LETTER ON RUSSIA

• AUTHOR: Peter Kropotkin
• DATE: 1914.10.00
• ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Freedom; also in the Manchester Guardian, October, 1914.
• SOURCE: The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife, 254-256, by Edward Carpenter, 1915.
• NOTE: None
• ALTERNATE VERSIONS: N/A

"But what about the danger of Russia?" my readers will probably ask.

To this question, every serious person will probably answer, that when you are menaced by a great, very great danger, the first thing to do is to combat this danger, and then see to the next. Belgium and a good deal of France are conquered by Germany, and the whole civilization of Europe is menaced by its iron fist. Let us cope first with this danger.

As to the next, is there anybody who has not thought himself that the present war, in which all parties in Russia have risen unanimously against the common enemy, will render a return to the autocracy of old materially impossible? And then, those who have seriously followed the revolutionary movement of Russia in 1905 surely know what were the ideas which dominated the First and Second, approximately freely elected Dumas. They surely know that complete Home Rule for all the compenent parts of the Empire was a fundamental point of all the Liberal and Radical parties. More than that: Finland then actually accomplished her revolution in the form of a democratic autonomy, and the Duma approved it.

And finally, those who know Russia and her last movement certainly feel that autocracy will never be re-established in the forms it had before 1905, and that a Russian Constitution could never take the Imperialist forms and spirit which Parliamentary rule has taken in Germany. As to us, who know Russia from the insdie, we are sure that the Russians never will be capable of becoming the aggressive, warlike nation Germany is. Not only the whole history of the Russians shows it, but with the Federation which Russia is bound to become in the very near future, such a warlike spirit would be absolutely incompatible. --Quoted in "Freedom," also in the "Manchester Guardian," October, 1914.

Last Updated: 2008.12.10