A prince of the Russian court who became the world's most articulate anarchist.

Memoirs of a Revolutionist

Peter Kropotkin · 1899

Kropotkin's 1899 memoir is a firsthand account of one of the more improbable political conversions in modern history: a page to the Tsar and heir to a princely title who became anarchism's most respected theorist. Written from exile for a Western readership, it moves from the ceremony of the Russian court through Siberian scientific expeditions, underground propaganda work among Russian peasants and factory workers, arrest and a daring prison escape, to a life of exile, imprisonment in France, and international radical organizing. Kropotkin narrates his own radicalization as a case study in how observation — of nature, of peasant cooperation, of state repression — reshaped a life, and the book doubles as the origin story of the ideas of mutual aid and anarchist communism he spent the rest of his life defending.

52 chapters · 156,299 words · ~11.8 hr read