Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

A movement similar to that of the Lollards is rapidly growing now amongst the Russian peasants.

No police in the world will find you, if they conceal you....

As for myself, I should have been content with anything I could do, no matter how small it might be, if only it would help to raise the intellectual level and the well-being of the peasants.

What sort of basis for a political struggle could such institutions offer?

Having granted institutions of a very limited form of self-government to certain provinces of Russia, the government, immediately after having passed that law, directed all its efforts to reduce that reform to nothing and to deprive it of…

Many young people cherished for a time the same hopes; but all these hopes vanished at the first contact with the actual government machinery.

Every young man of democratic tastes, every young woman following a course of higher education, was a suspect in the eyes of the state police, and was denounced by Katkóff as an enemy of the state.

The young generation, as a whole, were treated as ‘suspects,’ and the elder generation feared to have anything to do with them.

Our elder brothers did not want our socialistic aspirations, and we could not part with them.

But we saw no possible ground, legal or semi-legal, for such a struggle.

We felt, therefore, the necessity of a political struggle against this terrible power, which was crushing the best intellectual forces of the nation.

We knew, and we learned more every day, of the lawlessness of the functionaries, and the almost incredible bestiality of many among them.

We knew how, in every direction, Russia was being plundered in a most scandalous manner.

We, ‘visionaries,’ saw coming that complete ruin of a whole population which by this time, alas, has been accomplished to an appalling extent in Central Russia, and is confessed by the government itself.

We saw already that the mass of the peasants were being driven to unavoidable and irremediable ruin by foolish taxation, and by the still more foolish selling off of their cattle to cover the arrears of taxes.

It is certainly true that our youth listened to the mighty voice of Bakúnin, and that the agitation of the International Workingmen’s Association had a fascinating effect upon us.

This was not an organized movement: it was one of those mass movements which occur at certain periods of sudden awakening of human conscience.

In the same way our Russian youth, each one for himself or herself, refused to take personal advantage of the revenues of their fathers, Such a youth had to go to the people--and they went.

They had done with regard to capitalism what Tolstóy advises should now be done with regard to war--that is, that people, instead of criticizing war and continuing to wear the military uniform, should refuse, each one for himself, to be a…

They were not theorisers about socialism, but had become socialists by living no richer than the workers live, by making no distinction between ‘mine and thine’ in their circles, and by refusing to enjoy for their own satisfaction the…

The circle preferred to remain a closely united group of friends; and never did I meet elsewhere such a collection of morally superior men and women as the score of persons whose acquaintance I made at the first meeting of the circle of…

The few friends had judged, quite correctly, that a morally developed individuality must be the foundation of every organization, whatever political character it may take afterward and whatever programme of action it may adopt in the…

He loved science and deeply respected it, but, like many of us, he soon came to the conclusion that to follow the career of a scientific man meant to join the camp of the Philistines, and that there was plenty of other and more urgent work…

Girls passed teachers’ examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the hundred into the villages, devoting themselves entirely to the poorest part of the population.

Young men went into the villages as doctors, doctors’ assistants, teachers, village scribes, even as agricultural labourers, blacksmiths, woodcutters, and so on, and tried to live there in close contact with the peasants.