Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/412

386 having cordially commended the novel wherein Stepniak described the life of the terrorists. Tyrannicide, said Kropotkin, is morally permissible, we have a "right" to undertake it, because the terrorist asks us in advance to slay him also should he ever become a tyrant, a viper to his fellow men.

"Treat others as you would wish them to treat you in similar circumstances." To slay a tyrant is just as justifiable as to slay a viper.

Kropotkin is himself a fresh illustration of the psychology of the Russian revolutionary. Humane as a man can be, a gentleman in the best and finest sense of the word, when he speaks of "vipers" Kropotkin is concentrating in that expression the revolutionary mood of a lifetime. The phrase embodies his personal experiences, his unjust persecution by the government and the court, the way in which his beloved brother was compelled to seek by suicide an escape from the intolerable conditions of Siberian exile; it embodies his view of Russian conditions as these had been determined by the existence of serfdom (conditions which had poisoned home life for Kropotkin during childhood). Thus does it come to pass that a man who by temperament and philosophic training is one of the kindliest of his day can justify and recommend the slaughter of a tyrant as though he were a viper. Such is the mood in which Kropotkin has described and stigmatised the white terror. (See § 36, and Kropotkin's The Terror in Russia.)

To complete this sketch we must briefly consider Kropotkin's relationship to his Russian predecessors and contemporaries, and his attitude towards Russian literature and its leading trends. For Kropotkin, his system of anarchism is a general philosophy of life.

Kropotkin's chief teacher among the Russians was Bakunin, regarded by Kropotkin as the founder of modern anarchism or antistate socialism. A few of the distinctions between these two thinkers have already been mentioned. The most notable difference is that Kropotkin is less strongly and less directly influenced by Feuerbach, so that Bakuninist "antitheologism" makes its appearance in Kropotkin in a somewhat mitigated form.

Bakunin died just at the time of Kropotkin's escape from prison, so that the two men never met. But Lavrov was a personal friend of Kropotkin, and Kropotkin considers that