In Our Time - Peter Kropotkin

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Russian prince who became a leading anarchist and famous scientist. Kropotkin (1842 - 1921) was born into privilege, very much in the highest circle of Russian society as a pageboy for the Tsar, before he became a republican in childhood and dropped the title 'Prince'. While working in Siberia, he started reading about anarchism and that radicalised him further, as did his observations of Siberian villagers supporting each other without (or despite) a role for the State. He made a name for himself as a geographer but soon his politics landed him in jail in St Petersburg, from which he escaped to exile in England where he was fêted, with growing fame leading to lecture tours in the USA. His time in Siberia also inspired his ideas on the importance of mutual aid in evolution, a counter to the dominant idea from Darwin and Huxley that life was a gladiatorial combat in which only the fittest survived. Kropotkin became such a towering figure in public life that, returning to Russia, he was able to challenge Lenin without reprisal, and Lenin in turn permitted his enormous public funeral there, attended by 20,000 mourners.With Ruth Kinna Professor of Political Theory at Loughborough UniversityLee Dugatkin Professor of Biology at the University of LouisvilleAndSimon Dixon The Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at University College London

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Before you get stuck into this episode, I want to tell you about some changes we're making to where you can find this podcast. From next month, you can hear in our time 28 days before anyone else for free on BBC Sounds. If you haven't already, you can download the BBC Sounds app

to listen to in our time first. It's easy. Once you're there, you'll find even more podcasts that are available on sounds before anywhere else. Live BBC Radio and exclusive music. music mixes. Just search for In Our Time, subscribe, and if you want, we'll send you a

notification every time a new episode is ready. I told you it was easy. Now, let's get back to the podcast. Hello, the Russian Prince Peter Cropotkin 1842 to 1921 was on the most famous scientists of his age and most

prominent anarchists. As a child who was a head page boy for the Tsar, but left that behind to study evolution and ferment revolution, dropping the prince and escaping from jail in Russia for a 30-year exile in England and celebrity there and in the USA. And later back in Moscow, he criticised Lenny to his face,

yet was still allowed an enormous public funeral there with mourners stretching for a mile, the last hurrah for anarchy in the Soviet state. With me to discuss Peter Kropotkin are Ruth Kinnah, Professor of Political Theory at Loughbury University, Lee Dugatkin, Professor of Biology at the University of Louisville, and Simon Dixon, the Sir Bernard Pairz, Professor of Russian History at University College London.

Simon, what was his childhood like? Kroporkin's childhood fell into a very distinctive period of Russian history, the latter part of the reign of Nicholas I, which became increasingly reactionary, particularly after the revolutions elsewhere in Europe in 1848. So in the wake of those revolutions, the regime shifted even more towards anti-intellectual militarist values of the sort associated very much with Krapotkin's father, who was a general in the army, who was a leading aristocrity belonged to one of the oldest families in Russia, and who still ran all his estates in a very patriarchal sort of way. And it wasn't really until after the Crimean War,

in the mid-1850s when Krapotkin was just entering his teens, that the whole nature of Russian political culture changed so that when he went to school in St. Petersburg, At the core of pages, which was the elite military academy, he encountered all sorts of quite different sort of reformist ideas, and these were the two formative influences on his life, the childhood that he wanted to escape from, and the teenage exploration of a whole series of ideas, which made him one of the most multifaceted intellectuals for the rest of the century.

He caught the Tsar's eye in a rather peculiar way, didn't he? Well, yes, because while he was at school, he became sergeant of the corps, which was effectively head boy of the school. And so as a result, he became personal page boy to the Tsar. And in 1861, the year in which the serfs were emancipated in Russia, he was actually right at the heart of the imperial palace following the Tsar around. And so he saw both sides of reformist Russia, on the one hand, all the people advocating change.

But on the other hand, the sort of less attractive features of court society and nest of vipers, who were all trying to flatter the Tsar and make their way up the greases. pole, and that was one of the things that put him off, really, the kind of career that he could have expected to have in the top guards regiments. Can we just stop for a moment to say how clever he was? And people notice this, as how many other people, how precociously clever he was. I'm reading of him, knowing six languages, for instance. Yes, well, I think he certainly did

know. At least he had a reading knowledge of quite a lot of languages and eventually picked up spoken knowledge later on when he moved around Europe. And very decisive young man, wasn't it? He said he would not be called Prince after the, at the age of 12. Yes, that was characteristically precocious. Of course, being a prince helped him out in a number of ways, but he didn't like to be addressed as Prince. What was it about Russian life that began to make him uncomfortable? There were three things really.

One was that whole experience at the court. The second was the inflexibility and sterility of Russian bureaucratic life. I mean, to be careful not to exaggerate that too much, because, of course, the impetus for reform came from within the bureaucracy. So it's not to be over-exaggerated. But nevertheless, a lot of the people he encountered were pen-pushers of the goggle sort of stereotype, and he didn't like that. He wanted something more driving and energetic.

