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Memoirs of a Revolutionist Paperback – April 1, 2002

by Peter Kropotkin (Author)

4.6 115 ratings

Book 4 of 4: The Kropotkin Collection

Autobiography of this Russian geologist/geographer by training, social revolutionist by action. Born in 1842 in Moscow; experiencing the death of his mother at the age of 3 1/2 from consumption. Self described as a revolutionist, "seldom have there been revolutionists as humane and as mild as he is." Kropotkin explored Siberia and Manchuria.

Book 4 of 4

The Kropotkin Collection
Print length

524 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Fredonia Books
Publication date

April 1, 2002
Dimensions

5 x 1.25 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

1589637704
ISBN-13

978-1589637702
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Editorial Reviews

From the Author

"The worst was the silence, as of the grave, which reigned about me. In vain I knocked on the walls and struck the floor with my foot, listening for the faintest sound in reply. None was to be heard. One month passed, then two, three, fifteen months, but there was no reply to my knocks. We were only six, scattered among 36 casemates, all my arrested comrades being kept in the Litovskiy Zamok prison. When the noncommissioned officer entered my cell to take me out for a walk, and I asked him, 'What kind of weather have we, Does it rain,' he cast a furtive side glance at me and without saying a word promptly retired behind the door..."

"We certainly foresaw that if full freedom is left to the individual for the expression of his ideas and for action, we should have to face a certain amount of extravagant exaggerations of our principles. I had seen it in the Nihilist movement in Russia. But we trusted - and experience has proved that we were right - that social life itself... would be the most effective means for threshing out opinions."

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fredonia Books (April 1, 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 524 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1589637704
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1589637702
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.41 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 1.25 x 8 inches

Customer Reviews:
4.6 115 ratings

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4.6 out of 5

115 global ratings

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Fernando Zanini

Condition and Delivery

Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2022

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Product in perfect condition.
Fast delivery.

Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2017

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Great

2 people found this helpful

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brm

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2016

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Most enlightening!

2 people found this helpful

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William K Barker

Apart from providing a wonderful insight into life in Russia during the pre-revolutionary period

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2016

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This was purchased to replace an old, battered & much read paperback I've had for years.
Apart from providing a wonderful insight into life in Russia during the pre-revolutionary period, this memoir helps to understand the political and philosophical development of a key figure in the pantheon of anarchist thinkers.
Recommended.

2 people found this helpful

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Wronghead

The greatest political thinker of the age.

Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2017

This is a book of great moral, historical and human importance. It is at once fascinating, revealing, exciting, informative and rare. I don't hesitate to give this 6 stars out of 5.

2 people found this helpful

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John Onymous

Some quality control issues...

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2022

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The first page of this book explains that this book was produced as cheaply as possible with no intention of profit. I appreciate that in the spirit of the subject matter, but I would have paid a bit more if some care was taken in producing it: the first couple of pages are upside down and placed incorrectly, resulting in missing parts of the text.

One person found this helpful

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Magnum

Pampered Political Angst

Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2018

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Boring! I am an eclectic and voracious reader. I would rather read than eat or sleep (and often do) - particularly about revolutionary and guerrilla warfare which I have studied for over 30 years. This autobiography is as boring as the glorification of Che’s Motorcycle Diaries
I read it to find the moment of his conversion from spoiled child of aristocrat parents to Socialist. It was anti-climactic. Same old story of pampered angst against the system looking for self validation - much like the American radicals of the ‘60s.

3 people found this helpful

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Cassian Ardent

Recommended

Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2014

For people who are interested in studying a specific period in depth, and who have already read a few general histories of it, biographies are a logical step. Whereas the former gives a birds eye view of the subject, the latter gives a ground-level view - less impressive perhaps in total area covered, but filled with detail and nuance that might otherwise be missed. The impression that they produce is more likely to stick with the reader over the long term - and with it, the basic facts of the period. Autobiographies have the additional benefit of allowing the reader a more intimate familiarity with a person about whom they may have read in another context. What they lack in impartiality, they make up for in immediacy.

The basic facts of Kropotkin's life are easily accessible elsewhere, so I won't recapitulate them here. Suffice it to say he was born into a life of privilege, which he rejected in order to pursue what he regarded as a higher calling. The first volume discusses his childhood in St. Petersburg, his youth in Siberia, and his eventual imprisonment for political activities. The second describes his geographic work, his escape from prison, and his adventures in the political underground of Europe, from about 1870-1900. The second volume is far less concerned with narrating facts than the first - whereas, in the first volume, seemingly trivial incidents were retold in lavish detail, in the second he frequently neglects to mention what city he is living in, how he is getting his money, and other basic facts which, presumably, readers of a biography would be interested to know. About 1/3 of the way through he casually mentions that he has acquired a wife, who is never named, but who was apparently an active companion in his revolutionary labors.

The general impression that one gets from this volume is of a kindly, intelligent, generous man, filled with enthusiasm for a new age which, he is sure, is just about to dawn. No doubt generalizing from his experience of Czarist government, where the description probably contains a great deal of justice, he regards the defenders of aristocracy and bourgeois republicanism alike as corrupt, incompetent, and simply backward men, clinging to tradition out of sheer stubbornness. The superiority of scientific socialism is for him a given, requiring no explanation or apology.

