Kropotkin was born in Moscow on 9 December 1842, in the
Konyushennaya ("
Equerries") district. His father, Alexey, was a typical royal officer who owned serfs in three provinces and
whose family descended from the princes of
Smolensk. His mother, Ekatarina Sulima, was the daughter of General
Nikolai Sulima and a descendant of a
Zaporozhian Cossack leader. Peter, the youngest of her four children, was three years old when she died of
tuberculosis. Kropotkin's father remarried two years later. This stepmother was indifferent towards the Kropotkin children and had a streak of jealous vindictiveness, going to great lengths to remove the memory of Kropotkin's mother. With his father mostly absent, Kropotkin and his older brother,
Alexander, were raised by their German nurse. Kropotkin developed an enduring compassion for the estate's servants and serfs who cared for him and relayed stories of his mother's kindness. He was raised in the family's Moscow mansion and an estate in
Nikolskoye, Kaluga Oblast, outside Moscow. At the age of eight, Kropotkin attended Tsar
Nicholas I's Royal Ball. Commending the child's costume, the tsar chose Kropotkin for his
Page Corps, an elite school in
St. Petersburg that combined military and court education and produced the tsar's imperial attendants. Kropotkin joined the Page Corps as a teenager and began a 14-year epistolary relationship with his brother that charts his intellectual and emotional development. By the time of his arrival, Kropotkin had already shown a populist position towards
the emancipation of serfs and a nature of revolt against his father and the school's
hazing. Kropotkin began his first underground revolutionary writings at the school, where he advocated for a Russian constitution. He developed an interest in science, reading, and opera. As a top student, Kropotkin became a sergeant-major in 1861 and was thrust into court life, serving as the emperor's personal Page de Chambre. His views of the tsar and court life soured as imperial policy changed over the next year. Privately, he was preoccupied with the need to live a societally useful life.
Siberia For his tour of service, in 1862, he chose the
Amur Cossacks in east
Siberia, an undesirable post that would let him study the technical mathematics of artillery, travel, live in nature, and achieve financial independence from his father. He developed a firm worldview of compassion for the poor and contrasted the pride and dignity of the yeoman peasant farmers against the indignities of serfdom. He wrote approvingly of the cultivated
Transbaikalia governor-general
Boleslav Kukel, to whom Kropotkin reported. Kukel engaged Kropotkin in prison reform and city self-governance projects that the central government ultimately denied. The exiled poet and political prisoner
Mikhail Larionovitch Mikhailov introduced Kropotkin to anarchism by recommending he read an essay by
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Kropotkin's brother came to live with him in
Irkutsk. After Kukel's ouster in early 1863, Kropotkin found solace in geographical work. He led a disguised reconnaissance expedition to find a direct route through
Manchuria from
Chita to
Vladivostok the next year. He explored the
East Siberian Mountains in the north the year after. The mountain measurements from his 1866
Olekminsk-
Vitimsk expedition confirmed his Manchurian hypothesis that the Siberian area from the
Ural Mountains to the
Pacific Ocean was a
plateau and not a
plain. This discovery of the
Patom and
Vitim Plateaus won him a gold medal from the
Russian Geographical Society and led to the commercialization of the
Lena gold fields. A
range of mountains in this region was later named for him. Kropotkin covered Siberia for St. Petersburg newspapers since his arrival, including the condition of the Polish political exiles who participated in the unsuccessful 1866
Baikal Insurrection. Kropotkin secured a promise from the governor-general to suspend the prisoners' death sentences, which was reneged upon. Disillusioned, Kropotkin and his brother resolved to leave the military. His time in Siberia taught him to appreciate peasant social organization and convinced him that administrative reform was an ineffectual means to improve social conditions. After five years in Siberia, Kropotkin and his brother moved to St. Petersburg, where they continued their schooling and academic work. Kropotkin took a position with the Russian
interior ministry with no duties. He studied mathematics, physics, and geography at the university. After presenting his Vitim expedition findings, Kropotkin accepted the Russian Geographical Society's part-time offer of its Physical Geography section Secretaryship. Kropotkin translated
Herbert Spencer's work for additional income. He continued to develop a theory, which he considered his best scientific contribution, that the East Siberian mountains were part of a large plateau and not independent ridges. Kropotkin participated in a 1870 polar expedition plan that postulated the existence of what was later discovered as the
Franz Josef Land Arctic archipelago. In early 1871, he was commissioned to study the
Ice Age in Scandinavian geography, in which Kropotkin developed theories of the glaciation of Europe and the
glacial lakes of its northeast. His father died later that year, and Kropotkin inherited a wealthy estate in
Tambov. Kropotkin turned down the Geographical Society's offer of its general secretary position, instead choosing to work on his Ice Age data and interest in bettering the lives of peasants.
Anarchism While Kropotkin became increasingly revolutionary in his writings, he was not known for activism. He was spurred by the 1871
Paris Commune and the trial of
Sergey Nechayev. He and his brother attended meetings on the
Franco-Prussian War and revolutionism. Likely at the encouragement of a Swiss extended family member and his own desire to see the socialist workers' movement, Kropotkin set out to see Switzerland and Western Europe in February 1872. Over three months, he met
Mikhail Sazhin in Zurich, worked and fell out with
Nikolai Utin's
Marxist group in Geneva, and was introduced to the
Jura Federation's
James Guillaume and
Adhémar Schwitzguébel. The Jura were the main internal opposition to the Marxist-controlled
First International, as followers of
Mikhail Bakunin. Kropotkin was quickly impressed and was instantly converted to anarchism by the group's egalitarianism and independence of expression, but narrowly missed meeting the leading anarchist, Bakunin, while there. Kropotkin visited Belgium's movement before returning to Russia in May with contraband literature. Back in St. Petersburg, Kropotkin joined the
Chaikovsky Circle, a group of revolutionaries that Kropotkin considered more educational than revolutionary in their activities. Kropotkin believed in the inevitability of
social revolution and the need for stateless social organization. His
populist revolutionary program for the group emphasized the role of urban workers and peasants, whereas the group's moderates concentrated on students. Partially for this reason, he declined to contribute his personal wealth to the group. He viewed professionals as unlikely to forgo their privileges and judged them to not live societally useful lives. His program emphasized federated agrarian communes and a revolutionary party. While he could speak powerfully, Kropotkin was not a successful organizer. Kropotkin's first political memo in November 1873 covered his basic plan for stateless social reconstruction, including common property, worker control of factories, shared physical labor towards societal need, and labor vouchers in lieu of money. He emphasized living among commoners and using propaganda to focus mass dissatisfaction. He rejected the Nechayev conspiracy model. Members of the circle began to be arrested in late 1873, and the
Third Section secret police came for Kropotkin in March 1874. His arrest for agitation, as a former
page de chambre and officer, was scandalous. Kropotkin had just filed his Ice Age report and had been recently elected president of the Geographical Society's Physical and Mathematical Department. At the society's request, the tsar granted Kropotkin books to finish his glaciation report. Kropotkin was held in the
Peter and Paul Fortress. His brother, who had also been radicalized as a follower of Lavrov, was also arrested and
exiled in Siberia, where he committed suicide about a decade later. Kropotkin was moved to the House of Detention prison military hospital in St. Petersburg for poor health, with the help of his sister. With assistance from friends, he escaped from the minimum-security prison in June 1876. By way of Scandinavia and England, Kropotkin arrived in Switzerland by the end of the year, where he met Italian anarchists
Carlo Cafiero and
Errico Malatesta. He visited Belgium and Zurich, where he met French geographer
Élisée Reclus, who became a close friend. == Exile ==