And then thirdly, of course, perhaps most importantly of all, he reacted against the inhumanity of serfdom and of mistreatment of the peasantry. Which he saw on his own estates. Indeed, he'd seen in practice, because every summer in his child, childhood. They went from Moscow where the family was based to the nearest of the big estates they owned. His father owned more than a thousand serfs, which far more than most. And like many young noble children, he got to know the domestic servants and learned a lot from them, sympathised with their plight. And so eventually he kind of joined a long line of nobleman

who thought, perhaps we shouldn't have treated the serfs quite this way, and tried to atone for their sins. So those were the three things, I think. So then we have this 17-year-old, which you filled in brilliantly. Ruth, Ruth, he chose, instead of going into high office or into the army, to becoming the guards. He chose to go to Siberia. Why was that? That's right.

So, I mean, as Simon said, one of the reasons is he wanted an escape. So he would have been expected to have gone into one of the elite guard regiments. And by the time he was able to choose what he wanted to do, he decided that he definitely didn't want to take. part in the endless rounds of balls and parades that that kind of service would have entailed. And then I think he was drawn to Siberia for a number of reasons that he outlines in his memoirs. One was because he wanted to find a route into university education, which his father was not enthusiastic about at the time.

How would you find a route in university education by going to Siberia? Because he thought, I mean, he'd already read about Siberia, which was one of the other draws. He'd read the work of people like Carl Ritter, the geography of Humboldt. And so he thought that he could go to Siberia and undertake research, which he did. So that would have been a sort of a data collection exercise, if you like. What sort of research? Well, he did research into glaciation, which he wrote up eventually in prison. He was interested in what I suppose we would call physical geography now.

But the other draw, I suppose, was he was also, as Simon has outlined. He was someone who was thought of himself as a reformist, someone who thought that it was possible to change Russian society, to change it for the better. and he thought that going to Siberia would be an outlet for his commitment to improvement. How did he change when he was in Siberia for two or three years, wasn't it? The big change, well there were two big changes. One, he became much more sceptical about the possibility of reform within the system. So he became alerted to gross abuses of power, to administrative inefficiency.

The reports that he was writing, which were proposing changes, were simply ignored. He also came into contact with Polish anti-Zarist rebels, and that sharpened his critical sort of understanding of czarism, I suppose. And I think most importantly, he went to Siberia thinking that the way in which you brought about positive change was to develop sensible, you know, enlightened policy and to issue commands from above. And one of the things that he realized in Siberia was not only did the indigenous people, organised themselves, but they had a wealth of knowledge about the environment that Gropokin felt that he could learn from. And I think he came back from Siberia, thinking that rather than change

being something that has its origins in commands from above, actually the way in which you bring about change is through building relationships of trust, with cooperating with people, and trying to understand how they understand their lives. That was a fundamental, I think, shift in his understanding. Anarchist ideas were developing outside Russia before Kropotkin became aware of it. What was understood then by anarchy? So from the time that Kropotkin went to Siberia in the 1860s to the 20 years thereafter, anarchy changes. I mean, it crystallises quite considerably within European politics.

So in the 1860s, anarchy is associated principally with the work of Pierre Joseph Proudon, who was the author of What is Property, and that was published in 1840. Proudon been very influential in the 1848 revolutions and he was regarded as probably one of the leading radicals of the mid-century. By the 1870s and Kropokin makes his first trip to Western Europe in 1871 and he declares himself an anarchist at that point. During that period, anarchism begins to be understood as a distinctive current within the socialist movement

and from an anarchist perspective it's a current which is defined by its anti-authoritarianism in distinction to what anarchists called the authoritarianism of Marxism. So that's one of the big sort of shifts in socialist politics. And then by the 1880s, and I think this is one of the things that's important in terms of the popular myths that grow about anarchism. In 1881, with the assassination of the Tsar, of Alexander, anarchism becomes associated in a lot of liberal circles with nihilism, with Russian nihilism,

and more particularly with the idea of, assassination and terrorist methods, and it's this that starts fueling the red scares of the late 19th century. So anarchism is not really a clearly defined ideology at the time. It's something that's beginning to take shape, not only through the work that anarchists themselves do, but also through the lens of their critics. If we can look for one fundamental, it was against the idea of a state. Lee, Lee Dugatkin. What impact had Darwin? He read Darwin, which had just come out, the origin of species. What impact did that have on Kropotkin before he went to Siberia? As Simon touched on before, this was a really precocious young guy.

And one of the things that happened to him when he was in the core was that he often got bored. And so he would do things like create a course on medieval history or translate Voltaire into Russian. He actually wrote a little physics books that they used in the core. And one of the things that he really got interested in was the early ideas on Darwin and evolution by natural selection. And that happened because his older brother, Alexander, was a student at the university. And one of his professors of zoology had given three lectures that Alexander referred to as on-trial. transformism. This was essentially lectures on Darwin and natural selection, and Peter Kropotkin became fascinated by this. In time, he and his brother would exchange lots of letters and discuss this.

