Memoirs of a Revolutionist (English Edition)

The stimulating autobiography of the Russian anarchist and scientist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), written in English, is a disarmingly humble page-turning adventure of a read. The son of an aristocratic serf-owning soldier, Kropotkin vividly describes his wide-ranging experiences, encounters and intellectual development. Educated at a military school in St Petersburg, he becomes a page to Tsar Alexander II yet nevertheless begins to develop as a radical. In Siberia he serves in the army as an administrator and explorer before studying mathematics at university and working for the Russian Geographical Society. At the age of thirty he is also a necessarily clandestine anarchist activist and in 1874 he is imprisoned in the dreaded Peter and Paul Fortress. His spectacular escape to the West, his role in European anarchist movements, his incarceration at Clairvaux, France, are all recounted in vigorous prose enlivened by pen-portraits and enriched by discussion of social and political issues. Living again in England, Kropotkin became a respected and well-known figure in progressive circles and wrote his major works “The Conquest of Bread” (1892) “Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution” (1902) and the “Memoirs”.