Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist political philosopher and geographer, a proponent of anarchist communism. Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, he attended the Page Corps and served as an officer in Siberia, where he took part in geological expeditions. Imprisoned for his activism in 1874, he escaped two years later and spent 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France and England. He argued for a decentralised communist society of voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises, in The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). He returned to Russia in 1917 but was disappointed by the Bolshevik state.