I think he became fascinated by it because it was this new idea that might reshape the way we think about history and diversity on the planet. And, you know, it also tapped into this penchant. that Krapotkin already had for the study of natural history. You know, when he was on those estates during the summers, when he was a child, he would often write in very poetic terms about sort of walking about in nature. Humboldt was one of his heroes, and he would read Humboldt and, I think, fantasize about doing the kinds of things that Humboldt did. What impact did Darwin's book have on him?

What did he make him think and do that he didn't think and do before he was? read it, especially when he got to Siberia. Right. So when he got to Siberia, he went there thinking that Darwin's ideas played out the way that they were primarily being discussed in Europe and especially in the United Kingdom, which was that it was this bitter struggle for existence, what eventually would be called Court of Nature red in tooth and claw. And this is what Kropakken expected to see when he went to Siberia. And instead, what he saw was what he relatively quickly started referring to as mutual aid.

So he would see animals helping one another in all of these different ways. And this was very, very different from what he expected from this kind of dog-eat-dog world that he was reading about in terms of Darwin's work. He saw animals sharing food with each other, huddling for warmth. He saw animals giving alarm calls to help one another, creating these defensive rings to fend off predators, all of these things. And this over time began to make him believe that this mutual aid that he was seeing in non-humans, as well as in all sorts of communities in Siberia, that this was one of the driving evolutionary forces that produce the diversity

of life that we see around us. And this all came from an initial reading or discussion of Darwin with his brother, and it fundamentally reshaped the way he thought about science. And there are interesting ways in which it eventually began to interact with his views on anarchy as well. Simon Dixon, what did Kropotkin do when he went back to St. Petersburg led to his arrest? Well, when he got back to St. Petersburg initially to study mathematics in 1867, he found the whole atmosphere completely changed, of course, because by then there had been a failed attempt to assassinate the Zal. the year before.

And opinion was now divided effectively into two groups. There were those who thought that reform had gone far too far and should be stopped. And there were those who wanted to push it even further. And Kropotkin was at the extreme end of those in the end. He first of all decided to go to Switzerland, having abandoned the possibility of being, again, a good job, a secretary of the Imperial Geographic Society. He kept on turning good jobs down, didn't he? He kept on turning good jobs down.

And instead he disappeared into the Jura Mountains with the watchmakers of Jura. And he found all sorts of small-scale exchanges of exactly the kind that he expected to like. And returning from that experience in the early 1870s to St. Petersburg, he himself became much more politically active. He joined a group of so-called populists. Populists were a group of people who believed unlike Marxists that to get straight from feudalism to socialism, you could avoid all the perils of capitalism, landless proletariat, all the things that had caused trouble in 1848, but you could do it only in Russia

on the basis of the peasant commune. So this was a group of people who focused their efforts on energizing the peasantry. And there was a lot of debate about how they might do that. There was no sort of clear ideological line, even within the group that Kropokin joined, which was the so-called Chikovsky Circle. And it did all sorts of things.

It had some propaganda. It had lectures to people. But above all, Kropotkin was, he was very good at this kind of thing. he was involved with the migrant textile workers of St. Peaceburg, people who came in from the villages to undertake seasonal labour in the factories. And they, of course, ideal people for taking the message back to the countryside, or so it seemed. Unfortunately, security within the group wasn't very good.

So by January 1874, he'd been arrested and he was imprisoned in the St. Peter and Paul fortress. Notorious. Notorious indeed, yes. I mean, he had a slightly better time than most, of course, because of his aristocratic connections, I think. He was allowed not only to read, but also to write very unusually. And as Ruth said earlier on, this was the time when he worked quite hard on writing up all his geological and geographical, physical, geographical work. But he wasn't very well. And also his health deterioration.

Yes, he wasn't very well because it was all extremely damp. And, well, it was both damp, humid, warm, everything. So he was taken away to a military hospital eventually on the outdoors. outskirts of the city, and it was from there that an escape was engineered. Made the great escape. So how long was he in these two prisons ago? It was about two years. Two years, yes.

It was an 1876 that he escaped. So can you describe the great escape? First of all, first of all, he was going to escape with a balloon, via a balloon, but the balloon failed. Of course, the only source that we really have about this is his own memoirs written at the end of the century for an American audience, and it is, of course, quite a romanticised sort of story. But the story was that a conspiracy was organized by,

prominent doctor in St. Pittsburgh, who wasn't himself an anarchist, but was sympathetic to the cause. Classically enough, Kraportkin was supposed to hang about in the hospital yard until the moment came, and the signal was to come from a balloon. But there was a bit of a shortage of balloons, and the one they eventually got didn't work too well. So that had to be abandoned. And then they had another one where the code word was sort of somebody playing on the violin. And it struck up on the scraping noise, and he made a dash for the exit, and got into a horse and cut. And allegedly they'd hired a special racing horse to drive this car very quickly, and it got away. And, well, one believes as much of that as one likes, really.

But I suppose the key element is that he did get away, and nobody was ever arrested as a result of it. The doctor was eventually arrested for something he hadn't done in a very classic sort of Russian way. And very soon he landed in England where he said on an offer 30 years, Ruth Killer, now in exile is in exile, in England, which he turned out he liked very much, and gave him a lot of things he valued being able to be. able to say his mind being able to lecture in public and so on. Why did ideas about propaganda when he becomes so important to him? Kropokin was always, I think, someone who thought of himself as a propagandist for anarchist communism. And propaganda for him was a synonym for education.

