Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) is remembered as a theoretician of anarchism and one of the leading exponents of anarcho-communism, a doctrine he helped to elaborate with his comrades Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus in the late 1870s. He grew up in what he described as Moscow’s Faubourg Saint-Germain, into considerable privilege, and attended the prestigious corps of pages, an elite military academy in St Petersburg, from 1857. In 1860 he edited his first revolutionary paper, then as a constitutionalist. Two years later, looking for more outlets for his rebellious instincts, Kropotkin passed up the opportunity of a glittering career at the imperial court and joined the Cossacks stationed in the far east of Russia.