Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Petersburg police, were indeed the real rulers of Russia.

All Russia wanted technical education, but the Ministry opened only classical gymnasia, because formidable courses of Latin and Greek were considered the best means of preventing the pupils from reading and thinking.

Technical education--in a country which was so much in want of engineers, educated agriculturists, and geologists--was treated as equivalent to revolutionism.

A feeling of despair took possession of all those who wished to do anything useful in public life; while the peasantry were ruined at an appalling rate by over-taxation, and by ‘beating out’ of them the arrears of the taxes by means of…

But no one dared to suggest any remedy, or to hint at any field of action, at any outcome from a position which was represented as hopeless.

Petersburg, was full of men of advanced opinions, who seemed ready at that time to make any sacrifices for their ideas. ‘What has become of them?’ I asked myself.

A class of men who formerly would have lived in the country on the modest income of a small estate cultivated by a hundred serfs, or on a still more modest salary of a functionary in a law court, now made fortunes, or had such yearly…

The Italian Opera, formerly a forum for radical demonstrations, was now deserted; the Russian Opera, timidly asserting the rights of its great composers, was frequented by a few enthusiasts only.

It must be said that the political atmosphere was such that the best men had reasons, or had at least weighty excuses, for keeping quiet.

Groups of young men, some of whom were on the road to become brilliant university professors, or men of mark as historians and ethnographers, had come together about 1864, with the intention of carrying to the people education and…

Their zeal was great; considerable fortunes were brought into the service of the cause; and I am inclined to think that, compared with all similar movements which took place later on, this one stood perhaps on the most practical basis.

It was a terrible thing to see, and to think what it meant.

I may add that I have the absolute certitude that--at least in one case--drugs were administered to a prisoner in the fortress--namely, ‘Sabúroff,’ in 1879.

Was there ever before in history, I ask myself, a youthful band engaging in a fight against so formidable a foe, so deserted by fathers and even by elder brothers, although those young men had merely taken to heart, and had tried to…

Was there ever a struggle undertaken in more tragical conditions than these?

Since the Government had shown its determined intention not to admit women to the existing universities they had directed all their efforts toward opening universities of their own.

Was it possible, indeed, to forbid future mothers studying the methods of education?

There they won something more valuable than the degree of Doctor of Medicine; they won the esteem of the most learned professors, who expressed it publicly several times.

One of the Russian girls who studied mathematics under Weierstrass at Berlin, Sophie Kovalévsky, became a mathematician of high repute, and was invited to a professorship at Stockholm; she was, I believe, the first woman in our century to…

Above all it was through the unlimited devotion of a mass of women in all possible capacities that they gained their successes.

They have conquered their rights in the true sense of the word.

The real secret of their wise and fully successful attitude was that none of the women who were the soul of that movement were mere ‘feminists,’ desirous to get their share of the privileged positions in society and the State.

The rights they strove for--both the leaders and the great bulk of the women--were not only the individual right to higher instruction, but much more, far more, the right to be useful workers among the people, the masses.

I never before had realized so vividly what Russia’s northern position meant, and how the history of the Russian nation had been influenced by the fact that the main centres of its life had to develop in high latitudes, as far north as the…

Only then I fully understood the uncontrollable attraction which southern lands have exercised on the Russians, the colossal efforts which they have made to reach the Black Sea, and the steady pressure of the Siberian colonists southward…