arose. This was crystalized by the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Although not approving assassination as a political method, Kropotkin was unwilling to condemn the assassins, explaining their actions as the result of impotent desperation. At the end of 1882 he was arrested in France for revolutionary activity in which, for once, he had not participated. Sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, he was released following international pressure in early 1886 and settled in London, England.
For a living and for the cause, Kropotkin now lectured throughout Britain and wrote for numerous publications. His principal fame during the British period derived from his books, including In Russian and French Prisons (1887), Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899), Mutual Aid (1902), Modern Science and Anarchism (1903), Russian Literature (1905), The Terror in Russia (1909), and The Great French Revolution (1909). With British comrades, he launched the anarchist journal Freedom. He wrote frequently for political publications in several languages. He was greatly encouraged by the 1905 revolution in Russia.
Kropotkin’s writings during these years of exile are parts of an ongoing argument with those hegemonic Victorian thinkers Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin. He takes issue with Malthus’s bleak vision to argue that humanity’s future is not limited by its reproductive success, but by science and equality. Nature shows the role of mutual aid in its evolution, analogous to the freely cooperating communes of postrevolu-tionary humanity. Anarchist communism is not merely desirable, but inevitable. Kropotkin’s optimistic view of science no longer commands respect, but to many his works beckon us to a wonderful future.
In 1917, in old age, Kropotkin was able to return to revolutionary Russia. He worked for a while on various federalist projects and died in Dmitrov, a Moscow province. His last major work, Ethics, was published posthumously and incomplete in 1924. See also: ANARCHISM; BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL ALEXAN-DROVICH; IMPERIAL RUSSIAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cahm, Caroline. (1989). Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism 1872-1886. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cahm, Caroline, Colin Ward, and Ian Cook. (1992). P. A. Kropotkin’s Sesquicentennial: A Reassessment and Tribute. Durham: University of Durham, Centre for European Studies. Miller, Martin A. (1976). Kropotkin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slatter, John (ed.). (1984). From the Other Shore: Russian Political Emigrants in Britain 1880-1917. London: Frank Cass. Woodcock, George, and Ivan Avakumovic. (1950). The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin. London: Boardman.
(1869-1939), revolutionary, educator, head of Glavpolitprosvet (the Chief Committee for Political Education) and deputy head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, full member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1927-1939), wife of Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
A native of St. Petersburg, Nadezhda Krup-skaya developed an early and lifelong interest in education, especially that of adults. Beginning in the 1890s, she taught in workers’ evening and adult education schools. In Marxist circles she met Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin). When she and Lenin were both arrested in 1895 and 1896, she followed him to Siberia as his fianc?e and later as his wife. While in exile, Krupskaya wrote her most famous work, The Woman Worker (first published in 1901 and 1905). Here she explored the problems faced by women as workers and mothers.
From 1901 to 1917 Krupskaya shared Lenin’s life in exile abroad, helping to direct his correspondence and build up the organization of the Party. She worked on the editorial boards of the journals Rabotnitsa, Iskra, Proletary, and Sotsial-Demokrat. She also began writing about theories of progressive American and European education, especially those of John Dewey. In the 1920s these ideas on education were to have some impact on Soviet schooling, though they were then reversed in the 1930s.
After 1917 she headed the newly created Extra-Curricular Department of the Commissariat of Education, which was later replaced by the Chief Committee on Political Education (Glavpolitprosvet). She also worked in the zhenotdel (the women’s section of the Party), editing the journal Kommunistka, but never heading the section.
In 1922 and 1923, when Lenin was seriously incapacitated with illness, Krupskaya quarreled badly with Josef Stalin, whom she found rude and boorish. When Lenin died in January 1924, Krup-skaya found herself isolated and increasingly drawn to side with the Leningrad Opposition led by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. By the fall of 1926, however, she had defected from the Opposition. From 1927 to 1939 she served as a full member of the (now much weakened) Central Committee of the Party. During the height of the Purges, she tried to save some of Stalin’s victims,
Nadezhda Krupskaya, wife of Vladimir Lenin, seated at her desk. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS including Yuri Pyatakov, but without success. Although Stalin gave a eulogy at her funeral in 1939, her works were suppressed until Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw.
Historians have tended to minimize Krupskaya’s importance, viewing her primarily as Lenin’s wife. Yet she played a crucial role in establishing the Party, building up the political education apparatus that reached millions of people, and keeping women’s issues on the political agenda. See also: ARMAND, INESSA; EDUCATION; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; ZHENOTDEL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McNeal, Robert H. (1972). Bride of the Revolution. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Noonan, Norma C. (1991). “Two Solutions to the Zhen-skii Vopros in Russia and the USSR, Kollontai and
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Krupskaia: A Comparison.” Women and Politics 2(3):77-100. Stites, Richard. (1975). “Kollontai, Inessa, and Krupskaia: A Review of Recent Literature.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 9(1):84-92. Stites, Richard. (1978). The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wood, Elizabeth A. (1997). The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.
(1769-1844), writer, especially of satirical fables, who is often called the “Russian Aesop.”
The son of a provincial army captain who died when he was ten, Krylov had little formal education but significant artistic ambitions. Entering the civil service in Tver, Krylov was subsequently transferred to the imperial capital of St. Petersburg in 1782, which gave him access to the most prominent of cultural circles. Although he began his literary career penning comic operas, when he joined Nikolai Novikov and Alexander Radishchev on the editorial board of the satirical journal Pochta dukhov (Mail for Spirits) in 1789, he became recognized as a leading figure in Russia’s Enlightenment. When the French Revolution made enlightened principles particularly dangerous during the last years of the reign of Catherine the Great, Krylov left St. Petersburg to escape the more severe fates suffered by his coeditors. He spent five years traveling and working in undistinguished positions.
In 1901, with the assumption of the throne by Catherine’s liberally minded grandson, Alexander I, Krylov moved to Moscow and resumed his literary career. Five years later, he returned to St. Petersburg, returning also to satire. He began translating the works of French storyteller Jean La Fontaine, and in the process discovered his own talents as a fabulist. Moreover, his originality coincided with the intellectual movement to create a national literature for Russia. His new circle was as illustrious as the old, including the poet Alexander Pushkin, who was the guiding spirit behind the evolution of Russian into a literary language.
Krylov’s fables, which numbered more than two hundred, featured anthropomorphized animals who made political statements about contemporary Russian politics. This satirical style allowed him to describe repressive aspects of the autocracy without suffering the wrath of Catherine’s heirs. He received government sinecure with a position in the national public library, where he worked for thirty years. Many of his characters and aphorisms continue to resonate in Russian popular culture. See also: CATHERINE II; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH
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