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Title: Kropotkin and Lenin
Author: David Shub
Date: October 1953
Language: en
Topics: Pëtr Kropotkin, Lenin, history
Source: *The Russian Review*, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1953), pp. 227–234. http://www.jstor.org/stable/125955

David Shub

Kropotkin and Lenin

In the first years after the Bolshevik coup d’etat, many Americans, and

a few Europeans as well, confused Bolshevism with anarchism. In 1917,

Lenin had preached the complete destruction of bourgeois state forms and

the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ republic based on local

soviets, similar to the local communes of which the anarchists had

dreamed. Dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin had said, was only a

temporary expedient, necessary to destroy the bourgeois state and wipe

out forces hostile to the new order; when the revolution was complete,

the state would gradually disappear. Some of the methods, moreover,

which Lenin employed in destroying the old order were similar to those

preached by Mikhail Bakunin, the father of Russian anarchism. As a

result, a majority of anarchists in Russia, and a large proportion of

anarchists abroad, sympathized with the Bolsheviks during their first

half-decade in power. Only with the extension of Bolshevik terror to

anarchists and the later suppression of the Kronstadt revolt did this

sympathy begin to waver.

It is an indisputable fact, however, that the greatest of all the

anarchists — Peter Kropotkin — opposed Lenin from the start and

considered the Bolshevik ideology more hostile to anarchism than

so-called “bourgeois liberalism.” The moral gulf that separated

Bolshevism from democratic socialism also divided it from the

anarchism-communism conceived by Kropotkin. Nothing more dramatically

illustrates this basic hostility than the relations between Kropotkin

and Lenin during the first years of the Revolution. In the meeting and

correspondence between these two men, the details of which have only

recently become clear, may be viewed the monumental divergence between a

philosophy of the free individual spirit, many of whose insights will

still play a part in building a better life, and a philosophy of

institutional subjugation which, for all its present vaunted power, is

doomed to oblivion.

No one could better represent Bolshevism at such a confrontation than

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, for in his mind all its basic elements were

conceived and through his iron will they were brought to fruition. And

Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince turned geologist, explorer,

historian, and revolutionary, embodied the highest ideals toward which

his creed strove — science, art, literature, philosophy, music were all

within his ken, and the moral force of his loving personality was a

legend even among his bitterest foes.

Both men had been abroad when the Russian people overthrew the tsarist

autocracy, Kropotkin in England, Lenin in Switzerland. Both had had to

flee the tsarist police many years before. But where the 47-year-old

Lenin was known only to a small circle of European socialists,

Kropotkin, at 75, had been a world figure for two decades. His

scientific articles had already won him scholarly acclaim when, in the

i88o’s, writing in the London Times, The Nineteenth Century, the North

American Review, and other periodicals, he had done more than any other

man to awaken the Western world to the realities of Russian life under

Tsarism. In 1882, the French government, pressed by its burgeoning

entente with the Romanovs, had arrested him in connection with anarchist

violence in Lyons (in which he had no part); a petition asking his

release was signed by Victor Hugo, Herbert Spencer, Algernon Charles

Swinburne, and leading contributors to the Encyclopedia Britannica. When

Kropotkin was sentenced to five years in prison, the historian Ernest

Renan and the French Academy of Science each offered Kropotkin the use

of their libraries. (His French prosecutor, meanwhile, was decorated by

Tsar Alexander III.)

Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, published in 1899, brought him

international admiration, and the venerable Scandinavian critic Georg

Brandes stated flatly in its preface, “There are at this moment only two

great Russians who think for the Russian people, and whose thoughts

belong to mankind — Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin.” When, in 1901,

Kropotkin exposed in the North American Review the repressive character

of the tsarist school system, Pobedonostsev, Nicholas II’s chief

adviser, felt compelled to answer him personally.

