Peter Kropotkin

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin lived from 9 December 1842 to 8 February 1921 and was a Russian anarchist political philosopher and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism. Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, he attended the Page Corps and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he took part in several geological expeditions, before being imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and escaping two years later; he then spent 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France, where he was imprisoned for almost four years, and England, lecturing and publishing widely on anarchism and geography, and returned to Russia after the 1917 revolution, only to be disappointed by the Bolshevik state. Kropotkin argued for a decentralized communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises, writing many books, pamphlets and articles, most prominently The Conquest of Bread of 1892 and Fields, Factories and Workshops of 1899, with Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution of 1902 standing as his principal scientific work; he also contributed the article on anarchism to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and left an unfinished work on anarchist ethical philosophy.