Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

I never forced the men to cross, but they themselves, knowing why I had to hurry, would decide at a given moment that an attempt must be made. ‘There are not seven deaths in one’s life, and one cannot be avoided,’ they would say, and…

No reactionist could raise, or ever has raised, his voice to assert that what was left--the unreformed tribunals, the absence of municipal government, or the system of exile--was good and was worth maintaining: no one has dared to say that.

And when they had framed their ideas, and had shaped them into laws which merely required his signature to become realities, then he refused that signature.

He made them realize what could be done immediately, and how easy it was to do it; he induced them to sacrifice whatever of their ideals could not be immediately realized, and to demand only what was practically possible at the time.

Yielding for a moment to the current of public opinion around him, he induced men all over Russia to set to work, to issue from the domain of mere hopes and dreams, and to touch with the finger the reforms that were required.

It is seen from what I have just said--and the story of little Chitá was the story of all Russia--that he did worse than that.

It has often been said that Alexander II. committed a great fault, and brought about his own ruin, by raising so many hopes which later on he did not satisfy.

Only now, after thirty-six years have passed away, the authorities are introducing the reformed tribunals and a parody of self-government in Siberia, and committees have been nominated again to inquire into the system of exile.

I not only lost in him a dear personal friend, but I felt also that this parting was the burial of a whole epoch, full of long-cherished hopes--‘full of illusions,’ as it became the fashion to say.

Worst of all, public opinion itself took a further step backward.

To be revolutionists, and fail to prove to the masses that a new era has really begun for them, is to ensure the certain ruin of the attempt.

Unfortunately, it often happens that the leaders are so much absorbed with mere questions of military tactics that they forget the main thing.

A revolution, from its very outset, must be an act of justice towards the ‘down-trodden and the oppressed’--not a promise of making such reparation later on--otherwise it is sure to fail.

You stand no longer under any obligations whatever to your late masters: you are simply their neighbours; all you will have to do is to pay the redemption tax, so much every year, to the Government.

It was bound to accomplish an act of justice towards the serfs--whose condition in Poland was as bad as, and often worse than, in Russia itself--by granting them better and more definite conditions of emancipation.

When the revolution broke out in Poland it was generally believed in Russia that it would take a democratic, republican turn; and that the liberation of the serfs on a broad democratic basis would be the first thing which a revolutionary…

The gallant fight of the always brave sons of Poland, and the indomitable energy with which they resisted a formidable army, won sympathy for that heroic nation.

Russia can keep her in servitude only by means of sheer force and oppression--a condition of things which has hitherto favoured, and necessarily will favour, oppression in Russia herself.

Poland will never lose her national character, it is too strongly developed; she has, and will have, her own literature, her own art and industry.

It was only after I had stayed a fortnight with the peasants, and had won their confidence, that the misdeeds of their chief could be brought to light.

This was not by any means easy, because the peasants, terrorized by him, and well knowing an old Russian saying, ‘God is far away, while your chief is your next-door neighbour,’ did not dare to testify.

He robbed the peasants and flogged them right and left--even women, which was against the law; and when a criminal affair fell into his hands, it might lie there for months, men being kept in the meantime in prison till they gave him a…

In short, our work was very serious; and even now, looking back at it through the perspective of so many years, I can say in full confidence that if municipal self-government had been granted then, in the modest shape which we gave to it…

I became the secretary of two committees--for the reform of the prisons and the whole system of exile, and for preparing a scheme of municipal self-government--and I set to work with all the enthusiasm of a youth of nineteen years.

There I had to give myself, heart and soul, without loss of time, to the great reforms which were then under discussion.