Kropotkin’s own warm and tender character (he was as at ease with

children and animals as with political groups) had a marked influence on

the direction of the anarchist movement. Where Bakunin had been

predominantly negative — concentrating on the task of destroying

existing state coercion, Kropotkin addressed his thoughts to the

positive program for building a society based on free cooperation. Both

as a physical scientist and as a social theorist, he postulated

existence: another he called law it just the as law important of “mutual

as that aid.” of The the solidarity struggle for of people — their

natural inclination to work out together, unhampered by coercion, the

most satisfactory approach to their common problems — was the foundation

of Kropotkin’s philosophical anarchism.

In that anarchism, no privileged part was to be played by “professional

revolutionists.” Rather, Kropotkin believed that social justice could

only be achieved through the conscious cooperation of all the people

-workers, farmers, tradesmen, and intelligentsia. Thus, while personally

intimate with the leaders of Russia’s People’s Will movement, Kropotkin

disapproved of their idea of making a revolution for the people. A

decent and durable social order, he said, could only emerge through the

efforts of the people themselves.

Despite these doubts about other strains of Russian radicalism,

Kropotkin bitterly opposed isolating anarchism as the only true

anti-tsarist faith, waging war against all infidels. He greeted liberal,

Socialist Revolutionary, and Social Democratic foes of despotism as

allies in the common struggle for basic political liberties. The dangers

of narrow sectarianism and of “professional revolutionists” were

apparent to him even before 1909, when he wrote:

Every revolutionist dreams about a dictatorship, whether it be a

“dictatorship of the proletariat,” i.e., of its leaders, as Marx said,

or a “dictatorship of the revolutionary staff” as the Blanquists

maintained.... They all dream about a revolution as a possible means of

destroying their enemies in a legal manner, with the help of a

revolutionary tribunal, a public prosecutor, a guillotine... All of them

dream of capturing power, of creating a strong, all-powerful

totalitarian state which treats the people as subjects and rules them

with thousands or millions of bureaucrats supported by the state.... All

revolutionists dream of a Committee of Public Safety, the aim of which

is to eliminate everyone who d,ares think differently from those who are

at the helm of the government.... Thinking, say many revolutionists, is

an art and a science which is not devised for common people....

When Kropotkin arrived in Petrograd on June Io, 1917, after 41 years of

exile (he had braved German U-boats in the North Sea to reach Stockholm

and the train for Russia), he was greeted by a crowd of 60,000 people,

who had waited for him in the cold night till 2 A. M. Moved as he was by

“that crowd of intelligent, bold, proud faces, celebrating the triumph

of light over the shadows, of truth over falsehood, of freedom over

slavery,” Kropotkin soon began to feel the war-weariness of the Russian

people and their subtle demoralization in the face of continued war

losses and the concentrated pro-German propaganda of the Bolsheviks. The

return to Petrograd, two months earlier, of Lenin (who came through

Germany in a sealed train by arrangement with the Kaiser’s General

Staff) had quickly transformed the Bolsheviks’ early collaboration with

the democratic parties into a virulent assault on all of them, on the

Provisional Government, and on the Allied war effort.

Kropotkin, even in 1914, had declared that the duty of all freedomloving

peoples was to support the Allies against German militarism, which he

considered the most potent center of European reaction and a threat to

all peoples. When, in those early days, he was reminded that an Allied

victory would also be a triumph for Tsarist Russia, he replied that he

was sure that Tsarism would be overthrown and a new regime established

in Russia. Asked why he was so sure of a revolution, he would answer:

“Simply because everyone in Russia is awaiting one.”

The democratic revolution in Russia had made Kropotkin an even more

passionate believer in the Allied cause. For with the overthrow of

Tsarism and the entry of America under Wilson into the war, the Allies

had become, in fact as well as word, the camp of humanitarian democracy

in a mortal struggle against reactionary militarism.

Although Kropotkin had declined the post of Minister of Education in the

Provisional Government (he saw little reason to alter his principled

opposition to governments per se), he largely defended its efforts. The

Bolsheviks’ unsuccessful July putsch upset him deeply, as did the

resignation of George Lvov, the noble Liberal who was the democratic

government’s first Premier. At the National State Conference in Moscow

in August (attended by representatives of all political parties, social

associations, and military organizations, as well as cabinet ministers,

army leaders, and former Duma members), Kropotkin looked forward to the

coming Constituent Assembly-elections for which were scheduled for late

November and to the type of republic Russia would become: “And,

citizens,” the great anarchist declared, “the republic must be a

federated one, in the sense in which we see it in the United States,

where every state has its own legislative bodies, these legislative

bodies deciding all the internal problems, while the Republic in all its

decisions needs the consent of several states or of all the states.”

