Word: kropotkin
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...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...
...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...
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...
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...