Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [46]
Kropotkin’s faith in mankind, despite a life of hard experience, was inexhaustible and unshatterable. He gave the impression, said the English journalist Henry Nevinson, who knew him well, of “longing to take all mankind to his bosom and keep it warm.” Kindliness shone from his bald and noble dome ringed with a low halo of bushy brown hair. An ample beard spread comfortably beneath his chin. He was very short, “with hardly enough body to hold up the massive head.” Descended from princes of Smolensk who, according to family tradition, belonged to the Rurik Dynasty, which had ruled Russia before the Romanovs, Kropotkin took his place in that long line of “conscience-stricken” Russian nobility who felt guilty for belonging to a class which had oppressed the people for centuries.
He was born in 1842. After service as an officer of Cossacks in Siberia, where he studied the geography of the region, he became Secretary of the Geographical Society, for whom he explored the glaciers of Finland and Sweden in 1871. Meanwhile he had become a member of a secret revolutionary committee, and on this being discovered, his arrest and imprisonment followed. After his escape in 1876—the year Bakunin died—he went to Switzerland, where he worked with Elisée Reclus, the French geographer and a fellow Anarchist, on Reclus’ monumental geography of the world. Kropotkin wrote the volume on Siberia and, with Reclus, founded and for three years edited Le Révolté, which, after suppression and a rebirth in Paris as La Révolte, was to become the best-known and longest-lived Anarchist journal. His stream of convincing and passionate polemics, the prestige of his escape from the most dreaded Russian prison, his active work with the Swiss Anarchists of the Jura—which caused his expulsion from Switzerland—all topped by his title of Prince, made him Bakunin’s recognized successor.
In France, where he came next in 1882, the traditions of the Commune had nourished a militant Anarchist movement of which there was a flourishing group in Lyons. A police raid and a retaliatory bomb causing one death had been followed by the arrest and trial of fifty-two Anarchists, including Kropotkin, on charges of belonging to an international league dedicated to the abolition of property, family, country and religion. Sentenced to prison for five years, Kropotkin had served three, had then been pardoned by President Grévy and, with his wife and daughter, had settled in England, the inevitable refuge of political exiles at the time.
In a small house in Hammersmith, a drearily respectable dormitory of outer London, he continued to write fiery paeans to violence for La Révolte, scholarly articles for geographical journals and for the Nineteenth Century, to entertain visiting radicals in five languages, to lecture Anarchist club meetings in a cellar off Tottenham Court Road, to thump the piano, and paint, and to charm with his sweet temper and genial manners everyone who met him. “He was amiable to the point of saintliness,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, “and with his full beard and lovable expression might have been a shepherd from the Delectable Mountains. His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. And he was right in the end.” This weakness was in fact an expression of Kropotkin’s optimism, for war to him was the expected catastrophe that was to destroy the old world and clear the way for the triumph of Anarchy. The “galloping decay” of states was hastening the triumph. “It cannot be far off,” he wrote. “Everything brings it nearer.”
This agreeable person, conventionally dressed in the black frock coat of a Victorian gentleman, was an uncompromising apostle of the necessity of violence. Man’s progress toward perfection was being held back, he wrote, by the “inertia of those who have a vested interest in existing