page_title: Peter Kropotkin
section_title: Return to Russia
hierarchical_section_title: Peter Kropotkin / Biography / Return to Russia
caption_attribution_description: Peter Kropotkin passes through Haparanda in 1917. There are a number of classic pictures of russian revolutionaries in Sweden. One of the oldest is from when Michail Bakunin visited Stockholm in the 1860s and the most known is probably from Lenin's visit in Stockholm 1917. For those, the photographers are known, but not for this picture. It is probably taken by a local photographer in Haparanda since it was published on page 39 in the city of Haparanda's 100th jubilee yearbook published three years after the city turned 100 years in 1942. ("Haparanda stad 100 år", by R. Odencrants, printed in Uppsala 1945). Peter Kropotkin passerar Haparanda 1917. Det finns ett antal klassiska bilder på ryska revolutionärer i Sverige, en av de äldsta är när Michail Bakunin besöker Stockholm på 1860-talet och den kanske mest kända är Lenins snabbesök i Stockholm år 1917, där är fotograferna kända, men med denna bild är det inte så och jag tror att det är en lokal fotograf i Haparanda som har tagit den, för den finns med på sidan 39 i Haparanda stads 100 års jubileumsbok, vilken utkom tre år efter att staden fyllde 100 år 1942. ("Haparanda stad 100 år", förf. av R. Odencrants, tryckt i Uppsala 1945 på uppdrag av Haparanda stad.). Odencrants lämnar inga utförligare uppgifter om enskilda bildobjekt.
context_page_description: Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian activist, writer, revolutionary, economist, sociologist, historian, essayist, researcher, political scientist, human geographer and philosopher who advocated anarcho-communism.
  Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, he attended a military school and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France and England. While in exile, Kropotkin gave lectures and published widely on anarchism and geography. He returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917 but was disappointed by the Bolshevik state.
  Kropotkin was a proponent of a decentralised communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. He wrote many books, pamphlets, and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops; and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.
context_section_description: In 1917, after the February Revolution, Kropotkin returned to Russia after 40 years of exile. His arrival was greeted by cheering crowds of tens of thousands of people. He was offered the ministry of education in the Provisional Government, which he promptly refused, feeling that working with them would be a violation of his anarchist principles.
  His enthusiasm for the changes occurring in the Russian Empire expanded when Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. He had this to say about the October Revolution: "During all the activities of the present revolutionary political parties we must never forget that the October movement of the proletariat, which ended in a revolution, has proved to everybody that a social revolution is within the bounds of possibility. And this struggle, which takes place worldwide, has to be supported by all means – all the rest is secondary. The party of the Bolsheviks was right to adopt the old, purely proletarian name of "Communist Party". Even if it does not achieve everything that it would like to, it will nevertheless enlighten the path of the civilised countries for at least a century. Its ideas will slowly be adopted by the peoples in the same way as in the nineteenth century the world adopted the ideas of the Great French Revolution. That is the colossal achievement of the October Revolution." ....
  "I see the October Revolution as an attempt to bring the preceding February Revolution to its logical conclusion with a transition to communism and federalism."
  Even though he led a life on the margins of the revolutionary upheaval, Kropotkin became increasingly critical of the methods of the Bolshevik dictatorship and went on to express these feelings in writing. "Unhappily, this effort has been made in Russia under a strongly centralized party dictatorship. This effort was made in the same way as the extremely centralized and Jacobin endeavor of Babeuf. I owe it to you to say frankly that, according to my view, this effort to build a communist republic on the basis of a strongly centralized state communism under the iron law of party dictatorship is bound to end in failure. We are learning to know in Russia how not to introduce communism, even with a people tired of the old regime and opposing no active resistance to the experiments of the new rulers."
caption: Kropotkin in Haparanda, 1917
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