Petr Kropotkin is chiefly remembered today as one of the great advocates of anarchism. For those who reject the state and look forward to the creation of a human society without a central, coercive government, Kropotkin's influence has been immense. His writings, along with those of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin and Pierrejoseph Proudhon, have attained a canonical status among anarchists that is little short of holy writ. Writing fluendy in French and English as well as Russian, Kropotkin produced a vast body of writing-books, articles, pamphlets, journals, and speeches—especially after his withdrawal from revolutionary activism in the 1880s. In works such as Sovremennaia nauka i anarkhim (1901; translated as Modern Science and Anarchism, 1903) and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), he sought to place anarchist principles on a scientific basis, drawing in particular on Charles Darwin's ideas of biological and social evolution. Two sides of Kropotkin's personality are evident here. An internationally respected geographer, he was a man of science and letters; at the same time, he was a revolutionary activist, deeply imbued with a sense of the injustices inflicted by modern societies on the working classes and those without property. La Conquete du pain (1892; translated as The Conquest of Bread, 1906) and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899) together provide one of the most explicit attempts to imagine what an anarchist society might look like. In Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899) Kropotkin leaves us a brilliantly vivid and humane record of Russia in the latter half of the