Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin was born in Moscow into an old princely family and served as an army officer in Siberia, where his geographical surveys earned him scientific recognition. In the 1870s he renounced his title and joined the revolutionary movement. He was imprisoned in Russia, escaped in 1876, and was later jailed in France before settling in England for about three decades. His main works include The Conquest of Bread (1892), Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899) and Mutual Aid (1902). He returned to Russia in 1917, criticized the Bolshevik government's methods, and died in Dmitrov in 1921.

Kropotkin is one of the most widely read anarchist writers, and his ideas influenced anarchist movements in Spain, Latin America and East Asia, as well as later thinkers on cooperatives, ecology and urban planning. Biologists and social scientists continue to discuss Mutual Aid in debates on the evolution of cooperation. Marxist critics described his program as utopian, and the Bolshevik government he criticized suppressed anarchist groups shortly after his death; his Moscow funeral was one of the last large anarchist gatherings allowed in Soviet Russia. Liberal and market-oriented critics question whether a large economy could allocate goods without prices or a state. His support for the Allies in 1916 was denounced by many fellow anarchists, including Errico Malatesta, as a break with antimilitarism.