Foreign School of the 20th Century (Russian?) - Presumed Portrait of Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921)

Foreign School of the 20th Century (Russian?)
Presumed Portrait Of Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921)
Oil on canvas
62 x 49 cm
Beautiful old chassis

Russian revolutionary writer and geographer, Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin was born on November 26, 1842 in Moscow (Russia). A descendant of the family of the Grand Prince of Kiev Vladimir II Monomachus, this future theorist of Anarchy entered the corps of pages of the Tsar in Saint Petersburg in 1857 and pursued a military career. Having earned his officer stripes, he asked to be assigned to a Cossack regiment in Siberia and could thus explore the Amur River basin and eastern Siberia.
The Polish uprising of 1863 and the terrible repression that followed caused his resignation from the Russian Imperial Army. He settled in Saint Petersburg where he studied mathematics and geography. From 1867, he himself taught mathematics at the Faculty. Appointed secretary of the Geographical Society, he published a work on the Ice Age, Summary of Orography of Siberia. In the early 1870s, he traveled to the Far East, then to France and Switzerland. It was during one of these trips abroad that he got closer to anarchist circles and especially the Nihilists. In 1872, he joined the Jura Federation of the First International and joined the revolutionary group of Mikhail Bakunin, who then opposed Karl Marx.
Returning to Russia, Kropotkin actively militates within Tchaikosky's underground revolutionary group. Arrested in 1874, he feigned madness and was interned in a hospital from where he fled in 1876 to England and then Switzerland. Founder in 1879 of the anarchist newspaper Le Révolté, he advocated violent action and the use of terrorism. Arrested again following the Lyon silk strikes of 1882, he was convicted and incarcerated in 1883 in Clairvaux prison. He spent three years there before being amnestied in 1886 thanks to the intervention of several personalities including that of Victor Hugo. He then went into exile in London, where he lived until 1917, devoting himself to science, politics and literature. He published numerous works which expose his philosophical system based on the theory of evolution as well as his ideas on Anarchism.
Among his main essays from the years 1880-1910, include In the Russian and French Prisons (1887), violent denunciation of the penitentiary system; Anarchist Morality (1889), where he radically rejects traditional religious and social morals; Words of a Rebel (1895), collection of his main political articles published in Le Révolté; The Conquest of Bread (1892); Anarchy (1896); The organization of justice, called vindicte (1901), Mutual Aid, a factor of evolution (1902); Communism and Anarchy (1903); Fields, factories and workshops, or industry combined with agriculture and intellectual work with manual labor (1909); and a history of the French Revolution entitled La Grande Révolution (1909). We also owe him important contributions to the Universal Geography of Élisée Reclus and to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as very lively pages devoted to Russian literature published under the title Ideal and Reality in Russian Literature. Kropotkin is finally the author of Around a Life: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the first edition of which was published in London in 1906 and which, both for the historical interest it presents and for its literary value, can be compared to Past and Meditations by Alexandre Herzen.
For Kropotkin, it is necessary to abolish all forms of government and state institutions in favor of a society which would be exclusively governed by the mutual aid and voluntary cooperation of its members. To achieve this ideal communist society, the revolution must first go through a phase of social liberation and libertarian collectivism. “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”, summarizes its principles.
From the 1910s, Kropotkin's political thought evolved towards more reformist action and he saw in the unions a means of awakening revolutionary consciousness, while remaining skeptical of the use of the general strike. The Anarchist Principle was published in 1913. During the First World War, driven by great patriotism, he took the side of the Allies against Germany. The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought him back to Moscow. He participated in the Bolshevik movement there but refused a ministerial post in the government of Alexander Kerensky, denouncing the centralization of powers. Opposing Lenin, he tried to form a Russian anarchist political force. Nestor Makhno's insurrection in Ukraine in 1919 was an attempt to apply his theories of self-help. But he cannot complete his task, all anarchist thought being increasingly systematically pursued by the communist regime.
Peter Kropotkin

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