THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW AS SET FORTH BY KROPOTKIN

• AUTHOR: The American Review of Reviews: An International Magazine, Volume LI, January-June, 1915, Page 230
• DATE: 1915.02.00
• ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: The American Review of Reviews
• SOURCE: N/A
• NOTE: N/A

One of the clearest, most cogent statements of Russia's point of view on the war which has yet appeared in English comes in the form of a letter written by the famous Russian anarchist-exile Peter Kropotkin, from London, to the Russkiya Vyedomosti.

Under existing circumstances, says this eminent Russian revolutionist,

every one who has the strength to do something, to whom all that was best in European civilization and for which the the workingmen's "International" fought is dear, can do just one thing,--help Europe crush the foe of our most sacred covenants, German militarism and German imperialism.

The best spirits of European liberalism, says Kropotkin, have fought this militarism. The German Socialist leaders, Bebel and Liebknecht, fought it in 1871, when they protested against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine to the German Empire against the will of the people of those provinces. "They saw in this international robbery the source of new, inevitable wars, and with these the arrest of civilization and progress." Bakunin, Garibaldi, among other radicals, as well as many of the "bourgeoisie of all Europe," protested against the harsh terms Prussia exacted from prostrate France. "All felt that the triumph of the Prussian Junker would inevitably lead to the triumph of militarism and the mailed fist in all Europe, to the general detriment of culture."

Peaceful protestations against militarism, continues this Russian radical, have been unavailing since

the power of the old order of the military state gained the upper hand, since he who, when sending German troops to China against the "Boxers," could call himself Attila and order his soldiers to be as cruel as the hordes of Attila became the leader and spokesman of Germany; since this evil power gained the upper hand and let its brutalized soldiers run loose in Western Europe, our duty is to resist this power by all means at our disposal.

To the German contention that Russia's support of Servia was the cause of the war, Kropotkin makes the following remarkable statement:

It was well known to the statesmen of Western Europe that yet on the nineteenth of July the German government had irrevocably decided upon war. The Austrian ultimatum to Servia was the effect of this decision and not the cause.

The final decision was arrived at on July nineteenth. But how many times since 1871 was Germany ready to start war on France! Germany lived always in readiness for it, and France waited all the time for another invasion which she would be helpless to stop. Three times, at first in the reign of Alexander II and after of Alexander III, Russia was forced to intervene in order to avert the otherwise inevitable destruction of France. Within the last three years an European war was twice on the point of breaking out. In June, 1911, it was so near that here in England coal for warships was transported from Wales to Newcastle by rail. To transport by water would have been perhaps too slow and already unsafe.

Last year Austria kept under arms a million of mobilized soldiers near her eastern frontier, and German cavalry yet in February, when snow still lay in Russia, stood on the western border of Poland, quite ready for advance. I know this from eye-witnesses.

For various reasons,--chiefly the incomplete conditions of several of Germany's works of defense (notably the fortifications of the Kiel Canal, and the forts around Konigsberg and Danzig),--the war did not break out as soon as the Germans intended--so Kropotkin contends. And yet, he goes on to say, even last winter,

various signs pointed to the proximity of the war, and in February, at Bordighera I argued with my friend and editor of the Temps Nouveau, how wrong the French were in protesting against the law of three-year military service. There was no other way, in view of Germany's increase of her ready-for-battle army by two hundred thousand people. If France had ordered a mobilization, even partial, she would have appeared the author of the war. "The war will start," I said, "as soon as harvest time approaches in Russia and France. The Germans know that, otherwise, they will not have anything with what to feed their armies, particularly their rapidly advancing cavalry. Remember that the war of 1870 started on July 15th." My russian friends I have advised to leave for home as early as possible...

Really, who of the Belgian statesmen did not know that it had long been decided to conquer Belgium at a favorable moment and to compel Holland to join the German empire, because in her hand are the straits which lead from the Indian Ocean into the Pacific? As to France, it was long, long ago decided to reduce her to the status of a third-rate power. To these aims the whole life of the German empire has been directed. Millions of people, bourgeois and workmen alike, dream in Germany about these conquests.

The real cause of the war, this Russian writer and thinker insists, is the fact that,

excepting an insignificant minority, that class which directs the political life of Germany was drunk with its triumph over France and its rapidly developing military power on land and on the seas. That class considers it offensive to Germany that her neighbors hinder her from taking possession of the rich (ready and inhabited) colonies in the Mediterranean (Morocco, Algeria, Egypt) and also of Asia Minor and a part of China, are ahead of her in the plans for seizing the future Adriatic of the Indian Ocean, that is, the Persian Gulf, and in general do not let her establish her hegemony in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The rapid development of German manufacturing industries within the last forty years without the simultaneous growth of material prosperity among the peasantry, which would afford a market for the sale of manufactured goods (as in the United States), has made it that the immense mass of the German proletariat was being infected with the same conquest plans, and also dreams now about the rapid development of the powerful, conquering capitalism. The result is a real worship of the idea of an unified military state, the adoration of the army, and a striking unanimity in dreams of conquests.

In general, Kropotkin believes the triumph of Germany in this war would mean the "subjection of all European civilization to problems of military domination."

As to the end of the struggle, he concludes thus:

The Allies will win, and this war will be the last European war. The rights of all nationalities to free development will be recognized; the federative principle will find a wide application at the remaking of the map of Europe. The horror of war and the inability of armed peace to prevent it strike the eye so forcibly that a period of universal disarmament approaches.

Last Updated 2008.03.16