Sophie Kropotkin

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Sofia Kropotkina
Софія Кропоткіна
Kropotkin (c. 1880)
Born
Sofia Grigorievna Ananieva-Rabinovich

1856 (1856)
Kyiv, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Died1938(1938-00-00) (aged 81–82)
Moscow, Soviet Union
Resting placeNovodevichy Cemetery
EducationUniversity of Bern
Occupation(s)Educator, lecturer, writer
OrganizationKropotkin Museum
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1878; died 1921)​
ChildrenAlexandra Kropotkin

Sofia Grigorievna Kropotkina (née Ananieva-Rabinovich; 1856–1938), commonly known by her anglicised name Sophie Kropotkin, was a Ukrainian teacher, writer, lecturer and museum director. Born into a Ukrainian Jewish family, she was educated in Tomsk, where her father had been exiled. After graduating, she went to Switzerland, where she pursued a degree in biology at the University of Bern and met Peter Kropotkin, who she married. When her husband was arrested and imprisoned by the French government, she actively campaigned for his release, drawing sympathy from much of the Western press. She then moved to the United Kingdom, where she took up a career in teaching and went on lecture tours of the country, discussing the political issues of the Russian Empire and its revolutionary movement. After the Russian Revolution, she and her family moved to Moscow, where her husband died in 1921. She worked as the director of a museum about his life and work, which she managed up until her death.

Biography[edit]

Early life and education[edit]

Sofia Grigorievna Ananieva-Rabinovich was born in 1856,[1] in Kyiv.[2] Raised in a Jewish family,[3] while she was still young, her father was exiled to Tomsk, where she received an education.[2] After graduating from secondary school, she moved abroad to Switzerland in order to pursue a higher education.[4] She took up studying biology,[5] at the University of Bern.[3]

In May 1878, she met Peter Kropotkin at a cafe in Geneva; the two married on 8 October 1878.[5] Although Kropotkin was almost twice her age, they had a happy marriage together.[3] In 1883, the couple travelled for to Paris, where they met Jean Grave.[6] In the French capital, she also met Élisée Reclus, to whom she suggested that Grave be made editor-in-chief of his journal Le Révolté; Grave would take up the post later that year.[7] While she was living in Geneva, in 1883, James Thomas Knowles sent Sophie a cheque for £20 and commissioned her husband to write an article about Siberia.[8] In a letter to Sophie, on 1 January 1886, the Scottish geographer John Scott Keltie wrote that her husband's writings on geography had attracted a lot of attention in the United Kingdom.[9]

Campaign against husband's imprisonment[edit]

In the wake of the assassination of Alexander II of Russia, her husband was arrested by the French authorities and imprisoned in Clairvaux Prison.[10] Sophie frequently visited him in prison, where she brought him books supplied by the French Academy of Sciences and Ernest Renan.[11]

Sophie immediately began campaigning for his release. She wrote to The Boston Globe, alleging that the French Third Republic's anti-communist laws had enabled him to be convicted without any evidence, and that it had been motivated by a desire to appease the Tsarist autocracy.[12] She quipped that France "is a republic; yes, but a republic so afraid that it panders to a despot. Republic, bah."[13] Sophie herself successfully generated widespread sympathy for her husband's treatment by the French state, with one correspondent for the Evening Telegraph depicting her as a "heroic" figure, suffering through her husband's imprisonment, who deserved sympathy and respect.[14] In 1884, the English anarchist newspaper editor Charlotte Wilson travelled to France in order to meet Sophie.[15]

During the entire length of Kropotkin's imprisonment, Sophie played a leading role in popularising anti-Tsarist sentiment in the West.[16] In 1886, her story "The Wife of Number 4,237", a serialised work of autobiographical fiction about her experiences, was published in Liberty by Benjamin Tucker.[17]

Life in Britain[edit]

That same year, Sophie moved to the United Kingdom,[15] after Charlotte Wilson had secured her with a career as a teacher and public speaker.[18] After her husband's release, he joined them in London, where he participated in the publication of Wilson's newspaper Freedom.[15] Together they had a daughter, Alexandra Kropotkin, who Sophie gave birth to in April 1887.[3]

In 1887, Sophie fell ill with typhoid, which was reported by a number of sympathetic British newspapers. Her title of "Princess" was regularly invoked by the British press, and many people attended her public lectures, in which she discussed the political situation in the Russian Empire. When she visited Dundee on a lecture tour in November 1907, the Evening Telegraph wrote of her and other Russian revolutionary women being "selected for the most difficult and dangerous tasks."[16] Unlike her husband, she was never depicted as a terrorist by the Anglophone press.[16]

Work for the Kropotkin museum[edit]

Sophie and Peter Kropotkin in Dmitrov, 1919

After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, she, Peter and Alexandra moved to Dmitrov, in the Moscow region. Having refused an offer from the Soviet government to buy the rights to publishing Peter's literature, the family lived by modest means, together in a single poorly-heated room. Without telling her husband, who she knew would reject it, Sophie accepted an offer from the People's Commissariat for Education for an academic stipend.[19]

