Memoirs of a Revolutionist
Glossary
A
- Alexander III
- The Russian emperor who succeeded his assassinated father, Alexander II, in 1881. Kropotkin describes him as a man of colossal stature but little courage, who refused to occupy the Winter Palace and retreated instead to his grandfather Paul I's fortified palace at Gatchina amid the panic following the assassination.
- Related: Tsar Alexander II, Narodnaya Volya
- Alexander Kropotkin (Brother)
- Kropotkin's elder brother, sent to the corps of cadets at Moscow, whose intellectual influence and beautifully microscopic handwriting in their smuggled correspondence Kropotkin credits with shaping his own early development. The two remained close throughout their lives, sharing radical ideas and later planning their move to St. Petersburg's literary circles.
- Related: Peter Kropotkin (Narrator), The Corps of Pages
- Anarchist Communism
- The stateless, classless political philosophy Kropotkin arrived at through his experience with the Jura Federation and spent the rest of his life advocating, organized through voluntary federation and mutual aid rather than centralized authority, private property, or parliamentary politics.
- Related: Mutual Aid, Jura Federation
C
- Chernyshevsky
- The influential radical Russian writer, held in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul in exile, whom Kropotkin lists among the best political writers of the generation he hoped to find active upon returning from Siberia. His imprisonment exemplified the state repression that had scattered Russia's leading radical intellectuals.
- Related: Peter Lavrov, Nihilism, Peter-and-Paul Fortress
- Clairvaux Prison
- The French prison where Kropotkin was held following his arrest for anarchist propaganda in France, part of the pattern of imprisonment across Europe that punctuated his revolutionary career after his escape from the Peter-and-Paul Fortress.
- Related: Peter-and-Paul Fortress, Anarchist Communism
E
- Emancipation of the Serfs (1861)
- Tsar Alexander II's 1861 decree freeing Russia's serfs, a reform Kropotkin situates as the great hope of his generation and the backdrop to the surge of educational and social discussion that followed, including the opening of the first high schools for girls in 1857 and eager public debate over remedying the ignorance and obstacles imposed on the masses.
- Related: Tsar Alexander II, Serfdom, Mutual Aid
G
- Gatchina
- The fortified palace built by Paul I outside St. Petersburg, planned like a Vauban fortress with moats, secret staircases, and hidden trap-doors, to which the frightened Alexander III retreated after his father's assassination by Narodnaya Volya rather than move into the Winter Palace.
- Related: Alexander III, Narodnaya Volya
I
- Irkutsk
- The chief city of East Siberia, where Kropotkin was stationed as an administrative officer and to which he returned to witness the court-martial of Polish exiles who had attempted to break their chains near Lake Baikal following the 1863 insurrection. He sent detailed accounts of the trial to a St. Petersburg newspaper against the wishes of the Governor-General.
- Related: The Siberian Expeditions, The Polish Insurrection of 1863
- Ivan Turgenev
- The celebrated Russian novelist whom Kropotkin met in Paris through their common friend Lavrov, who wished to celebrate Kropotkin's escape from Russia with a dinner. Kropotkin credits Turgenev's 'A Sportsman's Notebook' with helping discredit serfdom, and his later novels with shaping Russian ideas of women's capacities and men's proper regard for them.
- Related: Serfdom, Peter Lavrov
J
- James Guillaume
- The Swiss anarchist based at Neuchatel whom Kropotkin visited regularly during his propaganda work for the Jura Federation, one of the network of European socialists and anarchists — including Pindy, Spichiger, Schwitzguebel, and the Blanquists Ferre and Jeallot — with whom Kropotkin organized meetings and local agitation.
- Related: Jura Federation
M
- Mutual Aid
- Kropotkin's central scientific and political idea, that cooperation rather than only competition is a major factor in evolution and social development, which he traces in this memoir to his observations of animal life and peasant communities during his Siberian expeditions and to the practical solidarity he witnessed among Jura watchmakers and Russian revolutionaries alike.
- Related: The Siberian Expeditions, Anarchist Communism
N
- Narodnaya Volya ("The People's Will")
- The Russian revolutionary organization that turned to political terrorism, including the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a current within the broader revolutionary movement that Kropotkin narrates from abroad. He describes the wild panic that seized the St. Petersburg court after the assassination, with the new Tsar, Alexander III, retreating to the fortified palace at Gatchina.
