Cultural revolution in the land of Kafka and Borges

On Peter Kropotkin's Memoirs

Famous anarchist theorist, revolutionary and a renowned explorer of Siberia, Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs were published in 1898, written in Russian but originally printed in English in The Atlantic Monthly. They were later slightly revised and expanded, and this final version is what we currently have and which I have just read.

It is a very clearly and, I think, objectively written book. Kropotkin begins with his privileged childhood.  He was born into the house of Prince Kropotkin, one of the most influential aristocrats, close to the emperor, living in a palace in Saint Petersburg. Kropotkin tends to underplay the privileged environment into which he was born, but he does not deny it. The book then moves chronologically: his years at the elite page academy of the Court, decision not to go into the expected military service but to move to Siberia which he explored and about which he wrote several seminal geological and geographical treatises; and then onto the political activity, prison in Russia, escape to western Europe, forty years of life in exile… Since the book ends much before the October Revolution and even before the split between social-democratic and communist wings, these issues are obviously not treated. But the schism between the Marx-dominated faction of the First International and Bakunin’s anarchist faction is discussed. And attacks on state socialism, propagated by Engels and Marx (this was written before the codification of Marxism, so the two famous names are written in an unusual order) are sustained and frequent.  

Kropotkin returned to Russia after the October revolution. The role of anarchists in the Revolution was not negligible but their later fate was not pleasant. Kropotkin however was too old, and died in Moscow in 1921, just days before the Kronstadt rebellion. He was buried in Moscow and it was the last time that anarchists’ black flags were freely unfurled in the Soviet Union. Today, one of Moscow’s metro stations bears Kropotkin’s name.

Politically, the most interesting period treated in The Memoirs is the one after the Crimean War and emancipation of serfs in 1861. He writes about the contradictory nature of Alexander II who oscillated between being the Tsar—liberator and the Tsar—reactionary, and whose very death at the hands of Russian revolutionaries exhibited the conflicting strivings of his soul. Alexander was killed when, after the initial assassination attempt failed, he, alone among all, jumped out of his car to help the injured guard; that provided an easy target for the second assassin, and he did not miss.

Kropotkin’s descriptions of the revolutionary life in the Russia of the 1860s are hyper-realistic. But to the reader today, the entire Russian existence seems to be that of a land of wonders. The relationship between political offenses and punishments meted out is not only a product of arbitrariness (for which a nice Russian word proizvol’ exists) but the outcome of an almost infinite randomness.

To visualize it, assume that your political sin (emancipation of labor, printing of non-authorized literature, attendance of anti-government rallies, violent attacks on police, assassination of the dignitaries) is written on a piece of paper which is then put into an enormous machine that produces the sentence. The machine is geared to produce harsh sentences; sentences that are often written before the crime is committed. Next, let this piece of paper with your crime move to a second, attached, machine which is managed by a capricious God. That second machine revises the sentence; the sentence of exile can become one of being hanged, or, differently, of immediate freedom; it can lead you to a decade in jail or to be released and feted by liberal intelligentsia today. The first machine was described by Kafka in his Penal Colony (inspired by Dostoyevsky); the second is from Borges’ short story in which every individual passes through all possible positions in life, from a ruler to a homeless, entirety at the will of capricious gambling chance. Thus, the Russia of the 1860s, and perhaps the one of today, appears as a blend of Kafka and Borges. 

For a rational mind, it is very difficult to see not only how such punishments help the government, but not to notice that the capriciousness, randomness, and indeed sloppiness  with which punishments are executed become entirely counterproductive from the point of view of the rulers’ own interests.

Take Kropotkin’s case. He was followed by the secret police for “going to the people”, i.e., organizing lectures on socialism and anarchism among workers in St. Petersburg and several other cities in Russia. He would move from his home (probably dressed in the fineries), change into mud-stained boots, short coat (that we learn distinguished the workers from the rich), rough shirt, and move through dark St Petersburg alleyways until he reached a badly-lit warehouse where twenty or thirty workers and a couple of young intellectuals (camouflaged like Kropotkin in people’s attire) would meet to discuss George Berkeley, David Hume, Chernyshevsky, Jesus Christ and human freedom in general. Kropotkin was eventually arrested—but even that arrest had several unusual moments, including being foretold to the potential prey which led Kropotkin to hide and destroy all incriminating evidence; and where the arrest, perhaps because of his family background, needed a clearance from the top powers. Kropotkin is thrown into the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress, in a tiny cell (whose sketch is provided in the memoirs) where he is held for a year in solitary confinement: able to make eight paces only and to see a tiny piece of St Petersburg translucent Nordic-blue or entirely dark sky. But in such a room, he is, after a while, allowed to have his family send him food daily and is visited by the Grand Duke (the brother of the Emperor) who, according to Kropotkin, tries, through apparent amicability, to extract confession from him.

Kropotkin is afterwards, because of his loss of weight and general weakness, sent to a prison hospital that is so poorly guarded that he is able to plot his daring escape with a dozen of revolutionaries, some of whom are also in jail and others free. The plans are made and remade almost daily as if the plotters had access to the modern internet and were totally free to write and then revise various escape scenarios. Finally, in a rocambolesque way, Kropotkin escapes, and while the Klondike-like police chases him, he and his accomplices decide to spend the evening in the plushest restaurant of St Petersburg where police does not do razzias.

What was the crime for which he and his comrades, among whom women played an extraordinary important and brave role (as Kropotkin repeatedly mentions), were accused of? Creating a cultural revolution in the Russian countryside by telling the liberated but indebted peasants that they are no different from the nobles, that they have the right to a free life, and that they should rebel, burn the aristocratic estates and disobey the Emperor. The young educated people of St Petersburg and Moscow who went “to the people” (similar to those sent by Mao into the peasant communes a century later) numbered, according to Kropotkin, only some 3,000 individuals. They gave up all comforts of their previous lives. Many moved to villages, working there as ordinary journeymen or toiling the land, with the goal of bringing Russian peasants out of their millennial turpitude and teaching them how to be free. They, and again particularly so the women, did it with an unbelievable self-abnegation, dedication, courage and seriousness.  

They did not shy of “direct action”. While Kropotkin does not explicitly endorse assassinations, he underlines the reasons that lead to them. The line between the tyrannicide and terrorism was always thin. Kropotkin approves of the assassination of his own relative who was governor of Kharkov and enacted some harsh measures against the revolutionaries.

The West European part of the memoirs is interesting even if less exciting. It takes place after the suppression of the Paris Commune, in an atmosphere of police persecution, hangings, semi-legal printing presses, contraband of revolutionary tracts from Switzerland into France.  Kropotkin is most of the time, living (like Lenin later) in Switzerland, working on political agitation with the famous Association des Horlogers Jurassiens. He criticizes state socialism of German social-democrats whom he accuses of  aiming only at political power while disregarding moral transformation, indeed the cultural revolution, needed to save humankind.

Kropotkin’s ideas regarding the societal organization that would be built in concentric circles from the lowest to the highest level, would abolish the state, and organize production among the publicly-owned cooperatives that would not compete with each other but labor in free association and self-help looks irremediably naïve. It is not surprising that Marxists, and later Leninists, thought it was a fairy tale.

But perhaps that humans, at times, need visionaries, the selfless individuals who produce fairy tales and reading Kropotkin may be a way to try, at least for a moment, to believe in them. A young friend to whom I mentioned reading Kropotkin’s memoirs, and not expecting she would know of him, immediately replied: “We are reading him now to fight climate change and to help self-organization of society.”