Kropotkin's Funeral by Emmett Doyle published on 2021-08-18T01:21:47Z Kropotkin was buried in Moscow on 13th of February, 1921- barely two months after the leadership of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army in Ukraine were arrested and executed at a meeting with Red Army commanders, several years into the process of subordinating the workers' factory committees to top-down management, and just before the workers' strike in Petrograd demanding political freedoms for socialist parties and a redress of food supply grievances would lead to the Kronstadt Uprising. This winter was the last stand of the Russian anarchist movement, and it was a grim sign that in burying Kropotkin, the movement had to ask the government to release their imprisoned comrades, and asked for permission to carry their anarchist banners and slogans critical of the state. In asking for such permission, the balance of power was already painfully clear. Anarchist prisoners, such as Aaron Baron, the co-editor of the Nabat paper in the Free Territory, were released from jail for this single day; after burying Kropotkin, they would be interned into the prison system never to see freedom again. Others, such as Grigori Maksimov of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation of Russia, would flee in exile. Many of the architects of their demise, among the Old Bolsheviks, would themselves fall victims to the purge as their own rivals and enemies took power within the party.