- Related: Tsar Alexander II, Alexander III, The Going-to-the-People Movement
- Nihilism
- The mid-1860s Russian intellectual movement of radical skepticism toward tradition, authority, and inherited values among the educated youth, which Kropotkin situates as a precursor current to the populist 'going to the people' movement and the more organized revolutionary socialism that followed it.
- Related: The Going-to-the-People Movement, Chernyshevsky
O
- Old Believers (Nonconformists of the 'Old Faith')
- The religious dissenters who rejected 17th-century reforms to the Russian Orthodox liturgy, whom Kropotkin describes inhabiting Moscow's austere, formalistic Trans-Moskva River district as merchants living behind securely bolted gates — one of the many distinct social worlds he maps within the old capital.
P
- Page de Chambre
- The personal-attendant rank held by the sergeant of the Corps of Pages, who served in close personal proximity to the emperor and was considered a stepping-stone to court favor. Kropotkin held this coveted position by virtue of standing at the top of his form, a privilege he later renounced entirely.
- Related: The Corps of Pages, Tsar Alexander II
- Peter Kropotkin (Narrator)
- The author and narrator, born a prince in an ancient Russian noble family descended from the Grand Princes of Smolensk. He traces his own path from Corps of Pages and personal attendant to Tsar Alexander II, through Siberian scientific expeditions, to revolutionary populism, imprisonment, escape, and a life of European anarchist agitation and writing.
- Related: The Corps of Pages, Mutual Aid, Anarchist Communism
- Peter Lavrov
- One of the leading Russian radical writers and theorists of Kropotkin's generation, named alongside Chernyshevsky, Mikhailoff, and Pisareff as figures whose work Kropotkin and his brother had hoped to find alive and active in St. Petersburg's literary circles, only to discover most were in exile or imprisoned. Lavrov later became Kropotkin's close friend in Paris.
- Related: Ivan Turgenev, Nihilism
- Peter-and-Paul Fortress
- The St. Petersburg political prison on the Neva, described by Kropotkin as the site where 'so much of the true strength of Russia had perished' — including Peter I's torture and killing of his own son Alexis, and the imprisonment of the Decembrists. Kropotkin was held here after his 1874 arrest and staged his celebrated 1876 escape from its attached military hospital.
- Related: Third Section, The Decembrists, Peter Kropotkin (Narrator)
- Peterhof
- The imperial summer residence near St. Petersburg where the Corps of Pages and other military schools camped each summer for drill and open-air exercise, and the site of a memorable night alarm sounded on Tsar Alexander II's orders that roused the entire camp of several thousand boys.
- Related: The Corps of Pages, Tsar Alexander II
- Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin (Father)
- Kropotkin's father, a proud landowner obsessed with his family's ancient lineage from the princes of Smolensk, who paid heavily for a certified parchment tracing the family arms and considered enrolling his son in the Corps of Pages the realization of a long-cherished ambition. He represents the serf-owning aristocracy whose authority and worldview Kropotkin came to reject.
- Related: The Corps of Pages, Serfdom, Rostislav Mstislavich
R
- Rostislav Mstislavich the Bold
- The Grand Prince of Kiev from whom Kropotkin's family claimed descent, according to the parchment his father purchased from the Heraldry Department certifying the family's origin as Grand Princes of Smolensk. Kropotkin notes the family's genuinely ancient origin while gently mocking his father's vanity about its cost and pedigree.
- Related: Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin (Father)
S
- Serfdom
- The system of bonded peasant labor under which Russian nobility, including Kropotkin's own father, owned and controlled the peasants working their estates. Kropotkin credits Turgenev's 'Sportsman's Notebook' with rendering Russia the immense service of throwing odium upon serfdom, and treats his own family's dependence on serf labor as part of the privilege he came to renounce.
- Related: Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin (Father), Emancipation of the Serfs, Ivan Turgenev
- Syevertsoff
- The gifted zoologist and geographer, a leading explorer of Turkestan and the Pamirs, whom Kropotkin worked alongside at the Russian Geographical Society. Kropotkin praises him as one of the most intelligent men he ever met, though frustrated that Syevertsoff's dislike of writing meant little of his real insight reached print under his own name.
- Related: Russian Geographical Society
T
- The Chaikovsky Circle
- The Russian revolutionary populist group Kropotkin joined in St. Petersburg in the early 1870s under the assumed name 'Borodin,' which sent educated young people to live among and propagandize the peasantry and factory workers in the 'going to the people' movement. Kropotkin's arrest in 1874 followed his work with this circle.