Beneath ideology, one gets the impression that Kropotkin's real complaint against Czarist Russia - the context in which his character and basic political ideas were formed - is the ridigidy of its ideas and the brutality of their enforcement. The way he tells it, it was simply not possible for a good idea to get a hearing in Alexander II's Russia - all power was reserved to a tiny clique of aristocrats who hovered around the Czar, and who competed to influence him. For anyone outside that circle to display the slightest inclination toward independent thought, let alone personal initiative, was to invite the unkind attention of the authorities. Having grown up in this circle himself, Kropotkin is under no illusion as to their real character and abilities - he thinks they are, at best, close-minded old fuddy-duddies, and at worst a pack of brutal and corrupt tyrants. His account of his time in Russia is littered with examples of both, and he appears to have been genuinely moved by the plight of the ordinary people, who had no way to seek redress for their grievances under the Czarist system. These were the ideas he carried with him into Europe, and which shaped his basic outlook on the governments he found there. In practice they were, of course, considerably more tolerant and forward-thinking than Czarist Russia, but he does not seem to have noticed it.

There is no trace of bitterness or personal enmity in this book - despite his frequent imprisonment at the hands of the authorities, for no crime other than what we, in the United States, would regard as the exercise of our 1st amendment rights. But perhaps he is leaving some of his shadier activities out of the narrative, and if the authorities could tell their side of the story perhaps we would be in the possession of a very different set of facts. Nevertheless, he undoubtedly regarded himself as an enemy of the state, and was so regarded by the authorities, so the lack of personal enmity is remarkable. On the contrary, this book is filled with the praise of friends, family, and fellow revolutionaries. He even has kind words for the Czar Alexander II, whom he regarded as a basically well-meaning but weak-willed man, forever being mislead by crafty and devious advisers.

His descriptions of prison life, and of bizarre misadventures involving police spies, are the things I found mostly valuable in this book. It gives the reader a real sense of time and place, and one gets a definite sense of just how widespread socialist ideas were at that time, and just how much people were ready to sacrifice on their behalf. It also gives further evidence of the prestige and power of a then-current ideology, which might be labelled "scientism." Kropotkin is proud of his standing as a scientist, and he devotes considerable space to his geographical activities. This is not simply because he regards these as a professional accomplishment, or because it was an important part of his life - it is also because he senses that his activities as a scientist will lend an air of legitimacy to his political ideas, which he regards as resting on the same solid ground as his geographical activities. Or, in other words, he shares with Marx and many other socialists of his time the conviction that socialism is scientific, and that socialist ideas - or, as he refers to them "advanced opinions" occupy a special pride of place in the intellectual life of Europe at the time. To be a socialist is, for Kropotkin, to be a clear thinker - to be anything other than a socialist is to be unscientific, illogical, unreasonable. He doesn't exactly say all of this in his memoir - that would have been too direct - but he assumes it on every page. Careful readers of this text will be able to infer much that he does not openly declare.

All in all Kropotkin strikes me as having belonged to the early generation of revolutionaries - idealists who regarded their ideals as mere common sense, who had not yet appreciated what a bitter and protracted struggle they had on their hands, and who were pleased to imagine that a popular uprising could be expected any day. In Germany, France, and Italy revolutionary zeal would be tamed considerably by the incorporation of the socialist program into legalized and respectable political parties. People who wanted an armed revolution were not so much suppressed, as they were rendered politically irrelevant by government concessions to the common people. Russian politics was to take a very different course, with what results everyone knows. It is ironic, however, that our perception of socialism is so heavily influenced by the disastrous Russian experiment, when, as a matter of history, the Russian socialists were neither representative nor particularly numerous when compared to their European colleagues. Memoirs of a revolutionist is useful as a corrective to that kind of thinking.

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Top reviews from other countries

Vasiliki Mazis

Must read!!

Reviewed in Australia on March 31, 2021

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This is a fascinating yet disturbing insight into both Tsarist Russia and the absolute tyranny of its rule. From nobility to revolutionary, activist, Kropotkin narrates his life in vivid ways, highlighting certain events of his younger years that opened his eyes to the true nature of Tsarist Russia and which led him to dedicating his life to anarchic socialism. It is also an interesting insight into the extent of the international working class movement in the 19th century and the threat it would have posed to the ruling class.

A customer

Soulful narrative of a magnanimous mind

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 29, 2016

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One of the most

One person found this helpful

Sharon Braham.

If you like Russian literature, history, politics or the memoirists this is probabaly for you.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 27, 2020

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Don't be put off by the title. Prince Kropotkin, or Peter Kropotkin as he genuinely preferred to be called, was not some sort of terrorist. Neither was he a subscriber to the ideas that underpinned the Russian class system, as you might assume from his title. . He was somebody who rejected, very early in life, most of what the aristocracy stood for; particularly the Russian aristocracy. This took some courage. Which he had in abundance. I suppose in modern terms he was what we might call a democratic socialist. That alone make him outstandingly interesting, especially given the political climate of the time.
Aside from that, and if you are already tuned into Russia, this is another set of memoirs written by somebody who lead an incredibly interesting life; a life no one could lead now. He himself is an endearing man, especially when he writes about his childhood.
I'm struggling to write an objective review... You're either a Russophile, or you're not. But even if you're not, I still think you will gain some interesting insights into life in Russia at the time.

2 people found this helpful

MV

Appalling format & full of typos

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2022

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The size of the book is simply idiotic. It is not possible to hold it properly as it is too big, the pages therefore bend and it takes far too much space on the bookshelves. Furthermore, it is scattered with printing faults and full sentences are misplaced in the text. I'm not rating the content which is excellent and freely downloadable as a pdf. There are much better printed options available!

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Memoirs of a Revolutionist Paperback – April 1, 2002

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