Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended Page Corps and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions.

Kropotkin was a proponent of the idea of decentralized communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises.

He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899), with Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) being his principal scientific offering.

He contributed the article on anarchism to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica[4] and left an unfinished work on anarchist ethical philosophy.

[11] Kropotkin joined the Page Corps as a teenager and began a 14-year epistolary relationship with his brother that charts his intellectual and emotional development.

[12] By the time of his arrival, Kropotkin had already shown a populist position towards the emancipation of serfs and a nature of revolt against his father and the school's hazing.

[17] For his tour of service, in 1862 he chose the Amur Cossacks in east Siberia, an undesirable post that would let him study the technical mathematics of artillery, travel, live in nature, and achieve financial independence from his father.

The exiled poet and political prisoner Mikhail Larionovitch Mikhailov introduced Kropotkin to anarchism by recommending he read an essay by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

[24] Kropotkin covered Siberia for St. Petersburg newspapers since his arrival, including the condition of the Polish political exiles who participated in the unsuccessful 1866 Baikal Insurrection.

[26] After presenting his Vitim expedition findings, Kropotkin accepted the Russian Geographical Society's part-time offer of its Physical Geography section Secretaryship.

He continued to develop a theory, which he considered his best scientific contribution, that the East Siberian mountains were part of a large plateau and not independent ridges.

[27] In early 1871, he was commissioned to study the Ice Age in Scandinavian geography, in which Kropotkin developed theories of the glaciation of Europe and the glacial lakes of its northeast.

Kropotkin turned down the Geographical Society's offer of its general secretary position, instead choosing work on his Ice Age data and interest in bettering the lives of peasants.

[27] Likely at the encouragement of a Swiss extended family member and his own desire to see the socialist worker's movement, Kropotkin set out to see Switzerland and Western Europe in February 1872.

Over three months, he met Mikhail Sazhin in Zurich, worked and fell out with Nikolai Utin's Marxist group in Geneva, and was introduced to the Jura Federation's James Guillaume and Adhémar Schwitzguébel.

[29] Kropotkin was quickly impressed and was instantly converted to anarchism by the group's egalitarianism and independence of expression,[31] but narrowly missed meeting the leading anarchist, Bakunin, while there.

By way of Scandinavia and England, Kropotkin arrived in Switzerland by the end of the year, where he met Italian anarchists Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta.

Upon learning that the Holy League, a tsarist group, intended to kill him for his alleged association with the assassination, he moved to London, but could only bear to live there for a year.

[48] His research throughout the 1890s on the animal instinct for cooperation as a counterpoint to Darwinism became a series of articles in Nineteenth Century and, later, the book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which was widely translated.

[50] Kropotkin's support for Western entry into World War I, siding with Britain and France, divided the anarchist movement, which had been anti-war, and damaged his esteem as a luminary of socialism.

Months later, finding life in Moscow difficult in his old age, Kropotkin moved with his family to a friend's home in the nearby town of Dmitrov.

He advocated for workers' cooperatives and argued against the Bolsheviks' hostage policy and centralization of authority, while simultaneously encouraging Western comrades to stop their governments' military interventions in Russia.

[57] However, he criticized forms of revolutionary methods (like those proposed by Marxism and Blanquism) that retained the use of state power, arguing that any central authority was incompatible with the dramatic changes needed by a social revolution.

[59] To ensure order, preserve authority, and organize production the state would need to use violence and coercion to suppress further revolution, and control workers.

He believed that dissolving the state would cripple counter-revolution without reverting to authoritarian methods of control, writing, "In order to conquer, something more than guillotines are required.

"[59] He believed this was possible only through a widespread "Boldness of thought, a distinct and wide conception of all that is desired, constructive force arising from the people in proportion as the negation of authority dawns; and finally—the initiative of all in the work of reconstruction—this will give to the revolution the Power required to conquer.

Kropotkin summarized his thoughts in a 1919 letter to the workers of Western Europe, promoting the possibility of revolution, but also warning against the centralized control in Russia, which he believed had condemned them to failure.

The animal species [...] in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits [...] and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development [...] are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress.

The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution.

His works, inventive and pragmatic, were the most read anarchist books and pamphlets, with translations into major European and Eastern languages that influenced revolutionaries (e.g., Nestor Makhno and Emiliano Zapata) and non-anarchist reformers alike (e.g., Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard), as well as a wide range of intellectuals (including the writers Ba Jin and James Joyce).