Her husband died on 8 February 1921.[20] Sophie declined the Bolshevik government's offer to hold a state funeral and instead established an anarchist committee to organise it themselves;[21] the funeral attracted 20,000 attendees.[22] In April 1921, Sophie received a letter from Mabel Grave, who declared that: "It is my ambition to be to Jean the same sort of wife as you have been to Pierre – your example, the thought of that happy home you made for him, the atmosphere in which he could do his work, will always be an incentive to me to try to do likewise."[23]

Kropotkin's house was turned over to Sophie, who oversaw its transformation into a museum about his life and work.[24] Other members of the museum's committee included anarchist scholars such as Alexander Atabekian, Aleksei Solonovich [ru][25] and Nikolai Lebedev [ru].[26] Despite disputes with the Soviet government, whose state ideology clashed with Kropotkin's libertarian political theory, Sophie managed to keep the museum open throughout the 1920s and 1930s.[27] As the museum's honorary director, she dedicated herself to translating her husband's writings into Russian.[2]

By 1928, Sophie reported in a letter to Max Nettlau that the museum committee had fallen into factional infighting, as different groups that hadn't participated in the museum's construction sought to take over its management. She wrote that "I hope that none of them will be masters while I am alive, and some­ thing will have to be done to secure the safety of the Museum when I am no more there."[28] During the Great Purge, many of the committee's original members were arrested and deported.[29] Sophie Kropotkin herself died in 1938.[30] The museum was shut down shortly after her death.[31] Her body was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.[2]

Selected works[edit]

  • Kropotkin, Sophie (1886). "The Wife of Number 4,237". Liberty. 3–4. Translated by Holmes, Sarah E.
  • Kropotkin, Sophie (17 August 1893). "Numerous Insects Washed up by the Sea". Nature. 48 (1242): 370.
  • Kropotkin, Sophie (January 1898). "The Higher Education of Women in Russia". The Nineteenth Century. 43 (251): 117–134.
  • Kropotkin, Sophie (1902). "A Russian Village". Northern Europe. Youth's Companion Series. Boston: Ginn & Co. pp. 109–122.
  • Kropotkin, Sophie (3 April 1908). "News of the Religious Schools: New York City". Young Israel. 1 (19): 601.
  • Kropotkin, Sophie (January 1904). "Lending Libraries and Cheap Books". The Nineteenth Century. 55 (323): 69–78.
  • Kropotkin, Sophie (July 1915). "Intensive Farming in Flanders". The Contemporary Review. 108 (595): 105–112.

References[edit]

  1. ^ Ferretti 2017, p. 22; Osofsky 1979, p. 39; Saytanov 2021, p. 85n1.
  2. ^ a b c d Saytanov 2021, p. 85n1.
  3. ^ a b c d Osofsky 1979, p. 39.
  4. ^ Hinely 2012, p. 27; Saytanov 2021, p. 85n1.
  5. ^ a b Osofsky 1979, p. 39; Saytanov 2021, p. 85n1.
  6. ^ Bantman 2021, p. 27.
  7. ^ Bantman 2021, p. 30.
  8. ^ Ferretti 2017, p. 24.
  9. ^ Ferretti 2017, p. 22.
  10. ^ Green 2022, pp. 88–94; Osofsky 1979, pp. 39–40.
  11. ^ Osofsky 1979, p. 40.
  12. ^ Green 2022, p. 94.
  13. ^ Green 2022, pp. 94–95.
  14. ^ Green 2022, p. 95.
  15. ^ a b c Hinely 2012, p. 27.
  16. ^ a b c Green 2022, p. 98.
  17. ^ Avrich 1988, p. 81; Green 2022, p. 98.
  18. ^ Green 2022, p. 98; Hinely 2012, p. 27.
  19. ^ Osofsky 1979, p. 53.
  20. ^ Avrich 1971, p. 227; Green 2022, pp. 83–84; Osofsky 1979, p. 56.
  21. ^ Avrich 1971, p. 227.
  22. ^ Avrich 1971, p. 227; Green 2022, pp. 83–84.
  23. ^ Bantman 2021, p. 191.
  24. ^ Avrich 1971, pp. 227–228; Green 2022, pp. 104–105; Osofsky 1979, pp. 55–56; Saytanov 2021, p. 85n1.
  25. ^ Avrich 1971, p. 228.
  26. ^ Avrich 1971, p. 228; Osofsky 1979, pp. 55–56.
  27. ^ Green 2022, p. 105.
  28. ^ Avrich 1971, p. 243.
  29. ^ Avrich 1971, pp. 245–246.
  30. ^ Avrich 1971, pp. 245–246; Ferretti 2017, p. 22; Osofsky 1979, pp. 55–56.
  31. ^ Avrich 1971, p. 246; Osofsky 1979, pp. 55–56.

Bibliography[edit]

Further reading[edit]

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