“Many a man and many a woman have accomplished a great life-work without having led a great life”, the influential Danish literary critic Georg Brandes wrote in his introduction to Peter Kropotkin’s 1899 Memoirs of a Revolutionist. “Many people are interesting, although their lives may have been quite insignificant and commonplace. Kropotkin’s life is both great and interesting”.

Born Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842–1921) into a prominent Moscow family, by the end of his life, he had served as Tsar Alexander II’s personal page; had reshaped scientific knowledge of Asian geology and the Ice Age; had been the first European to travel to the Greater Khingan Range; had seen the serfs emancipated; and had been jailed twice for his revolutionary politics. More famously, he was, by the end of the nineteenth century, one of the world’s leading anarchists. If that life, as captured in his memoirs, is as interesting as it is great, it is because Kropotkin is an anarchist propagandist as fascinated by science and art as the goings-on of the First International.

Originally serialized in The Atlantic in 1898, these Memoirs are a Bildungsroman for the anarchist intellectual. When the tsar’s brother, the Grand Duke Nicholas (1831–91), comes to visit Kropotkin in his jail cell in the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress in 1876, Kropotkin delights in the royal’s discomfiture. How could someone so close to the palace have thrown his lot in with the people who wanted to see it destroyed? “Were you such in the corps of pages?” the Grand Duke asks (his voice filled “with terror”, Kropotkin adds). “In the corps I was a boy”, Kropotkin responds, “and what is indefinite in boyhood grows definite in manhood”.

Kropotkin’s childhood is thus narrated to make his later crisis seem almost inevitable. Born in 1842, that childhood is spent among an aristocracy whose shortcomings are as apparent to him as they were to his contemporary Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), another revolutionary dropout. Kropotkin’s father is distant to his sons and cruel to his serfs, forcing marriages and commanding floggings. Those serfs are, in contrast, much, much kinder to Kropotkin than they need to be.

But Kropotkin was young enough that his Europe, as later Russian exile Victor Serge (1890–1947) wrote in his own Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was still a place “where the ideal of liberty seemed to have some future”. And indeed we read how, when Alexander II issues the Emancipation Manifesto on March 3, 1861, Kropotkin and his fellow cadets rush to the hotbed of radical revolutionary energy in St. Petersburg — the Italian opera — and join in celebrations. “The same enthusiasm was in the streets”, he exclaims. A new Russia, perhaps, is dawning.

That hope, however, was short-lived, and Kropotkin has a front-row seat to the later disappointments of Alexander II’s reign: as the top student at the academy, he is assigned directly to the emperor as a page de chambre. His disgust with courtly life means that he eventually asks, in 1862, to be sent to eastern Siberia. In that little-populated, only-recently-annexed part of Russia, he sees how people can live without a state. It is here, finally, at the close of volume I, that he is “prepared to become an anarchist”.

His full conversion comes five years later, on a scientific expedition to Finland. He is considering whether to accept a position as the secretary of the Geographical Society when a revelation hits him, re-narrated some thirty years later with a characteristically vivid and sentimental urge to solidarity:

There, on the crest of that immense moraine which runs between the lakes, as if giants had heaped it up in a hurry to connect the two shores, there stands a Finnish peasant plunged in contemplation of the beautiful lakes, studded with islands, which lie before him. Not one of these peasants, poor and downtrodden though they may be, will pass this spot without stopping to admire the scene. Or there, on the shore of a lake, stands another peasant, and sings something so beautiful that the best musician would envy him his melody for its feeling and its meditative power. Both deeply feel, both meditate, both think; they are ready to widen their knowledge: only give it to them; only give them the means of getting leisure. This is the direction in which, and these are the kind of people for whom, I must work. All those sonorous phrases about making mankind progress, while at the same time the progressmakers stand aloof from those whom they pretend to push onwards, are mere sophisms made up by minds anxious to shake off a fretting contradiction.

So I sent my negative reply to the Geographical Society.

Once he has this realization, a return to normal life is impossible: he becomes a full-time revolutionist.

Nevertheless, Kropotkin is never quite able to abandon his scientific work. When word comes that the secret police is onto him, he has to delay his escape by a week, because he needs to be present for a debate about his work at the Geographical Society. The discussion concludes and everyone agrees he is right; unfortunately, a few days later, he is locked up without trial in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Yet science is also his relief from the horrors there: although ostensibly none of the prisoners are allowed books, pens, or paper, an exception is made for Kropotkin so he can finish his work on glaciers. (His self-sacrifice throughout is such that it is a relief to see him throw an aristocratic fit when his “silk undergarment” is confiscated by the prison administration.)

His friends spring him out in 1876, and he goes into exile first in England, where he earns money by writing articles for Nature, and then in Switzerland, where he begins printing his anarchist newspaper, Le Révolté (his passionate retelling of its founding is essential reading for anyone interested in DIY publishing). Kropotkin is arrested by the French in 1882, which only serves to make him more famous. Rumor has it (that is, Kropotkin alleges) that the nascent Franco-Russian alliance is conditioned on France keeping him locked up. But eventually he is freed, and off he travels to England, where he writes numerous books, including this memoir.

His valediction is a prediction: “a chance combination of accidental circumstances may bring about in Europe a revolution . . . a deep and rapid social reconstruction”. Fifteen years later, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, and three years after that the Romanovs were too. Unfortunately for the Bolsheviks, Kropotkin was wrong that, in this new age, revolutions would no longer need to “assume the violent character which they took in times past”. But when he died in 1921, the anarchists were allowed to organize a massive funeral (with a eulogy by Emma Goldman). It would be the last major anarchist gathering in the Soviet Union.