Volume 23, Number 17 · October 28, 1976
Lessons of Kropotkin
By Aileen Kelly
Kropotkin
by Martin A. Miller
University of Chicago Press, 342 pp., $15.00
The Essential Kropotkin
edited by Emile Capouya, edited by Keitha Tompkins
Liveright, 299 pp., $3.95 (paper)
To observers in the West, the barbarism of Russia's autocracy in the last century was on the whole less bizarre than the moralism of its intelligentsia—its dedication to a vision of a kingdom of God on earth, the reign of universal brotherhood, when man's lost wholeness would be restored. This faith was expressed in very diverse ideologies—conservative and radical, religious and atheistic—but most of its prophets were united on two central beliefs: that the advanced cultures of Western Europe were on the verge of collapse from inner moral decay, and that the main hope for regeneration lay in the uncorrupted instincts of the simple people—in particular the Russian peasant.
Review, 4880 words
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