KROONSTAD, a town of Orange River Colony, 127 m. by rail N.E. of Bloemfontein and 130 m. S.W. of Johannesburg. Pop. (1904), 7191, of whom 3708 were whites. Kroonstad lies 4489 ft. above the sea and is built on the banks of the Valsch River, a perennial tributary of the Vaal. It is a busy town, being the centre of a rich agricultural district and of the diamond and coal-mining industry of the north-western parts of the colony. It is also a favourite residential place and resort of visitors from Johannesburg. It enjoys a healthy climate, affords opportunities for boating rare in South Africa, and boasts a golf-links. The principal building is the Dutch Reformed church in the centre of the market square.
On the capture of Bloemfontein by the British during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 Kroonstad was chosen by the Orange Free State Boers as the capital of the state, a dignity it held from the 13th of March to the 11th of May 1900. On the following day the town was occupied by Lord Roberts. The linking of the town in 1906 with the Natal system made the route via Kroonstad the shortest railway connexion between Cape Town and Durban. Another line goes N.W. from Kroonstad to Klerksdorp, passing (17 miles) the Lace diamond mine and (45 miles) the coal mines at Vierfontein.
KROPOTKIN, PETER ALEXEIVICH, Prince (1842- ), Russian geographer, author and revolutionary, was born at Moscow in 1842. His father, Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin, belonged to the old Russian nobility; his mother, the daughter of a general in the Russian army, had remarkable literary and liberal tastes. At the age of fifteen Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had been designed by his father for the army, entered the Corps of Pages at St Petersburg (1857). Only a hundred and fifty boys—mostly children of the nobility belonging to the court—were educated in this privileged corps, which combined the character of a military school endowed with special rights and of a Court institution attached to the imperial household. Here he remained till 1862, reading widely on his own account, and giving special attention to the works of the French encyclopaedists and to modern French history. Before he left Moscow Prince Kropotkin had developed an interest in the condition of the Russian peasantry, and this interest increased as he grew older. The years 1857-1861 witnessed a rich growth in the intellectual forces of Russia, and Kropotkin came under the influence of the new Liberal-revolutionary literature, which indeed largely expressed his own aspirations. In 1862 he was promoted from the Corps of Pages to the army. The members of the corps had the prescriptive right of choosing the regiment to which they would be attached. Kropotkin had never wished for a military career, but, as he had not the means to enter the St Petersburg University, he elected to join a Siberian Cossack regiment in the recently annexed Amur district, where there were prospects of administrative work. For some time he was aide de camp to the governor of Transbaikalia at Chita, subsequently being appointed attaché for Cossack affairs to the governor-general of East Siberia at Irkutsk. Opportunities for administrative work, however, were scanty, and in 1864 Kropotkin accepted charge of a geographical survey expedition, crossing North Manchuria from Transbaikalia to the Amur, and shortly afterwards was attached to another expedition which proceeded up the Sungari River into the heart of Manchuria. Both these expeditions yielded most valuable geographical results. The impossibility of obtaining any real administrative reforms in Siberia now induced Kropotkin to devote himself almost entirely to scientific exploration, in which he continued to be highly successful. In 1867 he quitted the army and returned to St Petersburg, where he entered the university, becoming at the same time secretary to the physical geography section of the Russian Geographical Society. In 1873 he published an important contribution to science, a map and paper in which he proved that the existing maps of Asia entirely misrepresented the physical formation of the country, the main structural lines being in fact from south-west to north-east, not from north to south, or from east to west as had been previously supposed. In 1871 he explored the glacial deposits of Finland and Sweden for the Russian Geographical Society, and while engaged in this work was offered the secretaryship of that society. But by this time he had determined that it was his duty not to work at fresh discoveries but to aid in diffusing existing knowledge among the people at large, and he accordingly refused the offer, and returned to St Petersburg, where he joined the revolutionary party. In 1872 he visited Switzerland, and became a member of the International Workingmen’s Association at Geneva. The socialism of this body was not, however, advanced enough for his views, and after studying the programme of the more violent Jura Federation at Neuchâtel and spending some time in the company of the leading members, he definitely adopted the creed of anarchism (q.v.) and, on returning to Russia, took an active part in spreading the nihilist propaganda. In 1874 he was arrested and imprisoned, but escaped in 1876 and went to England, removing after a short stay to Switzerland, where he joined the Jura Federation. In 1877 he went to Paris, where he helped to start the socialist movement, returning to Switzerland in 1878, where he edited for the Jura Federation a revolutionary newspaper, Le Révolté, subsequently also publishing various revolutionary pamphlets. Shortly after the assassination of the tsar Alexander II. (1881) Kropotkin was expelled from Switzerland by the Swiss government, and after a short stay at Thonon (Savoy) went to London, where he remained for nearly a year, returning to Thonon towards the end of 1882. Shortly afterwards he was arrested by the French government, and, after a trial at Lyons, sentenced by a police-court magistrate (under a special law passed on the fall of the Commune) to five years’ imprisonment, on the ground that he had belonged to the International Workingmen’s Association (1883). In 1886 however, as the result of repeated agitation on his behalf in the French Chamber, he was released, and settled near London.
