George Woodcock - The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin

George Woodcock

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First Printed 1950

TO

MARIE LOUISE BERNERI

a true disciple of Kropotkin, who died on the 13th April, 1949

PRINTED AND BOUND IN ENGLAND BY HA2ELL WATSON AND VINEY LTD AYLESBURY AND LONDON

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PETER KROPOTKIN FrOfltlSpid*

PETER KROPOTKIN IN i86i IN pages UNIFORM facing page

ALEXANDER KROPOTKIN 112

SOPHIE AT THE TIME OF HER FIRST MEETING WITH

PETER KROPOTKIN 102

ELISEE RECLUS 208

ERRICO MALATESTA 320

PETER KROPOTKIN ON HIS DEATHBED 336

CHAPTER I

THE YOUTH

I

The forties of the last century, characterised in Western Europe by change and unrest, were for Russia, in those days always a few steps behind the civilised world, a time of uneasy stability, of waiting for an inevitable storm. In 1842, the year when Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin was born in a mansion of the old aristocratic quarter of Moscow, the military despotism of Nicholas I had hardened into a harsh tyranny that was to continue unbroken until the old Tsar died in disappointment, after the appalling Russian reverses during the Crimean War.

The basic structure of Russian society still maintained the belated feudalism imposed on it by Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. It could be divided into three mutually exclusive layers, separated by gulfs of tradition and custom. There were the aristocrats, consisting of the titled nobilityPrinces, Counts, and Barons in profusionand the hereditary noblemen like the fathers of Herzen and Bakunin, who had no titles and supplied the place in Russia of the English country gentlemen. The army, the land, the civil bureaucracy were all vested in the men of this top social layer who, speaking French almost as their native language and influenced by the Prussian methods of organisation favoured by the half-German Nicholas, were as yet, before the impact of Slavophil nationalism during the following decade, hardly conscious of the fact that they were Russian. Their conversation, their interests, their ways of living, their ideas of social efficiency were borrowed from Western Europe, although at times they bore these acquired possessions with all the awkwardness of the parvenu^ of the

African chieftain parading in the cast-off frock-coat and tophat of a European traveller. Even their feudal system was alien, for it was a negation of the primitive communal economy of the mfr, which still existed beside and beneath it, and'' represented the vital element in the cohesion of rural society.

Next to this motley nobility, many of whose members were merely poor clerks or half-pay officers who earned their livelihood by bribery and by sponging on their more fortunate neighbours, lay a great middle-class stratum of merchants anjj craftsmen. Free, but deprived of many of the privileges enjoyed by the nobility, these men were as a whole much more consciously Russian. At this period, however, their influence on affairs was slight, and, though they produced some intellectuals and outstanding professional men, they were engaged principally in exploiting the trading possibilities of the industrial and agrarian revolutions that were slowly beginning to reach Russia. Related to and dependent on them was an amorphous class of poorer freemen, artisans, petty traders, porters, still involved in a small-scale industry not yet dominated by the factory system which developed during the next half-century.

At the bottom of the creaking social pyramid moved the mass of the peasants, who represented the majority of the Russian people. Except in a few isolated districts they were serfs, bound to the landowners and saleable like goods and chattels. According to feudal theory they should have been linked inalienably to the land on which they lived; there was an old saying among them that the peasants belong to the lord, but the land belongs to the peasants. Feudalism in Russia, as elsewhere, had originally implied a reciprocity of obligations. But by the nineteenth century this had almost vanished, and, except for a few enlightened men, the landowners treated the souls under their care as movable property, selling them away from the land and sending them into the army at will. Theoretically, there was redress in law for wrongful ill-treatment of serfs, but in fact little real protection existed, and the Russian State, which always favoured the powerful, on the principle that concessions of any kind would merely encourage the poor to be rebellious, usually repulsed any attempt to temper the harshness of the masters. Even after their liberation the peasants generally took it for

granted that the bureaucratic machine would always work against them, and those who have read such books on the period as Herzen^s Memoirs will realise the heart-breaking difficulties facing the isolated men who tried to obtain some genuine improvement of conditions, even on a piecemeal scale. In reality, until the emancipation of i86i, the Russian peasants were usually slaves rather than serfs in the genuine feudal sense of a man tied to his land and bound to render certain services 4^4 return for his lords protection.