And this surname once thundered all over the world, since it belonged to Prince Rurikovich Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin, the recognized leader and theorist of anarchism in Western Europe (where, after a fantastic insolence escape from the Peter and Paul Fortress, he had to live forty years), so and in Russia (where poetry was written about him and ditties were composed). One of the ditties contained the following lines:
“The anarchist pulled off my aunt's short fur coat.
Oh, did Mr. Kropotkin teach him that?"
In fact, Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin taught that the cornerstone of anarchism is the individual (and not the masses - as with the Marxists), whose liberation is the main condition for the emancipation of the masses.
Kropotkin is known as the author of a number of books, among them: "Mutual assistance among people and animals as the engine of progress" and "Notes of a revolutionary." But not everyone knows that he was also an outstanding scientist and geographer. Before Prince Rurikovich became a professional revolutionary, severing all ties with his aristocratic circle (after all, in his youth he was the chamberlain of Emperor Alexander II, and in his youth - a guard officer), geography was his passion. As a member of the Russian Geographical Society, Pyotr Alekseevich, on his behalf, made six trips across Siberia. Having walked a total of 65 thousand versts (70 thousand kilometers), he discovered three unknown mountain ranges and compiled the first collection of descriptions of all the heights of Eastern Siberia.
In 1868, the Russian Geographical Society attracted the twenty-six-year-old prince to serious scientific work on the study of the Russian northern seas, which lasted three years. In the process of this work, Kropotkin carefully studied a huge number of domestic and foreign scientific publications, in particular, on the issue of currents in the Arctic Ocean.
In addition, Petr Alekseevich familiarized himself in detail with the general conditions in the area of the ocean that extends to the north and west of Novaya Zemlya - a group of islands between the Barents and Kara seas. As a result, he came to the conclusion that the Svalbard archipelago is not able to single-handedly hold huge masses of ice, occupying "an area of several thousand square miles in a constantly identical position between Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya."
Therefore, between them in the Arctic Ocean, according to Kropotkin, there must necessarily be “not yet open land, which extends to the north beyond Spitsbergen and holds the ice behind it. If it did not exist here, then from the action of the current carrying ice to the southwest, the North Cape and the entire coast of Lapland would be covered with eternal ice. A weak warm current would almost give way to the pressure of ice fields from the northeast."
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Recall that the North Cape is a cape in Norway, one of the extreme northern points of Europe. A weak warm current is a branch of the Gulf Stream off the coast of Spitsbergen with a water temperature from +1 to + 3 ° C, and Lapland at the time of Kropotkin was called the area covering the northern part The Scandinavian Peninsula and the western part of the Kola Peninsula. Thus, Kropotkin substantiated the existence of a large unknown land in the Arctic Ocean and indicated its location. All that remained was to equip a polar expedition to reach this land.
Pyotr Alekseevich intended to postpone all business and personally lead the polar expedition. However, its funding was refused, since the Minister of Finance could never believe that the St. Petersburg aristocrat, sitting at his desk in his office in the capital, did what none of the famous polar explorers and navigators had been able to do before him. (neither the Dutchman Willem Barents, nor the Swede Nils Nordenskjold, nor others), namely: he took and discovered an unknown land in the Arctic Ocean. As a result, the Russian polar expedition never took place.
And two years later, the unexpected happened. The Austrian ship "Tegethof", wiped out in 1873 near the islands territorially included in the Arkhangelsk province, began to drift northward and was assigned to the same unknown land, the existence of which Kropotkin wrote in 1871. The travelers Julius Payer and Karl Wei-precht, who were on board the Tegethof, were amazed at the unexpected discovery. To celebrate, they named the land in honor of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph of the Habsburg dynasty, who became famous for having led the monarchy without interruption for 68 years (!), Becoming a kind of a record holder among the rulers. Such was this reluctant "discovery", a discovery that the Austrians did not even intend to make.
So, the laurels of the discoverers went to foreigners who accidentally stumbled upon an unknown land, and not to our compatriot who rightfully deserved this honor, which can only be bitterly regretted. But the undeniable fact remains that two years before the Austrians, Russian scientist Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin was the first in the world to indicate the place and substantiate the existence of an unknown land in the Arctic Ocean. The geographical discovery made by Prince Rurikovich is all the more surprising because the exact location of this land was predicted by Kropotkin, being from it at a distance of two and a half thousand kilometers.