Tall with a bushy beard and a distinct Russian accent, this was the man who stood before an attentive audience at the Christian Institute in Aberdeen. It was March 1889. The theme of his talk was “What Geography Ought To Be”. Under the auspices of the Aberdeen branch of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society this was a highly respectable forum evident in the lecture being chaired by David Stewart of Banchory, manager of what was claimed to be the largest combworks in the world, a staunch Conservative and a future Lord Provost of Aberdeen. A close friend described the speaker as “an incomparable agitator . . . he becomes all passion when he mounts the platform . . . he trembles with emotion”.
The speaker was Prince Peter Kropotkin, one-time secretary to the Russian Geographical Society, famed for his explorations in Siberia and Manchuria in the 1860s and with an impeccable family background. Born into the Russian aristocracy in I842 he was brought up to admire and follow the moral and social codes of the privileged elite which ruled the country. His father’s estate was worked by 1200 serfs, women, men and children without even the freedom of wage labourers. “Owned” by their master this feudal condition was only abolished in the 1860s. For the first twenty years of his life Kropotkin could see at first hand the sometimes very brutal treatment of individual serfs and grasped the larger injustices of the system not to mention the sheer waste of human energies of serfdom.
Into the his mid-twenties Kropotkin followed the path expected of sons of the nobility: first educated by private tutors then on to military service and training which stressed the need for hierarchy, privilege and the supremacy of the Tsar. However, this structured social world did not preclude emerging critics such as Alexander Herzen who went into exile to escape being imprisoned for questioning and thus threatening the pyramid of privilege. Tsarist secret police did all they could to suppress voices of dissent. Many men and women sent into harsh exile in Siberia, some were executed, all were potential outlaws.
But revolutionary and critical works, nonetheless, circulated underground and by the late 1850s the young Kropotkin, in military service, was seeking and reading Herzen. The prince was enraptured by the writing of the exiled Russian: “the beauty of the style . . . the breadth of his ideas, and his deep love of Russia took possession of me” he wrote in his evocative memoirs; this motivated him to “edit my first revolutionary paper” But we should not think that he was then advocating wholesale overturning of the Tsarist regime rather it was as he himself said constitutional change he desired, proposing significant alterations to the state bureaucracy and a loosening of the hierarchy. Nonetheless the teenage prince was on dangerous ground, evident in the fact that the “paper” which he circulated were three handwritten copies of his views which he secretly passed to fellow military students. For all the brevity and to say the least limited circulation of his “paper” if caught he faced the prospect of exile to Siberia.
Kropotkin remained in military service until 1867 when he entered university much against the wishes of his family and expectations of his army colleagues. It was in military service that he had undertaken work in Siberia as well as explorations including travelling to Manchuria. His years in Siberia had opened his eyes to the creative potential of the Russian peasantry. Rural labour and communal work was something to be praised. As a consequence “I lost in Siberia whatever faith in state discipline I had cherished before I was prepared to become an anarchist”. University life offered him new opportunities, with higher education, some freedom from reactionary authority and the possibility of meeting liberal scholars. Henceforward he put his faith in what he called “the constructive work of the masses” which apart from the organisational strengths of peasants in rural communes had been spectacularly demonstrated in the Paris Commune of 1871 and the self-organisation of Communards. Beyond this Kropotkin became convinced that the loose federal organisation of Swiss Jura watchmakers provided a model of how society might be free of the dictatorial control of centralised states.
In this period the European socialist movement was widening its spread and deepening its critique of capitalism with three main strands emerging: a reformist strand which was finding strong expression in the British trade union movement, this was in contrast to the two revolutionary wings usually characterised as struggles between Marxism and Anarchism, personified in the critiques made by Karl Marx on one side and Michael Bakunin the other. Kropotkin moved towards the anarchist side.
In 1872 the Prince travelled to Switzerland where he immersed himself in discussions with members of the International Working Men’s Association, he clarified his thinking on revolution and decided to return to Russia to propagandise for the overthrow of the Tsarist regime. This put him on the path to imprisonment and exile. “Agitate, organise” became his watchwords. Literally he lived amongst urban workers and peasants, dressing as they did and doing all he could to avoid the regime’s spies. Travelling and propagandising under the name of Borodin he dodged the police until 1874 when almost inevitably he was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter-Paul fortress of St Petersburg. For two years, without being brought to trial, he suffered the deprivations of Tsar Alexander II’s reactionary policies. In 1876 he had the good-fortune to be moved to an “immense show prison” where conditions were better, nonetheless, he fell critically ill with scurvy resulting in him being sent to a military hospital. Recovery was slow with the constant threat of being returned to the more closely watched prison. As he gained strength so he looked to escape. Daring and dangerous describes it best. Conspiring with comrades he decided straight out the front door of the hospital was easiest. Chased by armed soldiers Kropotkin dashed to a waiting carriage which took him to relative safety just off the city’s Nevsky Prospekt. Having become an outlaw and faced with the threat of recapture and many years of probable imprisonment the Prince had no option but to go into exile: first it was on to Sweden, then by steamer to England. Unlike the Britain of the 21st century that of the later 19th century offered refuge for revolutionaries, as Kropotkin wrote on seeing the steamer which was to take him from Sweden, “Under which flag does she sail? . . . Then I saw floating above the stern the union jack, the flag under which so many refugees . . . have found an asylum. I greeted that flag from the depth of my heart”.
