Memoirs of a Revolutionist

Memoirs of a Revolutionist

By Peter Kropotkin.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Note
4. Memoirs of a Revolutionist
   1. Part I: Childhood
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
      8. VIII
      9. IX
      10. X
   2. Part II: The Corps of Pages
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
      8. VIII
      9. IX
   3. Part III: Siberia
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
      8. VIII
   4. Part IV: St. Petersburg; First Journey to Western Europe
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
      8. VIII
      9. IX
      10. X
      11. XI
      12. XII
      13. XIII
      14. XIV
      15. XV
      16. XVI
   5. Part V: The Fortress; The Escape
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
   6. Part VI: Western Europe
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
      8. VIII
      9. IX
      10. X
      11. XI
      12. XII
      13. XIII
      14. XIV
      15. XV
      16. XVI
      17. XVII
5. Colophon
6. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Note

This book would not probably have been written for some time to come, but for the kind invitation and the most friendly encouragement of the editor and the publishers of The Atlantic Monthly to write it for serial publication in their magazine. I feel it a most pleasant duty to express here my very best thanks for the hospitality that was offered to me, and for the friendly pressure that was exercised to induce me to undertake this work. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly (September, 1898, to September, 1899), under the title, “The Autobiography of a Revolutionist.” Preparing it now for publication in book form, I have added considerably to the original text in the parts dealing with my youth and my stay in Siberia, and especially in the Sixth Part, in which I have told the story of my life in Western Europe.

P. Kropotkin

Bromley, Kent, October, 1899

Memoirs of a Revolutionist

Part I

Childhood

I

Moscow is a city of slow historical growth, and down to the present time its different parts have wonderfully well retained the features which have been stamped upon them in the slow course of history. The Trans-Moskva River district, with its broad, sleepy streets and its monotonous gray-painted, low-roofed houses, of which the entrance-gates remain securely bolted day and night, has always been the secluded abode of the merchant class, and the stronghold of the outwardly austere, formalistic, and despotic Nonconformists of the “Old Faith.” The citadel, or Kreml, is still the stronghold of church and state; and the immense space in front of it, covered with thousands of shops and warehouses, has been for centuries a crowded beehive of commerce, and still remains the heart of a great internal trade which spreads over the whole surface of the vast empire. The Tverskáya and the Smiths’ Bridge have been for hundreds of years the chief centres for the fashionable shops; while the artisans’ quarters, the Pluschíkha and the Dorogomílovka, retain the very same features which characterized their uproarious populations in the times of the Moscow Tsars. Each quarter is a little world in itself; each has its own physiognomy, and lives its own separate life. Even the railways⁠—when they made an irruption into the old capital⁠—grouped apart in special centres on the outskirts of the old town their stores and machine-works, their heavily loaded carts and engines.

However, of all parts of Moscow, none, perhaps, is more typical than that labyrinth of clean, quiet, winding streets and lanes which lies at the back of the Kreml, between two great radial streets, the Arbát and the Prechístenka, and is still called the Old Equerries’ Quarter⁠—the Stáraya Konyúshennaya.

Some fifty years ago, there lived in this quarter, and slowly died out, the old Moscow nobility, whose names were so frequently mentioned in the pages of Russian history before the times of Peter I, but who subsequently disappeared to make room for the newcomers, “the men of all ranks,” called into service by the founder of the Russian state. Feeling themselves supplanted at the St. Petersburg court, these nobles of the old stock retired either to the Old Equerries’ Quarter in Moscow, or to their picturesque estates in the country round about the capital, and they looked with a sort of contempt and secret jealousy upon the motley crowd of families which came “from no one knew where” to take possession of the highest functions of the government, in the new capital on the banks of the Nevá.

In