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The first of many such ethical puzzles had been set. At 19, Kropotkin rejected a commission in a fashionable regiment for service in Siberia as aide to a provincial governor. As an already dedicated geographer, he set out to determine the course of the Amur River, a project that led him into a total revision of the geographical concept of Central Asia. He was impressed by the semi-Communistic "brotherly organization" of the Dukhobor sect. He proposed a sweeping agricultural reform, which was widely hailed. But then the whole enterprise bogged down in Czarist bureaucracies. "I lost in Siberia whatever faith in state discipline I had cherished before. I was prepared to become an anarchist," he wrote.
Back in St. Petersburg, Kropotkin was soon busy with pamphlets, manifestos, and interminable Russian discussions with a circle of students, workmen and intellectuals. He found the true faith and a false name—Borodin, the first of many. It was not long before he endured his first imprisonment and betrayal. Typically, while his colleagues scuttled out of town to escape the police, Kropotkin was caught because he felt obliged to keep his date with the local geological society to expound his theory on the ice cap. A weaver in his "circle" broke his alias to the police. There was no trial. The prince was shut up "at the Czar's pleasure." However, the Czar did allow him books and papers to work ("till sunset only") on his two-volume geography.
His escape (pure M-G-M costume drama with disguises, baffled sentries and galloping cabs) was followed by exile. He was happy enough in England, which dearly loves a lord and has always been kind to other nations' revolutionaries, and where he was asked to review his own books. But when he made a foray into France in pursuit of his revolutionary mission, he was jailed.
In fact, all his revolutionary life he and the police played an elaborate and almost stylized game. Whatever country he was in, some police, secret or otherwise, were keeping a wary eye on him. They were sure he was up to no good, but their problem was to catch him at it. For his part, the prince treated the police alternately with indifference and insouciance. Fortunately for the prince, they were mostly inept, often irritating, but sometimes diverting. There was one glorious day when he conned one of the Czar's gumshoes into carrying his luggage. The rules of the game were more urbane in those days.
Released by the French in 1886 after three years' imprisonment, he returned to London and wrote his Memoirs, first on the invitation of the Atlantic Monthly. The present book is a facsimile edition of that text, as expanded and published a year later by Houghton Mifflin in Kropotkin's own flawless English (no class was more cosmopolitan than Russia's decadent nobility, who spoke French and English among themselves and considered Russian useful chiefly in the nursery and for addressing servants and soldiers).