce by dictatorial methods: ‘Unfortunately, the method by which they seek to establish communism like Babeuf’s in a strongly centralized state makes success absolutely impossible and paralyzes the constructive work of the people.’
⁹¹

In order to check the worst excesses, Kropotkin met Lenin in the spring of 1919. In their conversation, Kropotkin complained of the persecution of
the co-operatives and of the bureaucratized local authorities which had been established, commenting ‘Anywhere you look around, a basis for non-authority flares up.’ Lenin for his part declared that the anarcho-syndicalist movement was harmful and made clear that the only kind of struggle that can be crowned with success is in the masses, ‘only through the masses and with the masses, from underground work to massive red terror if it is called for, to civil war, to a war on all fronts, to a war of all against all…’
⁹²

Lenin agreed to receive letters from the old anarchist describing any injustices. Kropotkin took up the opportunity in March 1920, arguing that the dictatorship of the Communist Party was harmful to the creation of a new socialist system. Without the participation of local forces, without an organization ‘from below’ of the peasants and workers themselves, it seemed impossible to build a new life. Russia had become a Soviet Republic only in name, Kropotkin warned prophetically: ‘at present it is not the Soviets which rule in Russia but the party committees’; and if the situation were to continue ‘the very word “socialism” will become a curse, as happened in France with the idea of equality for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins’.
⁹³
Again in December of the same year, Kropotkin complained to Lenin that the practice of taking hostages by the Red Army in the civil war represented a return to the worst period of the Middle Ages and was tantamount to a restoration of torture.
⁹⁴
But his pleas fell on deaf ears. Lenin soon became tired of the letters and told one of his associates: ‘I am sick of this old fogy. He doesn’t understand a thing about politics and intrudes with his advice, most of which is very stupid.’
⁹⁵

In the following year, Kropotkin wrote a
Letter to the Workers of the West
, in which he argued against foreign intervention in Russia which would only strengthen the ‘dictatorial tendencies’ of the Bolshevik rulers.
⁹⁶
In
What to Do
?, he further argued, like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, that the Bolsheviks were ‘perpetuating horrors’ and ruining the whole country. He had returned to the full-blown anarchism of his maturity.
⁹⁷

Kropotkin moved in 1920 from Moscow to Dmitrov, a small village forty miles from the metropolis. It symbolized his isolation from the Revolution. In his despair, he returned to his work on ethics. He also grew increasingly fatalistic and maintained that the revolution Russia had gone through was not ‘the sum total of the efforts of separate individuals, but a natural phenomenon, independent of human will’.
⁹⁸
The only thing one could do was to try and lessen the force of the approaching reaction.

When Kropoktin died in February 1921, the Bolshevik government offered a State funeral, but his family refused. As it happened, his funeral proved to be the last great anarchist demonstration in Russia, for later that year the movement was crushed. Although the house where he was born became the Kropotkin Museum, it was closed down in 1938. His anarchist
writings were not available in Russia, but his memory lived on in the name of a metro station, of a town in Caucasia, and of the mountain range in Siberia which he was the first to cross in 1866. More recently, however, in the
post-glasnost
era in the Soviet Union, his insights and recommendations have been increasingly appreciated. It may well be that in a future federation of independent republics Kropotkin, and not Lenin, will have the last word.

Kropotkin undoubtedly appears as one of the most attractive of anarchist thinkers and his influence has been acknowledged by people as diverse as Kōtoku in Japan, Pa Chin in China, Gandhi in India, and Lewis Mumford and Paul Goodman in the United States. He was a major inspiration of anarchist movements in Russia and Britain, and helped shape those in France, Belgium and Switzerland. He remains the greatest exponent of a decentralized society based on a harmonious balance between agriculture and industry. His call for ‘integrated education’ of mental and manual skills still demands attention. His pragmatic and inventive approach is appreciated by those who wish to develop alternative institutions within the shell of the existing State and encourage the further development of libertarian tendencies within society. His keen awareness that society is as much a part of nature as the individual is part of society makes him a forerunner of modern social ecology.

Although Kropotkin could be tediously repetitive at times, his clear and simple style makes him eminently readable and easily understood. While dealing with complex philosophical arguments or difficult scientific data, he always addressed the common person. He illustrated his arguments by lively examples, whether it was the Lifeboat Association to show how successful voluntary organizations can be, international railways to demonstrate how complex agreements to provide a service can be negotiated without a central authority, or the British Museum Library to explain how distribution could be organized according to need in a communist society.

Oscar Wilde described Kropotkin as ‘a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia’ and thought that his was one of the two most perfect lives he had come across (the other being Verlaine’s).
⁹⁹
Such a romantic and extravagant view was clearly unfounded. But by all accounts, Kropotkin was generous and considerate, and possessed great intelligence, sincerity and warmth. He was always ready to go out of his way to help those in need, whether they were his friends or strangers. Although he was born into Russia’s highest aristocracy, he gave up the privileges of his rank and wealth to throw in his lot with the poor and oppressed. It led not only to spells in prison but exile for most of his life. Yet despite personal difficulties, he continued to work and write for what he considered to be the cause of freedom until the very end of his life.

To many Kropotkin appeared good without knowing it and he is often portrayed as a kind of gentle angel, or, as Paul Avrich calls him, ‘a saint without God’.
¹⁰⁰
But this picture is misleading. Kropotkin was never a strict pacifist. He longed for the coming revolution to end oppression and injustice, but recognized that it would inevitably be violent. He always believed that idealism had to be translated into action, and welcomed serious acts of revolt which might trigger off an insurrection, and, of course, he recognized the revolutionary potential of syndicalism and the labour movement.
¹⁰¹
He may have been disturbed by terrorism and the taking of individual life, but he refused to condemn the terrorists, explaining their behaviour in terms of a desperate reaction to inhuman conditions. His growing nationalist sentiments led him to take sides during the First Word War, a position which was tantamount to accepting militarism, nationalism and Statism.

At the same time, Kropotkin rejected the kind of deceit and manipulation practised by Bakunin, preferring open and sincere propaganda. In his personal and revolutionary morality, he did not accept the idea that the end justified the means; on the contrary, the means inevitably shaped the ends. It was this awareness that led him into a head-on collision with Lenin over the direction of the Russian Revolution.

Kropotkin’s great value as a thinker lies in his endeavour to demonstrate that anarchism represents existing tendencies in society towards political liberty and economic equality. He further tried to adopt the methodology of the exact sciences in order to show that all the conclusions of anarchism could be scientifically verified. As a result, he attempted to prove that it is a philosophy which finds confirmation in evolutionary theory, sociology, anthropology and history.