Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was born a prince, served as Tsar Alexander II’s personal page, and died the most famous anarchist in the world. His Memoirs of a Revolutionist — serialized in The Atlantic in 1898, published in two volumes in 1899 — is the account of how one life moved from the palace to the prison cell to the revolutionary press. Mathilde Montpetit’s note for The Public Domain Review treats volume one as a Bildungsroman for the anarchist intellectual, and it’s a good argument: the whole book is built so the break with his own class looks almost inevitable.

The stations along the way:

  • A childhood among an aristocracy whose cruelties are plain to him — a father distant to his sons and brutal to his serfs, and serfs who are far kinder to the boy than they need to be
  • The Emancipation Manifesto of March 3, 1861, and the celebrations in the streets of St. Petersburg, where he and his fellow cadets rush to the Italian opera
  • Court life as page de chambre, and his request in 1862 to be sent instead to eastern Siberia — recently annexed, thinly populated, and the place where he first sees people living without a state
  • A scientific expedition to Finland, where a peasant pausing to contemplate a lake settles the question: he declines the secretaryship of the Geographical Society and becomes a full-time revolutionist
  • Two prison terms, exile in England and Switzerland, and the founding of the anarchist paper Le Révolté

The details are what make it worth reading. He delays his own escape by a week because he has to attend a debate about his work at the Geographical Society — and wins the argument, days before being locked up without trial in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The no-books rule is waived for him so he can finish his research on glaciers. He throws an aristocratic fit when the prison confiscates his silk undergarment.

Montpetit is careful with the ending too. Kropotkin believed modern revolutions would no longer need to “assume the violent character which they took in times past”; he was wrong, and the essay says so. When he died in 1921, the anarchists were allowed a mass funeral with a eulogy by Emma Goldman — the last major anarchist gathering in the Soviet Union. The memoir’s real subject is a claim about human capacity: that ordinary people, given leisure and knowledge, are already thinking. “Only give it to them,” he writes of a singing Finnish peasant, “only give them the means of getting leisure.”