Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) is an amazing, but in some ways very typical figure in Russian history: a prince from an old family who became a revolutionary, a scholar and encyclopedist immersed in politics, an anarchist who sharply criticized violence and the ‘Red Terror’. He became famous as a geographer and explorer of the North, a historian and philosopher, a literary critic and the author of the brilliant ‘Notes of a Revolutionary’. The Provisional Government offered him the post of minister, but he refused, saying: ‘I consider the trade of a bootblack more honest and useful’.