- Related: The Going-to-the-People Movement, Third Section, Peter Kropotkin (Narrator)
- The Corps of Pages
- The elite Russian military school for sons of the nobility, combining the character of a military academy with that of a court institution attached to the imperial household. Only about 150 boys were admitted; Kropotkin entered it as the fulfillment of his father's ambition and rose to sergeant and page de chambre to Tsar Alexander II, a privileged post he later renounced.
- Related: Peter Kropotkin (Narrator), Tsar Alexander II, Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin
- The Decembrists
- The Russian officers who led an unsuccessful 1825 uprising against the accession of Tsar Nicholas I, several of whom were imprisoned in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress. Kropotkin invokes their memory as part of the fortress's long history as a site of political imprisonment and state violence, connecting his own generation's revolutionary struggle to theirs.
- Related: Peter-and-Paul Fortress
- The Going-to-the-People Movement
- The wave of educated young Russians, mostly students, who in the early 1870s left their homes to live and work among peasants and factory laborers, preaching socialism and seeking to raise popular consciousness. Kropotkin describes it as the culmination of the era's revolutionary idealism, and its participants as the defendants in the great political trials of 'the hundred and ninety-three' and 'the fifty.'
- Related: Chaikovsky Circle, Nihilism
- The International Workingmen's Association
- The federation of European labor organizations (the 'First International') within which the Jura Federation's anarchist wing clashed with the general council over authority and political strategy. Kropotkin describes the pattern by which a political movement's compromising faction gradually drifts from its original aims — the split he witnessed within the International.
- Related: Jura Federation, Anarchist Communism
- The Jura Federation
- The federation of Swiss watchmakers, centered in the Jura Mountains around Neuchatel and La Chaux-de-Fonds, that Kropotkin encountered on first leaving Siberia and that became central to his political education. It rebelled against the general council of the International Workingmen's Association and introduced the 'no-government,' or anarchist, tendency into the socialist movement.
- Related: International Workingmen's Association, Anarchist Communism, James Guillaume
- The Kreml (Kremlin)
- The Moscow citadel that Kropotkin describes as the enduring stronghold of Church and State, surrounded by a vast marketplace that has served for centuries as the heart of Russian internal trade — part of his opening portrait of Moscow's distinct, self-contained quarters.
- Related: Old Believers
- The Polish Insurrection of 1863
- The uprising against Russian rule that began in January 1863 and lasted eighteen months, provoked by the cruel repression of nationalist demonstrations at Warsaw in 1861. Kropotkin describes broad sympathy for the Polish cause even among moderate Russians, and later recounts the transportation of eleven thousand Poles to East Siberia and a desperate escape attempt by Polish exiles near Lake Baikal.
- Related: Irkutsk, Tsar Alexander II
- The Russian Geographical Society
- The learned society for which Kropotkin worked as secretary of its section of physical geography after his Siberian travels, collaborating with figures such as the naturalist Syevertsoff. His scientific work here, observing cooperation among animal and human communities, fed directly into the theory of mutual aid he later developed.
- Related: The Siberian Expeditions, Mutual Aid
- The Siberian Expeditions
- Kropotkin's years as an officer and geographer exploring Siberia and Manchuria on behalf of the Russian Geographical Society, journeys through regions including the Vitim mountains and Lake Baikal that he credits with shaping both his scientific outlook and his political convictions, including his later theory of mutual aid.
- Related: Russian Geographical Society, Mutual Aid, Irkutsk
- The Third Section
- The Tsarist secret police charged with surveillance and suppression of political dissent, which conducted the preliminary inquest into Kropotkin's case after his 1874 arrest and held him for two years in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress while his health deteriorated from scurvy and confinement.
- Related: Peter-and-Paul Fortress, Chaikovsky Circle
- Tsar Alexander II
- The Russian emperor who emancipated the serfs in 1861 and whose reign Kropotkin served under as a personal page. Kropotkin describes witnessing the emperor's court at close range, including a night alarm at the Peterhof military camp, and later situates the reformer-turned-reactionary emperor's assassination by Narodnaya Volya as the climax of the revolutionary movement he chronicles.
- Related: The Corps of Pages, Emancipation of the Serfs, Narodnaya Volya