So it meant raising awareness, the nature of oppression, and building confidence in the possibility of anarchist change. And it was important because Kropokin believed that changes in thought or ideas were themselves essential to revolution. When he came to write his study of the French revolution, the second chapter is called the idea. And his argument there is that the success of the Jacobins could be explained by the clarity of their purposes. And the lesson he took from that was that unless revolutionaries had a clear idea of what they wanted to achieve, their resistance would fail. And as an anarchist, he was committed to the idea that any kind of revolutionary change would have to be accomplished by the oppressed themselves. You couldn't

force anarchist change because that would be a contradiction in terms. So as an anarchist communist, Kropokin, I think, devotes his energies really into trying to dispel myths about the necessity and the value of government to show that liberal constitutional regimes, although they have far more latitude in them than autocrates do, but he still wanted to show that they served the interests of an elite and that they were exploitative and that they sustained systemic inequalities. He also wanted to explain that alternative socialist doctrines, particularly Marxism, or what was called social democracy at the time, would not bring liberation to the workers. What would happen through the promise of Marxist revolution would be a new form of hierarchy,

which would be based on the power of the party and the party leaders being able to control and dictate the lives of working people. He saw that quite early and expressed it emphatically. He did. He was deeply anti-Marxist. And although I think, you know, from a modern perspective, we can see that there are clear overlaps between some of the things that Kropokin says about capitalism in particular and about, you know, the shortcomings of liberal democracy, he's hostile to Marxism. He doesn't trust it.

He sees it as a deeply oppressive and flawed doctrine. And the other thing he wanted to do was to tackle this prejudice that Prudon had identified in the 1840s, which was the idea that anarchy simply spells chaos. And one of the things Krippokin was very committed to was to show working people that anarchy was something that was feasible, was something that they could organise themselves, and that it would improve their lives to do so.

Thank you. Lee, Lidugatkin, he was mainly in England then over those 30 years, larger in England. And he read Thomas Huckley, known as Darwin's Bulldog, and that gave him something in Darwin, really could attack. Can you tell us what? Absolutely. I mean, as soon as he landed there, he started working at nature, this upstart science journal

and now the world's most famous journal. And as he was there, he came across this essay by Huxley called The Struggle for Existence, and it was published in 19th century, it was sort of the journal for the intelligentsia. And Huxley presents this view that's completely antithetical to what Kropotkin's experienced in Siberia. And if I could just read you two lines from this because they're so powerful. Huxley writes from the viewpoint of the moralists, the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated and set to fight the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. This was sort of exactly the opposite of what Kropotkin had experienced when he was in Siberia.

And so he goes to the editor of 19th century and he asks for equal time. In his essay, the first essay he writes in 19th century, he basically lays out his ideas on mutual aid, on what today we would call cooperation and altruism, telling the reader what he saw in Siberia as well as adding on other examples of mutual aid. He went on to publish then a whole series on mutual aid in non-humans as well. How did Huxley respond to Botkins taking them apart? Not at all. There's not a direct written response in the literature. You know, Huxley certainly would have known about it, but he and other British evolutionary biologists are not particularly swayed by this view. You can tell because Huxley is continuing to write about Hobbesian wars of all against all. And he tells... Life is nasty, brutish and short. Exactly, exactly. In the animal world as well as the human world. Yeah, particularly in the animal world.

And, you know, for Krapakken, it wasn't just that this was the opposite of what he saw in Siberia, but he was beginning to think that mutual aid in non-humans was the stage on which eventually cooperation on altruism in humans was built, that the same forces were in play. And, you know, he had a hard fight trying to convince Darwinists of this view. Darwin himself has little bits and pieces about cooperation in his work, but it's primarily about competition. Thank you. Simon, Simon Dixon. What did Cropotkin see in his travels in Western Europe that gave him his ideas about change?

Because this is the big movement now. What is changed, how has change brought about who did it affect, and so on. Yes, well, unlike most Russian emigres in the West, who lived in their own little bubble and might have been anywhere, really. Lenin was a classic example in London. Krapotkin, of course, got quite involved in the societies that he was visiting and travelled around, gave lectures,

learned a lot as a result, and went visiting and so on. And I suppose the biggest emphasis was that he had a very optimistic view of technological change. He had a vision that one of the main problems that political economists have to solve, production of goods, was going to be revolutionised by technology.

And that this would, allow intensive use of the land, which was quite different from the extensive use of land that he was used to in Russia, and which had led to a lot of shortage there, intensive cultivation of the kind that, for example, he saw in Guernsey, in the greenhouses there, would lead to greater cultivation, greater productivity, and there would be more of everything to go around. It would lead to a lot of other things, too. He thought, for example, that domestic drudgery could be got rid of by domestic appliances, that females would have a much better time than they were currently having, if only they had more gadgets in the house.

