Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel

by George Woodcock, Ivan Avakumovic

This biography surveys and analyzes the most significant aspects of Peter Kropotkin's life and his formative years in Russia, 1842-1876, and the origins of his anarchist thinking; his years as an emigré in Western Europe, 1876-1917, and the ripening of his political thought; and his last years in the Soviet Union, 1917-1921.

Genres: Biography

490 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

Woodcock was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but moved with his parents to England at an early age, attending Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow and Morley College. Though his family was quite poor, Woodcock had the opportunity to go to Oxford University on a partial scholarship; however, he turned down the chance because he would have had to become a member of the clergy.Instead, he took a job as a clerk at the Great Western Railway and it was there that he first became interested in anarchism (specifically libertarian socialism). He was to remain an anarchist for the rest of his life, writing several books on the subject.

It was during these years that he met several prominent literary figures, including T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley and became good friends with George Orwell despite ideological disagreements. Woodcock later wrote The Crystal Spirit (1966), a critical study of Orwell and his work which won a Governor General's Award.

Woodcock spent World War II working on a farm, as a conscientious objector. At Camp Angel in Oregon, a camp for conscientious objectors, he was a founder of the Untide Press, which sought to bring poetry to the public in an inexpensive but attractive format. Following the war, he returned to Canada, eventually settling in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1955, he took a post in the English department of the University of British Columbia, where he stayed until the 1970s. Around this time he started to write more prolifically, producing several travel books and collections of poetry, as well as the works on anarchism for which he is best known.

Towards the end of his life, Woodcock became increasingly interested in what he saw as the plight of Tibetans. He travelled to India, studied Buddhism, became friends with the Dalai Lama and established the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society. He and his wife Inge also established Canada India Village Aid, which sponsors self-help projects in rural India. Both organizations exemplify Woodcock's ideal of voluntary cooperation between peoples across national boundaries.

George and Inge also established a program to support professional Canadian writers. The Woodcock Fund, which began in 1989, provides financial assistance to writers in mid-book-project who face an unforeseen financial need that threatens the completion of their book. The Fund is available to writers of fiction, creative non-fiction, plays, and poetry. The Woodcocks helped create an endowment for the program in excess of two million dollars. The Woodcock Fund program is administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada and has distributed $887,273 to 180 Canadian writers, as of March 2012.

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel" was a great disappointment to me. The first problem was that I had been looking for an explanation of why anarchism had failed as a political movement and then died. However, Woodcock and Avakumovic writing in the 1940s fervently believed that anarchism was the best of all possible political or social systems and thought that it would eventually succeed. The second problem was that in their desire to promote anarchism, Woodcock and Avakumovic adopted a laudatory tone with respect to Peter Kropotkin and ignored too many of his faults. This much said, despite the hero worship, the book still provides a very good explanation for why Marxist-Leninism not anarchism became the dominant form of communism.
In the eyes of Woodcock and Avakumovic, Kropotkin always promoted the true faith: anarchism was a system based on production by local communes involved a federation with other local communes. All centralization was bad. Democracy was a system that inherently fell under the control of the bourgeoisie. Syndicalism was the great sin of Bakhunin. Parliamentarianism was the great sin of Marx. Lenin was a practitioner of state terrorism. The one source of anguish for Woodcock and Avakumovic was that Kropotkin vigorously support the English and the French in their war with Germany.
The book opens with a dreary and unenlightening section of Kropotkin's youth in Russia based primarily on Kropotkin's own memoirs published in 1899. His years in Switzerland and France are not but much better. Again, the authors rely heavily on the memoirs and diaries of Kropotkin. Fortunately, the section dealing with the last 30 years of Kropotkin's life passed primarily in England absolutely sparkles. During the English years, Kropotkin frequented many prominent English socialists such as Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Ford Maddox Ford and William Morris. Also during this era he became friends with American anarchists including Emma Goldman, John Most, Alexander Berkman and Benjamin Tucker. Woodcock and Avakumovic were able to interview a number of these celebrity socialists. As a result, the chapters of the last third of the book have a charm and atmosphere that is missing from those in the first two-thirds.
Kropotkin returned to Russia for the last three and a half years of his life. The narrative here is again excellent possibly because Woodcock and Avakumovic could draw on accounts from Emma Goldman and several English friends who visited Kropotkin in Russia.
From the biography of Woodcock and Avakumovic, Kropotkin emerges as an absolutely charming gentleman very much at home with the members of the Fabian society and other left-wing, middle class English intellectuals. In the company of Lenin and his Bolchevik followers, he was a lost sheep surrounded by wolves.