Why a Russian prince wrote the response to the Saxony-Anhalt state election 120 years ago
A man is sitting at an old kitchen table, reading. Hanging above him, framed and mounted like an ancestral portrait, is a man with a massive white beard and round glasses. A black flag lies on the table—the letter “A” inside a circle. Next to it is the pole used to carry it through the streets.
And the man smiles.
That's remarkable, and this smile stems from deeper thoughts. Anyone who sees the black flag thinks of burning barricades. What the man is actually holding in his hands is a book about kindness.
The man's name is Michael. The book is called*Mutual Aid in the Animal and Human Worlds*. The old man on the wall wrote it, and it was Michael's idea to hang it there. He wanted to have his picture taken with him.
A picture from the drawer
The photo was taken in the fall of 2025. It sat around for a long time afterward. Some pictures need their moment, and I didn't feel like this one had found its moment yet.
Now it's got him.
The following Monday
On September 6, 2026, elections were held in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD received 43.8 percent of the vote and won 38 of the 41 direct mandates. In 2021, it had received 20.8 percent—more than double that figure. During the same period, the CDU’s support plummeted from 37.1 to 17.2 percent. The state chapter in question is classified by the state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a confirmed far-right extremist organization.
The figure that concerns me the most is a different one: Voter turnout jumped from 60 to over 76 percent. It’s not that fewer people went to the polls. The number has increased significantly.
One could react to this with horror. Plenty of people did just that on Sunday evening. I think the more interesting question is: What exactly was voted on there?
I think it was a promise of solidarity.
Among voters who reported financial difficulties, support for the AfD stood at 65 percent. Among blue-collar workers, it was 59 percent. These are people who have been told for decades that things would somehow get better, but for whom things never did. And then someone comes along and says, “We’ll take care of you.” Finally.
This is a collaborative effort. Anyone who doesn't see that will never understand why it's so appealing.
But here's the thing: it's a group with a bouncer.
The Prince Who Renounced His Title
Peter Kropotkin was born in Moscow in 1842 into a princely family whose lineage could be traced back to the Rurikids. He joined the Page Corps, the training ground for the Russian nobility, and became a personal chamber page to Tsar Alexander II. From there, every path led to the top.
He accepts none of them. In 1862, he requests a transfer to Siberia.
For five years, he traveled through the tundra and the mountains of East Asia, covering tens of thousands of kilometers, correcting the maps of his time, and developing a theory of glaciation that established him as one of Europe’s leading geographers. In 1871, the Russian Geographical Society offered him the position of secretary—the crowning achievement of a scientific career.
He refuses.
For he hadn’t merely surveyed mountains in Siberia. He had seen how village communities organized themselves without any authority, a system that was centuries old and still functioning—and how the tsar’s administration destroyed everything it touched. A year later, among the watchmakers of the Swiss Jura Valley, he found the political language to express this. From then on, he was an anarchist.
The rest is a story of persecution. Arrested in 1874, imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and in 1876, a spectacular escape in broad daylight. This was followed by forty years of exile: Switzerland, France—including three years in prison in Clairvaux—and finally England. And there, in the reading room, the revolutionary once again became a scholar.
The book on the table
In 1888, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s most ardent defender, published an essay describing nature as a gladiatorial contest. Everyone against everyone else, without respite, without mercy. The stronger prey on the weaker. And because nature is like that, society is just the same.
Kropotkin reads this and thinks of Siberia.
What he had seen there was not a gladiatorial battle. It was cold. And against the cold, what helps is not a rival you defeat, but a herd you stand among. The animals he had observed were not fighting each other for the last remaining resources—they were banding together against an environment that would not let any of them survive on their own.
This contradiction gave rise to a series of essays beginning in 1890, which were compiled into a book in 1902:*Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution*. Gustav Landauer translated it into German in 1904.
In it, Kropotkin constructs a chain of evidence that begins with ants and termites and continues with flocks of birds, packs of wolves, and grazing animals. He then moves on to humans: village communities, medieval towns, craft guilds, trade unions, cooperatives, and volunteer sea rescuers. The same pattern is evident everywhere—groups that stick together survive better than individuals who try to make it on their own.
His point is not a moral one. He is not saying that peopleshouldbe kinder. He is saying that mutual aid is a factor in evolution, just as measurable as competition, and ultimately the more effective one.
“Survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean “the most brutal wins.”“Fit”means suitable, capable, well-adapted—and the one who is best adapted is usually the one who isn’t alone.
Biology has largely vindicated Kropotkin in retrospect. Symbiosis, multilevel selection, the entire field of modern research on cooperation. And in 2009, Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for her empirical demonstration that communities can manage common-pool resources on their own across generations—without the state, without the market. That is Kropotkin’s thesis, a hundred years later, backed by data.
And then the bread
During the photo shoot, Michael told me what had captivated him about Kropotkin, and it wasn't the flag. It was an idea: unconditional basic needs. That people share before asking who's sitting there.
The idea comes from another book,*The Conquest of Bread*, published in 1892. Kropotkin’s thesis there is as simple as it is uncomfortable: Every revolution in history has granted people rights and left them starving. Paper instead of bread. That is why, he writes, the first act of a free society must be a completely unromantic one—ensuring that everyone has enough to eat. Not as charity. Not after a means test. But as a starting point, before anything else comes.
He even had a historical precedent for this, and it’s described in the book Michael is holding in the photo: Medieval cities purchased their grain collectively, stored it, and distributed it to all citizens at cost. The city guaranteed the supply of bread. This was no utopia. It was standard administrative practice for centuries, and it worked.
And that's the difference I'm talking about.
There are two phrases that sound almost the same. “We share.”And:“We share among ourselves.”
The second sentence is the proposal that received 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt. It sounds like solidarity, but it is the opposite of solidarity, because it only works as long as someone is left out. First, the circle is drawn; then, the resources are divided. Who belongs in the circle is decided in advance—and whoever decides who belongs can change that decision at any time. That is why no one in this circle is truly safe.
Kropotkin’s circle has no boundaries. This is not do-goodism, but the logical consequence of his observation: Mutual aid predates every nation, every border, and every passport. It exists in ant colonies. It was there before Germany even existed. Anyone who ties it to one’s origins has not simply shared too little—they have destroyed the principle itself.
Two Who Are Giving It a Try
Michael used to be a pilot. Today, he accompanies his wife, Martina, to her appointments as a model and public figure. The two lead a life that hardly anyone would have chosen, and they are stared at, commented on, and ridiculed for it—every day, in every supermarket.
They carry on anyway. Not loudly, not defiantly. They simply don't invite others to have a say in their lives.
That is precisely why this couple, of all people, is sitting right beneath this portrait. Freedom is not the right to live the way everyone else thinks is right. It only becomes freedom when it applies even to those whom one finds strange. Anything less than that is merely a matter of taste masquerading as a principle.
Addendum
Kropotkin returned to Russia in 1917 after forty years in exile. He was greeted at the train station by tens of thousands of people. He then watched as the Bolsheviks established a dictatorship, wrote indignant letters to Lenin himself, and died in poverty in Dmitrov, near Moscow, in 1921.
His funeral became Russia's last major anarchist demonstration. Tens of thousands marched through Moscow; the imprisoned anarchists were released for that one day, and black flags were allowed to be carried openly for that one time. Never again after that.
One of these flags is lying on Michael's table. It is not a symbol of threat. It is a promise: that people will come together even without coercion.
And that's why he's smiling.
From the series"Portraits of Freedom"— people who live their own version of freedom.