Kropotkin also delivered an impassioned plea for national unity and for

continued resistance to the German aggressor. His voice did not prevail.

First the German rout of Kerensky’s summer offensive, then the struggle

between rightists, centrists, and socialists, climaxed by the Kornilov

affair, paved the way for the Bolshevik coup d’etat. When, in Moscow

that November, Kropotkin heard the first cannon volleys of the Bolshevik

uprising, he exclaimed: “This is the burial of the Russian Revolution.”

Although the Bolsheviks treated Kropotkin with deference, he refused to

accept any support from them (even turning down royalties from his books

re-published by the state) and declined to play any part in the Soviet

regime. Soon after Lenin’s surrender to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk,

Kropotkin described the Bolsheviks to a representative of Woodrow Wilson

in this manner:

They have deluded simple souls. The peace they offer will be paid for

with Russia’s heart. The land they have been given will go untilled.

This is a country of children — ignorant, impulsive, without discipline.

It has become the prey of teachers who could have led it along the slow,

safe way.... There was hope during the summer. The war is bad — I am the

enemy of war-but this surrender is no way to end it. The Constituent

Assembly was to have met. It could have built the framework of enduring

government.

By this time, the Bolsheviks had brutally suppressed the Constituent

Assembly, elected by universal suffrage with a clear majority for the

Socialist Revolutionaries and only 25 percent for the Bolsheviks. The

red terror, which preceded and followed the dissolution of the Assembly,

had erupted into the horror of the Civil War. All this while, Kropotkin

lived in the small town of Dmitrov, not far from Moscow, and kept aloof

from the bloody political warfare. Much as he opposed the Bolsheviks, he

could not approve of foreign military intervention once it had become

clear that the aims of England, France, and Japan in the intervention

were so largely territorial.

On May Io, I919, however, Kropotkin felt compelled to speak to Lenin on

a personal matter. An old friend and colleague was being held as a

hostage, earmarked for execution, and Kropotkin went to the Kremlin to

plead for his life. But the conversation, which took place in the

apartment of the old Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, soon developed

into a long discourse on the revolution and Russia’s future.

Kropotkin not only pleaded for his comrade, but tried hard to influence

Lenin to abolish the entire system of taking hostages and shooting

people in reprisal for opposition activity. He reminded Lenin of the

Committee of Public Safety, which had killed so many outstanding leaders

of the French Revolution, pointing out how one of its members had later

been discovered to have been a former judge under the Bourbons. “I

scared him a little,” Kropotkin later told his friend Dr. Alexander

Atabekian, who first disclosed the details of the conversation in a

speech at Dmitrov a year after Kropotkin’s death. To Atabekian, also,

Kropotkin confessed his own personal shame at visiting a dictator whose

subordinates were busy executing at that very moment the finest

representatives of Russian democracy.

Nevertheless, Lenin showed Kropotkin considerable respect at this

meeting, the only personal encounter between them after the

revolution.[1] The two men talked about Bolshevik methods, about the

cooperative movement (dear to Kropotkin’s heart), about the development

of bureaucratism in the Soviet state. Lenin tried briefly to sketch his

own ideal conception of future Soviet development. Kropotkin listened

attentively and then told Lenin: “You and I have different points of

view. Our aims seem to be the same, but as to a number of questions

about means, actions, and organization, I differ with you greatly.

Neither I, nor any of my friends, will refuse to help you; but our help

will consist only in that we will report to you all the injustices

taking place everywhere from which the people are groaning.”

Lenin took up this offer and asked Kropotkin to send him information

about injustices, which he would take into consideration. On March 4,

I920, Kropotkin wrote such a letter, in which he outlined the chaotic

and miserable condition of the countryside under “War Communism,” and

the sodden attitude of the suffering people toward local initiative:

At every point, people who don’t know actual life are making awful

mistakes for which we have to pay in hundreds of thousands of human

lives and the ruination of whole regions. Without the participation of

the local population in construction — the participation of the peasants

and workers themselves — it is impossible to build a new life....

