The Prince of Anarchists

MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST by Peter Kropotkin. 519 pages. Horizon Press. $10.

Anarchism, both as a doctrine and a political movement, has been pretty well defunct (except in Spain) for more than two generations. Yet today it is identifiable in the pattern of student unrest from Rome to Berkeley, and its black flag shows up persistently among the campus picket signs.

But all too often, the angry young men of the new anarchy do not know what they are talking about, argues Paul Goodman in the preface to this new edition of the classic autobiography of an original anarchist, Prince Peter Kropotkin. The anarchist movement was indeed revolutionary. But its best thinkers in general, and Kropotkin in particular, were not wreckers but visionaries, more concerned with postulating a new society of individual freedom than in the momentary task of destroying the established one. Today's students must realize, adds Artist Barnett Newman in the foreword, that "revolution is more than a Nihilist Happening." They must face up to the question Kropotkin constantly posed: After revolution, what?

Full Circle. Peter Kropotkin was a prince of Imperial Russia and, as the Irish say, a prince of men. He could have been a pampered and powerful member of the Establishment he chose to fight against; he cheerfully endured exile and long imprisonment but showed none of the pride, power mania or personal deviousness that disfigure the image of so many revolutionaries. As a child, he had slept during a court ball in the future Czarina's semi-sacred lap, and he died (at 78) safe, as it were, in the bosom of Stalin, only a troika's drive from the Kremlin. His life had come full circle, and so had the movement that began as a fight for freedom against an absolute monarch and ended in the absolutism of the one-party state.

His memoir is an incomparable record of the weird and wonderful Russian nobility, compared with whom the pious, drunken, sheepskin-clad serfs seemed like another race. The Czar's ramshackle empire was made up of three other races--the merchants, who were much like merchants anywhere; the official class, whose devotion to sacred paper could be compared only to a Tibetan monk operating a prayer wheel; and the student and professional intelligentsia, politically zealous to a pitch of almost mystical intensity.

Prince Kropotkin "passed" from one race to another, though not quite successfully. An anarchist among aristocrats, he remained an aristocrat among anarchists; paradoxically, this gave him a special strength in the revolutionary movements he helped to found. He was immune from the Russian intellectual's vice of soul-searching; as a prince, he never questioned his own actions.

Whose Man? At the school for the Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg, Princeling Kropotkin began to learn of the Byzantine rituals of the Romanov court --attendance at court balls, parades, mess dinners, the opera, blood horses, mistresses and some fashionable adultery. But at some stage something went sour. Was it when his father came back from a campaign with a medal for gallantry on his chest? It turned out that the deed that won the medal was actually performed by father's batman. The feudal father saw nothing odd about this. It was his man, wasn't it? explained the gallant old prince.

The first of many such ethical puzzles had been set. At 19, Kropotkin rejected a commission in a fashionable regiment for service in Siberia as aide to a provincial governor. As an already dedicated geographer, he set out to determine the course of the Amur River, a project that led him into a total revision of the geographical concept of Central Asia. He was impressed by the semi-Communistic "brotherly organization" of the Dukhobor sect. He proposed a sweeping agricultural reform, which was widely hailed. But then the whole enterprise bogged down in Czarist bureaucracies. "I lost in Siberia whatever faith in state discipline I had cherished before. I was prepared to become an anarchist," he wrote.

Back in St. Petersburg, Kropotkin was soon busy with pamphlets, manifestos, and interminable Russian discussions with a circle of students, workmen and intellectuals. He found the true faith and a false name--Borodin, the first of many. It was not long before he endured his first imprisonment and betrayal. Typically, while his colleagues scuttled out of town to escape the police, Kropotkin was caught because he felt obliged to keep his date with the local geological society to expound his theory on the ice cap. A weaver in his "circle" broke his alias to the police. There was no trial. The prince was shut up "at the Czar's pleasure." However, the Czar did allow him books and papers to work ("till sunset only") on his two-volume geography.

His escape (pure M-G-M costume drama with disguises, baffled sentries and galloping cabs) was followed by exile. He was happy enough in England, which dearly loves a lord and has always been kind to other nations' revolutionaries, and where he was asked to review his own books. But when he made a foray into France in pursuit of his revolutionary mission, he was jailed.

In fact, all his revolutionary life he and the police played an elaborate and almost stylized game. Whatever country he was in, some police, secret or otherwise, were keeping a wary eye on him. They were sure he was up to no good, but their problem was to catch him at it. For his part, the prince treated the police alternately with indifference and insouciance. Fortunately for the prince, they were mostly inept, often irritating, but sometimes diverting. There was one glorious day when he conned one of the Czar's gumshoes into carrying his luggage. The rules of the game were more urbane in those days.

Released by the French in 1886 after three years' imprisonment, he returned to London and wrote his Memoirs, first on the invitation of the Atlantic Monthly. The present book is a facsimile edition of that text, as expanded and published a year later by Houghton Mifflin in Kropotkin's own flawless English (no class was more cosmopolitan than Russia's decadent nobility, who spoke French and English among themselves and considered Russian useful chiefly in the nursery and for addressing servants and soldiers).

Basically, anarchism presents in the most extreme form the notion that man is essentially good, noble and altruistic but is perverted from his true nature by bad authoritarian institutions. In spite of all evidence to the contrary--not just the obvious beastliness of the bourgeoisie, officials and police but the perfidy, cowardice, treachery that would turn up even among the comrades--Kropotkin continued to believe in the goodness of man. If everyone were like him, anarchism might have a chance. But few men like Peter Kropotkin grow on the family tree of man--a fact that Kropotkin himself never realized.

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