So he was tremendously optimistic about all that and wrote a big book about it. Eventually, published in French called The Conquest of Bread in 1892, not a coincidental date, I think, because that was, of course, the year of a major famine in Russia. So here he is showing the Russians implicitly how more could be produced, if only they thought about it more carefully. Ruth, he produced perhaps his major work in 2002, mutual aid. It's been referred to two or three times. Can you tell listeners how that slotted in with his anarchism?

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, Leah's already outlined the first part of the book is a critique of social Darwinism and this idea of nature of red and tooth and claw. But the bulk of the book is actually a theory of anarchist organisation. What the book does is examine how sociability is embedded in different social arrangements. and Kropokin has three basic models. One he calls tribal society. The second he calls village community

and the third he calls the city-state. And in mutual aid, he argues that the practice of mutual aid in these different settings gives rise to an ethics of mutual aid. So this is an ethics that we would think of now as an ethics of care, of solidarity and of sharing, of giving without expectation of reward. And he says that mutual aid is something

that with practice will extend from family and friendship groups to strangers. So it supports a different way of living and a communal way of living. Crucially, Kropokin also argues that the city-state, which he described as the most ambitious experiment in organising for mutual aid. Medieval city states. The medieval city states, yeah. And he celebrates the medieval city states.

And he says that these are set up as self-conscious mutual aid societies, but he also points out that they fail. They don't involve the rural workers, the peasantry, and they don't have a check on private accumulation, so they build up inequalities within them. And his argument is that the failures of the city-state allow for the resurgence of competitive individualism and state formation. And this produces its own ethic, and that's an ethic of when it takes all and of naked, sort of aggressive individualism. So the book in the end sets out a choice, and Kropokin says, says, you know, we have two ways of thinking about our future. One is to think in terms of anarchy, which would involve the recovery of mutual aid. The other is to stick with the state

and the processes of centralisation and monopoly that that involves. And that for him would be a future which is inherently destructive. So mutual aid is an attack on laissez-faire liberalism, but it's also, I think, an attack on Marxism. And it challenged the idea that the advancement of capitalism would lay the foundations for socialism within the state. So I think Simon's right. Kropokin did have a faith, if you like, in technological change. But he also thought that that technological change would have to take place within the rebuilding of local communities and the abandonment of international commodity exchange.

And this is one of the things that mutual aid lays out. Lee, can you add to anything there to the strengths of this work mutual aid? It's a piece of fieldwork on evolution. biology? Sure. I mean, it was, it turned out that relatively quickly it was one of the most well-read books in biological circles, particularly evolutionary biological circles. And it was very much in line with this kind of natural history observation approach. There were no controlled experiments, nothing was brought into a laboratory, but it was well done. Kropotkin lays out, you know, what he's seeing and why he thinks he's seeing it. And for him, one of the most important things,

things was there were many people that were saying, you know, nature was kind of amoral. But for Kropokin, from what he saw in animals, he began to think that that wasn't true, that there was a kind of morality that you saw in nature. This led him in time to actually be one of the first scientists to discuss the idea of empathy in non-humans. And it all sort of stemmed from this basic law of mutual aid. He really felt that this would inform us when we think about human behavior, that it could be a model for us in terms of how we behave. I mean, after all, animals don't have governments and yet somehow they find these ways to cooperate with each other. I mean, surely we can do this as people.

Simon, Simon Dixon, what was his attitude towards Russia while he was in exile? And what was Russia's attitude towards him? Well, he, like many Russian exiles, I think, had a sort of love, hate relationship with his native land, and of course he didn't go back to it until the Tsar had fallen in 1917. Initially, his impact there or his influence there was negligible because, of course, he hadn't written anything of any political substance before he left Russia, so there was no legacy of writing. And the political culture in Russia, of course, had changed radically in the opposite direction from his after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. So there was a sort of era of much more conservative policies under Alexander III and Nicholas II.

So it wasn't really until Russia began to destabilise noticeably in the early 20th century that some of his ideas began to get through. Then, of course, he got a great boost from the Revolution of 1905, which made him think that Glory was around the corner. He did quite a bit of work on Russia at that point, and in 1909 wrote a book on the terror in Russia, which was effectively a denunciation of prison conditions of subject and which, of course, he could write with a lot of personal authority.

By then, there were anarchist groups in Russia, but I don't think you could say that very many of them were Krapotkinist in the sense that they were faciparous, they were isolated, many of them were Jewish groups in the Western provinces, and most of them were more keen on sort of random acts of violence than he ever was. When he came back in 1917, he's quickly taken up by all persons Lenin. Yes, that, of course, is a very curious relationship, because, as Ruth quite rightly said earlier on, Marxism is the enemy in many ways for Kropotkin.

He got back in June 1917 under the provisional government. He was even offered a job by the provisional government. And you turned down. Which, again, turned down. Yes, exactly. There's a kind of pattern there, isn't there? And perhaps this one, he was wise to turn down. And then, of course, in October, when the Bolsheviks took over, he was faced with an awkward dilemma.