Now in exile, with the Tsarist sate ever watchful hoping to get their hands on the anarchist, Kropotkin’s revolutionary propaganda centred on European workers. For periods he lived in Scotland, England, Belgium, France and Switzerland. By 1881 he was back in England but was alienated from the politics of Britain, as he put it there was “no atmosphere to breathe in”; in other words the country did not, as far he could see, have an appetite for insurgent politics so he took himself off to France in 1882 saying “Better a French prison” than the apparently quiet world of British labour. As it happened the 1880s proved to be a period of great class struggle in Britain with strikes and the growth of militancy amongst previously disorganised unskilled workers, women and men.
But Kropotkin could not know this hence he was off to France where there was a very active anarchist movement including those who favoured terrorist action as propaganda by the deed. And, almost needless to say, having recently unleashed a “carnival of blood” against the Communards of 1871 the French state was ever-keen to lock up anarchists and remove “foreigners” who posed a threat to property and so Kropotkin found himself in that French prison he’d earlier seen as his possible fate. This particular episode was linked to the prosecution of anarchist workers in Lyon, accused of planting explosives. Kropotkin was rounded up and along with others faced trial. They were found guilty of belonging to the International Working Men’s Association and the Russian with three others was sentenced to five years incarceration. This was 1883. For three years he languished in the system gaining his freedom in 1886 following agitation by French supporters.
On release he crossed the Channel to Britain. It was in this period that Kropotkin made his way to give a talk in Aberdeen. With his charm, mastery of the English language and rhetorical and intellectual skills the Russian anarchist was well-able to address not only groups of socialist inclined workers, men and women attracted to anarcho-communism but equally acceptable to more middle-class audiences. Hence it was he addressed the Aberdeen branch of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society on the subject “What Geography Ought To Be”.
March 1889 and Kropotkin faced the respectable Aberdeen audience and in his own way he nudged them towards a very liberal and nonetheless scientific view of the discipline of geography. He understood that the work of the geographer was a political exercise, making clear that the science was particularly important for British citizens this because their country was then “the greatest colonising Power the world ever knew, and whose sons have added new realms to civilisation while developing and extending” the wider conventions and social values of Europe. Geography, he said, was the science of first importance as it encompassed and in some sense unified other sciences primarily geology, climatology and the geographical spread of plants, animals extending to understanding the diversity of human societies dispersed across the globe, in other words anthropology. And, drawing on his anarchist principles, he proposed that what we might now call a holistic approach to geography would lay the basis for understanding that there was “the greatest likeness between the masses of the toilers of the soil and the workers in all nationalities”.
Unlike arch imperialists who often saw indigenous conquered peoples as “savages” living in societies lacking in rational legitimacy Kropotkin thought otherwise recognising that the Victorian world of individualised private property was an alien concept to many societies. He maintained that communal property demanded very different codes of behaviour which were as legitimate as any promulgated by imperialist nations. Being a man of his time and having implicit commitment to the truths of science Kropotkin had little doubt that social progress was built into the very fabric of the human world and it was “the duty of the geographer to show that every nationality was doing its own part in the development of humanity and was laying its own foundation stone for the benefit of mankind”.
At the lecture a member of the audience suggested that the Russian should look at the practice of Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon’s College where theoretical and practical sessions brought students to a wider understanding of the subjects studied. The anarchist paid close attention to this suggestion as evidenced in 1890, writing for the serial publication The Nineteenth Century he waxed lyrical on what was taught at the Aberdeen school. His topic for discussion was “Brain Work and Manual Work” the core of which argued the necessity for these two expressions of labour to come together for achieving a richer understanding of the world. Kropotkin argued that in their daily lives and with practical skills the so-called uneducated masses generated solutions to problems as a matter of course but sadly were seldom given credit for their creative abilities; at the same time more often than not they were excluded from the more abstract sciences which were left to specialists who in their turn were more usually ignorant of the crafts and organisations of rural and urban workers, This, he said impoverished both sides and as result hindered the progress of society; bring them together and things could only get better. He found this in place at the Aberdeen school, “There I found the system . . . had been applied with full success”, scientific education combined with workshop training across a number of trades: it was evident that the Gordon’s College industrial department was not a mere “copy of any foreign school; on the contrary, I should permit myself to suggest that if Aberdeen made that excellent move towards combining science with handicraft, the move was a natural outcome of what has been practised long since, on a smaller scale in the Aberdeen daily schools.”
It’s a moot point whether the anarchist’s evaluation of the educational strengths of the city’s schools is deserving, more certain is that the horrors and dangers of industrial work (for example those of the matchmaking industry which were exposed by the strike of 1888) brought forward the idea of rejecting the factory system as at all beneficial to humankind and unsustainable under socialism. Kropotkin as I’ve said favoured the craft organisation of Swiss watch makers and similarly the ardent socialist William Morris combined his Arts & Crafts aesthetic in the visionary notion that work might be organised along something like a guild structure with creative production for all, an escape from the tyranny of the factory clock and serial production. Morris and Kropotkin became friends during the anarchist’s exile in Britain. In his utopian novel News from Nowhere Morris gave voice to notions which would have found favour with the anarcho-communist such as “The wares which we make are made because they are needed, men make for their neighbours’ use . . . not for a vague market of which they know nothing, and over which they have no control . . . no inferior goods are made”.
Wee Bits of History 