Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

He was also one of the finest critics of the current socialist literature, and was never taken in by the mere display of fine words, or would-be science.

For the workers and their publications the liberty of the Press inscribed in the Constitutions has many limitations beside the paragraphs of the law.

When our next number came out from our own Imprimerie Jurassienne, and we had told our difficulties and issued a couple of small pamphlets besides--all of us helping in the printing--the money came in, mostly in coppers and silver, but it…

For a paper, as for everything else, men are of an infinitely greater value than money.

The result was that our penny and halfpenny pamphlets sold by the scores of thousands, and were reproduced in every other country in translations.

Here, aided by my wife, with whom I used to discuss every event and every proposed paper, and who was a severe literary critic of my writings, I produced the best things that I wrote for ‘Le Révolté,’ among them the address ‘To the Young,’…

Contact with educated men of similar ways of thinking is what we anarchist writers, scattered by proscription all over the world, miss, perhaps, more than anything else.

In Russia, the struggle for freedom was taking a more and more acute character.

Yet the sentences were ferocious--stupidly ferocious, because the movement, which had grown out of the previous state of Russia, was too deeply rooted to be crushed down by mere brutality.

There were such cases as that of a girl who got nine years’ hard labour and life exile to Siberia, for giving one socialist pamphlet to a worker: that was all her crime.

Even those who were acquitted by the courts were banished by the gendarmes to little hamlets in Siberia and North-east Russia, where they had to starve on the government allowance of six shillings per month.

The horror of such strikes, during which men and women refused to take any food for seven or eight days in succession, and then lay motionless, their minds wandering, seemed not to appeal to the gendarmes.

Information of these horrors leaked out from the prisons, crossed the boundless distances of Siberia, and spread far and wide among the youth.

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

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

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…

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…

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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…

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…