On the one hand, by this point he's living in Dimitre, of which, as a little sort of county town, as it were, north of Moscow. And Dimitriff allowed him to make all sorts of remarks about the way things were going. And on the one hand, he was pleased with developments of revolution, but he was absolutely distressed by Leninist authoritarianism. So he wrote lots of letters to Lenin complaining about it, and he even went to see Lenin, who saw him,

because Lenin, of course, in a curious kind of way, admired him. On the one hand, he got all his books and clearly read them. And, of course, you couldn't deny that Krapotkin was a, sort of icon of the revolution and he'd written about the French Revolution and so forth. So there was a sort of element there that had to be looked after. And Lenin did that, but he didn't take a blind bit of notice of any of his ideas. We've sort of hopped over, I'll go back to Ruth here, we've hopped over the First World War, a big hop.

Anyway, for our purposes, the people around him were amazed that he took sides, that he backed the Allies in the First World War. What do you say about that, Ruth? His decision to back the Ententee powers in 1914 split the anarchist movement effectively. And for a lot of his very close friends and former comrades, it was a sign that he'd gone back on his principles, that he'd been seduced by British jingoism. And they just didn't understand it as a position.

But I think, you know, from Kropokin's point of view, his views about the war were connected to his estimation about the possibility or the prospects for revolution. And Kropokin had been warning about the likelihood of a European war from the turn of the 19th, 20th century. And he was convinced that Europe was unstable, that the tensions, Franco-Prussian tensions, would provide a spark for a global war.

And that the likely outcome of this would be the collapse of the old empire. It's not just Russia, but also Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. So the question that was on his mind was always about, you know, construction, how the world would reformulate itself. And his view, I mean, his ideal, which we've touched on when we talked about mutual aid, was to advocate for what he called decentralized federation as a framework for anarchist communism. But his worry in 1914 was that the anarchist propaganda that he'd been so busy trying to spread had not taken sufficient route. And he doubted the strength of popular support for anarchist change. And actually,

he was very fearful that the Marxist Social Democrats had probably stolen the edge. So from his point of view, the outbreak of war risked the entrenchment of a highly centralised Prussian state model across Europe. Ms. Markkin model. Yeah, that's right. So when the war came and he was right,

it was sort of really triggered by Franco-Prussian tensions. If the Germans had won, then the Prussian state model would have a sort of cultural cachet, I guess. And this would be a disaster. would be a disaster for Europe, it would be a particular disaster for Russia, because it would mean that when the Tsar fell, which he was convinced that czarism would fail, another centralised regime would take over. He understood, I think, that the victory of France and Britain was not a victory for anarchy, it was a victory for the state, however way you looked at it.

But Kropotkin's view was that the defeat of the Prussian system was more important for the long-term success, particularly of the Russian Revolution. I think that's why he puts his weight behind the Montau-Powars. Lee, how well-known was Kropotkin in the latter part of his lifetime? How popular? And how did it matter? Well, he did a fairly remarkable set of speaking tours in the United States, for example. These were tours where the New York Times was following him around, talking about him and showing photos of him. And it was really quite astonishing the breadth of the things that he talked about.

So he went to the National Geographic Society and taught them about mutual aid. And then he came to New York City and he talked about socialism to 2,000 people at a place called Chickering Hall. And then he went to Boston and he talked not only about mutual aid but socialism.

He spoke not only to gigantic crowds, but he would talk to anybody who would listen. He gave a talk at the Women's Industrial Club near Harvard University. He gave a pair of talks at a church on Christianity and morality, which for Krapakken, as far as I understand it, were not very well connected. So he was being followed quite closely, both for his scientific and for his political views in the United States. In fact, he was invited back again in 2001 and gave a series of lectures as part. part of something called the Lowell Institute. And during this visit, he talked about mutual aid again,

but he also went and spent time with the leading anarchists of the day. He was set to come back for a third visit, except that our President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, and basically all anarchists were persona no grata in the United States. Otherwise, he would have come back again. And he gave talks on Russian literature and wrote a book about Russian literature, and on it went, can I come back to Simon, Dick, isn't here? This business of him going back to Russia and this enormous funeral,

did Kropotkin think this is it? I've got the man who runs it in the room with me. He didn't say he's giving me this funeral, but he was treating him with great respect and so on. Was that a moment of real hope for Kropotkin that oddly enough he'd achieve what he wanted by going away and coming back? It's difficult to say. I think there are a lot of Russian emigres who go back

and then find it hard to achieve what they, they'd hope for. The problem for Kropokin was this really, wasn't it? What happened over that period during the Russian Civil War was that initially, of course, the Bolsheviks were very keen to draw on ideas from their rivals, but at the same time, they then emasculated those rivals on the basis of their superior organisation. And Kropotkin, of course, had always said that you shouldn't have an anarchist political party. It was the opposite of what he wanted. And so Bolshevik discipline eventually wiped out virtually all the rivals. And I think that's really, why early in 1921 when Kraportkin died.