Russia has become a Soviet Republic only in name.... At present it is

ruled not by Soviets but by party committees.... If the present

situation should continue much longer, the very word “socialism” will

turn into a curse, as did the slogan of “equality” for forty years after

the rule of the Jacobins.

Nine months later, Kropotkin wrote to Lenin again on the subject of

hostages:

Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man

imprisoned not because of a crime committed but only because it suits

his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such

methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done

in the Middle-Ages.

I hope you will not answer me that power is for political men a

professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be

considered a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price.

This opinion is no longer held even by kings; the rulers of countries

where monarchy still exists have abandoned long ago the means of defense

now introduced into Russia with the seizure of hostages. How can you,

Vladimir Ilyich, you who want to be the apostle of new truths and the

builder of a new state, give your consent to the use of such repulsive

conduct, of such unacceptable methods? ...

What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important

defenders tramples in this way on every honest feeling?

There were other letters, too, but these were never published. All we

know is that they so enraged Lenin that the Soviet dictator told

Vladimir Obukh, an old Bolshevik: “I am sick of this old fogey. He

doesn’t understand a thing about politics and intrudes with his advice,

most of which is very stupid.”

The well-known Russian publicist, Katherine Kuskova, met Kropotkin often

in those days, and she has commented that Kropotkin’s “stupid advice”

consisted largely of (a) vigorous criticism of the terror, which he said

“debases the revolution and will lead to reactionary dictatorship,” and

(b) appeals to Lenin to find six or seven able non-Bolsheviks who would

work with his administration in a determined effort to restore normal

conditions of living.

From Kuskova, too, we learn of Kropotkin’s grim forebodings — after his

meeting with Lenin — of today’s global conflict. Kropotkin was convinced

that eventually the Communists would gain the upper hand in Europe and

would bring the same brutality there as in Russia. Kuskova pointed out

that the cultural backwardness of the Russian people had helped the

Bolsheviks, but that things were different in Western and Central

Europe. Kropotkin replied:

To be sure, little concern was shown for the cultural development of the

Russian people. But I am very familiar with the state of Western Europe

and I assure you that a Bolshevik revolution there would be a repetition

of what we had in Russia. The power of the Communists derives from the

fact that they support themselves upon the mob, upon the unorganized,

unskilled and ill-paid. Should these elements gain the upper hand in

Western Europe, we shall witness a repetition of what has occurred in

Russia.

But would not the mob be restrained, Kuskova asked, by other groups,

responsible, well-organized and experienced in maintaining justice? “The

world,” Kropotkin answered slowly, “is in serious perturbation. The

world is badly shaken by war, and in the flame of war insanity, human

beings have lost all common sense. Anything may happen. And when it

does, it will happen according to the Russian style and in no other. The

mob everywhere is cruel, corrupt and animated by beastly instincts.”

When Kropotkin died on February 7, 1921, the full measure of his

prophecy was apparent to only a few. But the thirty-two years that have

elapsed-the years of Hitler and Stalin-have made it plain to all. It

might well be said that Kropotkin’s dashed hopes in 1917, his protest at

barbarous Bolshevism, and his grave concern over the emotional balance

of a world in flames, represented a microcosm of our world today, when

the citizen of a democracy educated to the hope of a freer world for all

men-faces the unabated challenge of Lenin’s heirs.

[1] Contrary to this report, based on the account of Atabekian a year

after Kropotkin’s death, the British writers Woodcock and Avakumovich in

their book The Anarchist Prince, maintain that there were other

meetings. A check of their account of the “other meetings” with

Atabekian and other sources indicates that they have divided the

conversation of this May, I919, meeting and the correspondence which

followed into new “meetings.” Since publication of their book,

Kropotkin’s daughter Alexandra, now in New York, has personally

confirmed to me the fact that there was only one meeting. Alexandra was

living near her father at the time.