![]() By 1883, he was a political prisoner once again, this time in France. His propaganda landed him in prison, but he escaped in 1876 with the help of comrades. ![]() ![]() Back in Russia, he joined the revolutionary Circle of Tchaikovsky, disseminating underground literature and lecturing to the workers of St Petersburg disguised as Borodin the peasant agitator. In 1872, in Switzerland, he became an anarchist, impressed by the egalitarian fraternity he found among the watchmakers of Jura. It proved impossible for Kropotkin, a man ‘amiable to the point of saintliness’ according to George Bernard Shaw, to dedicate himself entirely to the ‘highest joys’ of scientific discovery, when all around him he saw ‘nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread’, as he put it in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899). It loses its purely physical character, it ceases to be simply instinctive, it becomes reasoned. He wrote that: s we ascend the scale of evolution, we see association growing more and more conscious. Kropotkin collected descriptions from all over the world of the sociable behaviours of ants, bees, termites, falcons, swallows, horned larks, migrating birds, gazelles, buffalo, colonies of beavers, squirrels, mice, flocks of seals, herds of wild horses, tribes of dogs, wolf packs, marmots, rats, chinchillas, as well as apes and monkeys. In 1882, he was fascinated by a crab stuck on its back in a tank in Brighton Aquarium it was painstakingly rescued by a band of comrades. In the 1860s, he watched a vast exodus of fallow deer gather in their thousands to cross the river Amur at its narrowest point to escape an early snowfall. Observation and wide reading convinced him that what he’d seen in Siberia was no exception, but a rule. Kropotkin pursued this contradiction for decades. As Kropotkin later wrote: We saw plenty of adaptations for struggling, very often in common, against the adverse circumstances of climate, or against various enemies, and Polyakoff wrote many a good page upon the mutual dependency of carnivores, ruminants, and rodents in their geographical distribution we witnessed numbers of facts of mutual support … facts of real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same species came very seldom under my notice, though I eagerly searched for them. Kropotkin and Poliakov – enthusiastic, curious and well-read young men in their 20s – were fired by the prospect of finding evidence of that defining factor of evolution set out by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859): competition. Peter Kropotkin, biologist, anarchist and geographer. ![]() From there, they continued with 10 Cossacks, 50 horses carrying three months’ supply of food, and an old Yukaghir nomad guide who’d made the journey 20 years earlier. Boat and horseback took them to the Tikono-Zadonsk gold mine. Prince Peter Kropotkin, the aristocratic graduate of an elite Russian military academy, travelled in 1866 with his zoologist friend Ivan Poliakov and a topographer called Maskinski. For one explorer, now better known as an anarchist than a scientist, this expedition was also the start of a long journey towards a new articulation of evolution and the strongest possible argument for a social revolution. Their discoveries would transform understanding of the geography of northern Asia, opening up the route eventually followed by the Trans-Manchurian Railway. Their mission was to find a direct passage between the gold mines of the river Lena and Transbaikalia. Trusting in a map drawn on bark with the point of a knife by a Tungus hunter, three Russian scientists set out to explore an area of trackless mountain wilderness stretching across eastern Siberia. Peter Kropotkin took on social Darwinism, casting evolution in a cooperative light and laying the groundwork for mutual aidįive years had passed since Czar Alexander II promised the emancipation of the serfs.
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