For the Bolsheviks, it wasn't too much of a worry to allow them to have this funeral. Funerals were, of course, a political event. They'd always had been. But in this case, they decided to go ahead with it. 20,000 people maybe attended it. And allegedly, Kami Nif actually let out some anarchists from jail for the day to attend. So it clearly wasn't thought to be a threat in any way. One of the deep ironies of anarchism

was that their ideas were fiery and fascinating as the three of you but the fact that they didn't have an organisation that they weren't a group and outfit was always going to be their great, not only a floor. Yes, I'm afraid it was. And they didn't have any detailed discussion of what would happen when all these sort of small-scale

mutual aid organizations potentially disagreed with one another. You know, how do you actually regulate when you spread it onto a sort of wider scale. They didn't have an open answer to that. And Lenin, the Bolsheviks, of course, did. And it lay in this kind of state power which Krapotkin abhorred. Ruth, which of his ideas, Krapotkin's ideas, have proved to be the most durable?

Well, certainly mutual aid is amongst one of them. And I think, you know, it's interesting that... You did go out of fashion very much, didn't it? For anarchists, it's still a touchstone. It's probably still one of the best known anarchist texts that's, you know, that's read anywhere. And I think it's interesting that in the first months of the pandemic, you know, what happens? Kropotkin's right. Mutual aid groups spring up right across the country, internationally. They network together. And the point about, you know, sort of, you know,

how do you resolve the conflicts? I mean, Kropotkin's answer to that is that you can only resolve conflicts through direct dialogue with your opponents. And I think one of the strengths of anarchism for me is that anarchy doesn't assume that people are anarchist. It assumes that people can practice their politics directly without arbitration. And that's really what

the other sort of, I suppose, enduring idea that Kropokin has. And it's now sort of called Do It Yourself politics or do it ourselves politics. But it's the idea of acting for yourselves and not delegating decision-making responsibility to others. Ney, what, we're coming to the end now,

what reputation does he have as a scientist now, or even now I'm reflecting on what he did it then? Yeah, I mean, certainly within sort of evolutionary biology, he's made quite a comeback. I mean, after Kropotkin, there was a whole school of mutual aid here in the 1930s and 40s, but then it sort of went away and not totally, but largely because of a sociobiological view of things where, again, the selfish gene approach sort of led people away from thinking about mutual aid, but it's come back. And now there are hundreds of studies that have been done. And many of them sort of call upon Kropotkin's original work. People are citing it more.

I think maybe one of the most remarkable things today looking back on Kropotkin is that he has this sort of what at the time seemed like a little bit of a throwaway line in his articles about mutual aid. He said one day we should expect to see mutual aid in Ponskum. And there's this entire school now within evolutionary biology that studies mutual aid cooperation and altruism in bacteria. Basically, we now know that. that these single-cell creatures are secreting things that are protecting others in their group. They're breaking down dangerous elements in a way that everybody in the group can benefit from it. This is mutual aid at a micro level, and Kropotkin predicted it 100 years ago.

Finally, Simon, what would your closing and summing remarks be about him? Well, he's a classic Russian intellectual in many ways, formed in Russia and retaining many of his Russian values about ideas for the rest of his life, even when he was abroad. And that those Russian intellectual formation was extraordinarily wide and the kind of multifaceted individual that we've been discussing for the last few minutes. Well, thank you all very much.

Thank you very much, Sam. Simon Dixon. Thanks to Lee, Devakin and Ruth, Ruth Kina, and our studio engineer, Tim Heffer. Next week, the ancient Sanskrit guide to running an empire, the Atashastra. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What did you not get to say that you really like to have said? If we'd had more time, I'd have spent more time to talk about the conquest of bread, I suppose. Ah, right, yeah. Because I think, I mean, I read the conquest of bread, I think differently from Simon. So I see the conquest of bread as, you know, why is it called the conquest of bread?

And the answer to that is, you know, Kropokkin thinks that revolutions are not won by military action alone. They're won on the logistics. You can only win a revolution if you can feed your revolutionaries. And so the whole idea of the conquest of bread is that you have to find ways in which you can keep the campaign that's likely to be unleashed against you going by organising your affairs in advance and as a practice

and through mutual aid. So you have to find ways of feeding your... people locally, of housing them, of clothing them, and that you do that partly by entering into subversive action from the start. So I think Kropotkin gives us an idea of a kind of a relationship between the means and ends of change that we didn't really cover, and I think is really quite crucial to his thinking about revolutionary change. That must be right. I think that's very interesting. But would that be the way that he was read?

I mean, is it possible that part of the reason why he attracted such large audiences is that in Western Europe is that they didn't immediately grasp some of the revolutionary implications of what he was saying and took on the sort of gentler aspects of it? I think, I mean, from the point of view of the socialist movement, I think one of the problems that Kropotkin's aware of, And I think, you know, he's proved right, sadly, about that, is that it's much easier for working people who are feeling oppressed and exploited to imagine how change is going to come about through party political organisation.

