MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST by Peter Kropotkin. 519 pages. Horizon Press. $10.
Anarchism, both as a doctrine and a political movement, has been pretty well defunct (except in Spain) for more than two generations. Yet today it is identifiable in the pattern of student unrest from Rome to Berkeley, and its black flag shows up persistently among the campus picket signs.
But all too often, the angry young men of the new anarchy do not know what they are talking about, argues Paul Goodman in the preface to this new edition of the classic autobiography of an original anarchist, Prince Peter Kropotkin. The anarchist movement was indeed revolutionary. But its best thinkers in general, and Kropotkin in particular, were not wreckers but visionaries, more concerned with postulating a new society of individual freedom than in the momentary task of destroying the established one. Today's students must realize, adds Artist Barnett Newman in the foreword, that "revolution is more than a Nihilist Happening." They must face up to the question Kropotkin constantly posed: After revolution, what?
Full Circle. Peter Kropotkin was a prince of Imperial Russia and, as the Irish say, a prince of men. He could have been a pampered and powerful member of the Establishment he chose to fight against; he cheerfully endured exile and long imprisonment but showed none of the pride, power mania or personal deviousness that disfigure the image of so many revolutionaries. As a child, he had slept during a court ball in the future Czarina's semi-sacred lap, and he died (at 78) safe, as it were, in the bosom of Stalin, only a troika's drive from the Kremlin. His life had come full circle, and so had the movement that began as a fight for freedom against an absolute monarch and ended in the absolutism of the one-party state.
His memoir is an incomparable record of the weird and wonderful Russian nobility, compared with whom the pious, drunken, sheepskin-clad serfs seemed like another race. The Czar's ramshackle empire was made up of three other races—the merchants, who were much like merchants anywhere; the official class, whose devotion to sacred paper could be compared only to a Tibetan monk operating a prayer wheel; and the student and professional intelligentsia, politically zealous to a pitch of almost mystical intensity.
Prince Kropotkin "passed" from one race to another, though not quite successfully. An anarchist among aristocrats, he remained an aristocrat among anarchists; paradoxically, this gave him a special strength in the revolutionary movements he helped to found. He was immune from the Russian intellectual's vice of soul-searching; as a prince, he never questioned his own actions.
Whose Man? At the school for the Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg, Princeling Kropotkin began to learn of the Byzantine rituals of the Romanov court —attendance at court balls, parades, mess dinners, the opera, blood horses, mistresses and some fashionable adultery. But at some stage something went sour. Was it when his father came back from a campaign with a medal for gallantry on his chest? It turned out that the deed that won the medal was actually performed by father's batman. The feudal father saw nothing odd about this. It was his man, wasn't it? explained the gallant old prince.