Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

The feeling among the workers was growing every day against the opportunist town councillors and political leaders as also against the Press, who made light of a very acute crisis, and undertook nothing to relieve the widespread misery.

They brought forward resolutions to the effect that the mines and all necessaries for production, as well as the dwelling-houses, ought to be owned by the nation; and these resolutions were carried with enthusiasm, to the horror of the…

When the Jura Federation, at its congress of 1880, boldly declared itself anarchist-communist--that is, in favour of free communism--anarchism won wide sympathy in France.

In reality, the French mind was hostile only to the monastic communism, to the phalanstère of the old schools.

Collectivism meant then the possession of the instruments of production in common, each separate group having, however, to settle for itself whether the consumption of produce should be on individualistic or communistic lines.

While I was at London, in 1882, I was also told one day that a man who pretended to be a bonâ fide agent of the Russian government, and could prove it, wanted to enter into negotiations with me. ‘Tell him that if he comes to my house I…

It has its periods of slumber and its periods of sudden progress.

Evolution is slow; but its rate is not uniform.

Those who are prone to speak of the slowness of evolution ought to study the development of socialism in England.

But my wife and I felt so lonely at London, and our efforts to awaken a socialist movement in England seemed so hopeless, that in the autumn of 1882 we decided to remove again to France.

In the summer of 1882 I spoke, in broken English, before the Durham miners at their annual gathering; I delivered lectures at Newcastle, Glasgow, and Edinburgh about the Russian movement, and was received with enthusiasm, a crowd of…

Perhaps he was right; but when, less than three years later, he started ‘Justice,’ it found a hearty support among the workers, and early in 1886 there were three socialist papers, and the Social Democratic Federation was an influential…

Occasionally some grey-bearded Chartist would rise from the audience and tell us that all we were saying had been said forty years before, and was greeted then with enthusiasm by crowds of workers, but that now all was dead, and there was…

Aided by a few English workers whose acquaintance we had made at the congress of 1881, or whom the prosecutions against John Most had attracted to the socialists, we went to the Radical clubs, speaking about Russian affairs, the movement…

They were there, of course; they thought and spoke; all the elements for a widespread movement were in existence; but, finding none of those centres of attraction which the socialist groups subsequently became, they were lost in the crowd…

There was no sign of that animated socialist movement which I found so largely developed on my return in 1886.

For one who held advanced socialist opinions, there was no atmosphere to breathe in.

The year that I then passed in London was a year of real exile.

It was a sanction given to the theory of ‘conspiracies concocted in Switzerland,’ and it was an acknowledgment of weakness, of which other powers took advantage at once.

If the Russian Liberals had shown even moderate courage and some power of organized action at that time, a National Assembly would have been convoked.

In the face of real danger he was courageous; but he continually trembled before the phantasms of his own imagination.

Then, and then only, a handful of revolutionists--the Executive Committee--supported, I must say, by the growing discontent in the educated classes, and even in the Tsar’s immediate surroundings, declared that war against absolutism which…

Let us resist, arms in hand, the nocturnal raids of the gendarmes; let them know, at least, that since arrest means a slow and infamous death at their hands, they will have to take us in a mortal struggle.’ At Odessa, Koválsky and his…

An Englishman, a Frenchman, would not tolerate such outrages.

Sheer exasperation took hold of our young people. ‘In other countries,’ they began to say, ‘men have the courage to resist.