And so the anarchists really lose out to social democrats and to campaigns for suffrage reform. And it happens not just within working class male movements, but also within the women's movements. movement. And I think anarchism, you know, it never really also got over the image problem that it had as a result of being associated with terrorism earlier on and then in the 1890s with the French wave of propaganda by the deed. So I think there was a kind of an uphill struggle that was always problematic for the anarchists. But, you know, I don't think Kropokin

thought that, I mean, I suppose that's another aspect of anarchism. There's never a moment of of change. There are just changes that you can make all the time. And I think that lesson is deeply embedded in things like the Conquest of Bread. We didn't much touch on violence, did we? And yet for a lot of people at the time, and since, Anarchy is violent.

Well, it's sometimes said, isn't it, that he's very cautious about speaking about violence. There's not much about violence or the need for violence in Conquest of Bread, for example. And there's a question about how far that's because he's in England for 30 years and it's not a question for him there, or how far he's trying to hide the violent side of it,

how far he's hoping that his ideas can be adopted by bourgeois people without realizing quite what they are. But I suspect Ruse doesn't agree with that. So the term propaganda by the deed, which is the term that's usually associated with terrorist action in the anarchist movement, is actually coined in the 1870s. And at the time that that it's coined, it's understood to mean confrontational action as opposed to violent action and certainly not assassination, which most anarchists thought of as a Republican approach to change rather than anarchist one. But Kropokin always disliked it and when it was taken up at the London anarchist conference of 1881, he suspected that the people who were really pushing it were not

really anarchists and again he was right that the people who were really promoting propaganda by the deed as a terrorist policy were a jean provocateur. But he preferred this idea of what he called the spirit of revolt, which is the title of an essay that he wrote, and that he used partly in reference to the nihilists in Russia, and particularly to people like Sophia Pera Skaia and a lot of other women activists, women nearists, and he understood it as rebellious action

that was informed by a longing for justice. and that may well take a violent edge. So he's not advocating violence, but he is advocating actions that people feel compelled to take on the basis of the injustice that they see and in order to try and correct that injustice. And I think when it comes to the, you know, to talking about individual acts of assassination,

Kropotkin's usual response is to look at the biography of the people of the assassins themselves and to try and work out what it was in their social conditions that drove them to commit these violent acts. And his general view is that, well, it's the violence of their daily lives, which is sustained by the state, which probably explains why they take the turns that they do. Lee, you wanted to come on on something else. Please, go away you go.

Actually, you know, now that I hear Simon and Ruth chatting about this, there might be something to add in terms of the evolutionary aspects of violence. violence in non-humans. So in fact, you know, Kropotkin was not naive, even though he thought that mutual aid was sort of the driving for evolutionary force. He understood that competition, and particularly violence, was also part and parcel of life in non-humans. But in particular, he often discussed the ways that violence would play out, for example, in ants. He would discuss ways in which there were all of these cooperative behaviors that were being displayed. Now, if certain individuals, in fact, did not add in, did not display these behaviors,

then all of a sudden there was intense punishment by others in the group, specifically with respect to the violation of the mutual aid norms, even in non-humans. In terms of the other thing that I... What sort of examples have you got, Lee? Yeah, so he discussed mostly in social insects, for example. in ants he discussed that they share food and so much so

that in some species like if one ant stroke a hungry ant strokes another ant the individual will regurgitate food into the gut of the other ant who was asked for help and this goes on back and forth and in fact it's only

when an individual doesn't respond to a request for help that others in the group act extraordinary violent towards it. The other thing I would, I just would have maybe said another minute about would be, I mentioned in passing that Kropotkin was also basically the first person to argue that empathy existed in non-humans. And the reason I think this might be worth discussing is that it touches on this very bizarre relationship that he had with Adam Smith's work. So if you look at,

you know, the wealth of nations, Krapakin had no use for that sort of thing. But, 30 years before Adam Smith wrote the wealth of nations, he wrote this book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And basically what Adam Smith says there is if you want to understand human society and how it's evolved, you need to understand empathy, the ability to put yourself in the position of somebody else and feel what they're feeling. And in one of his pamphlets, Kropotkin says that this is brilliant. This is a part of Adam Smith that I really like. Anna Smith's only mistake is that he did not understand that this is in fact in what he referred to as the habitual state. stage in non-humans. That is, we saw it, we see it in a kind of primitive way in non-humans. Now, it took a hundred years before individuals in the field of animal behavior really took

these ideas seriously and started looking at them. And it turns out that non-humans display empathy in all sorts of different contexts. I have a student in my lab who's looking at this right now in rats. And it's stunning that rats will take the time and energy and face risks to basically help other rats get out of dangerous predicaments. And this is something that Kropotkin talked about 100 years ago. Yeah. He talks about Adam Smith in the last book as well, the posthumously published ethics. So he crops up there. Well, thank you all very much. That was absolutely terrific. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. All right. Here we go, O2. Five, six, seven, eight. Dance. It has the power to connect and to

entertain. And in a new series for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds, I explore the iconic dancers who have been doing just that. Dance, it really, I think, saved my life. Join me, Otimaboussa, as I delve into the lives of the innovators and the mall breakers who have changed dance forever. Gene Kelly was this working class guy that I just really connected with that. Otimabusa's Dancing Legends on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.