The intellectual commerce between Russia and the West in the nineteenth century for the most part flowed in an easterly direction. Russian Marxism, for example, was only one of a long series of political, social and philosophical systems imported from Western Europe and adapted to Russian circumstances, often undergoing considerable alteration in the process. One notable exception, which helped to redress Russia's intellectual balance of trade, so to speak, was anarchism. Anarchism had Western roots, to be sure, specifically in the thought of William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but for over half a century it derived much of its vitality, both as a social theory and as a revolutionary movement, from the efforts of two Russians, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. (Meanwhile, yet another Russian, Leo Tolstoy, would create a distinctive variety of religious anarchism.)

Both Bakunin and Kropotkin, however, spent long years as émigrés in the West, and it was in Western Europe that they formulated their anarchist ideology. The interaction of Russian and Western elements was particularly complex in the case of Kropotkin, for unlike Bakunin he actively participated in the Russian revolutionary movement before he emigrated, spent even longer in the West, and then returned to Russia in his final years. Kropotkin's anarchism therefore was the product of a lifetime of interplay between his Russian and Western experiences.