Prince Kropotkin’s authority as a writer on Russia is universally acknowledged, and he has contributed largely to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Among his other works may be named Paroles d’un révolté (1884); La Conquête du pain (1888); L’Anarchie: sa philosophie, son idéal (1896); The State, its Part in History (1898); Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899); Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1900); Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution (1902); Modern Science and Anarchism (Philadelphia, 1903); The Desiccation of Asia (1904); The Orography of Asia (1904); and Russian Literature (1905).
KROTOSCHIN (in Polish, Krotoszyn), a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Posen, 32 m. S.E. of Posen. Pop. (1900), 12,373. It has three churches, a synagogue, steam saw-mills, and a steam brewery, and carries on trade in grain and seeds. The castle of Krotoschin is the chief place of a mediatized principality which was formed in 1819 out of the domains of the Prussian crown and was granted to the prince of Thurn and Taxis in compensation for the relinquishment by him of the monopoly of the Prussian postal system, formerly held by his family.
KRÜDENER, BARBARA JULIANA, Baroness von (1764-1824), Russian religious mystic and author, was born at Riga in Livonia on the 11th of November 1764. Her father, Otto Hermann von Vietinghoff, who had fought as a colonel in Catherine II.’s wars, was one of the two councillors for Livonia and a man of immense wealth; her mother, née Countess Anna Ulrica von Münnich, was a grand-daughter of the celebrated field marshal. Juliana, as she was usually called, was one of a numerous family. Her education, according to her own account, consisted of lessons in French spelling, deportment and sewing; and at the age of eighteen (Sept. 29, 1782) she was married to Baron Burckhard Alexis Constantin von Krüdener, a widower sixteen years her senior. The baron, a diplomatist of distinction, was cold and reserved; the baroness was frivolous, pleasure-loving, and possessed of an insatiable thirst for attention and flattery; and the strained relations due to this incompatibility of temper were embittered by her limitless extravagance, which constantly involved herself and her husband in financial difficulties. At first indeed all went well. On the 31st of January 1784 a son was born to them, named Paul after the grand-duke Paul (afterwards emperor), who acted as god-father. The same year Baron Krüdener became ambassador at Venice,[1] where he remained until transferred to Copenhagen in 1786.
In 1787 the birth of a daughter (Juliette) aggravated the nervous disorders from which the baroness had for some time been suffering, and it was decided that she must go to the south for her health; she accordingly left, with her infant daughter and her step-daughter Sophie. In 1789 she was at Paris when the states general met; a year later, at Montpellier, she met a young cavalry captain, Charles Louis de Frégeville, and a passionate attachment sprang up between them. They returned together to Copenhagen, where the baroness told her husband that her heart could no longer be his. The baron was coldly kind; he refused to hear of a divorce and attempted to arrange a modus vivendi, which was facilitated by the departure of De Frégeville for the war. All was useless; Juliana refused to remain at Copenhagen, and, setting out on her travels, visited Riga, St Petersburg—where her father had become a senator[2]—Berlin, Leipzig and Switzerland. In 1798 her husband became ambassador at Berlin, and she joined him there. But the stiff court society of Prussia was irksome to her; money difficulties continued; and by way of climax, the murder of the tsar Paul, in whose favour Baron Krüdener had stood high, made the position of the ambassador extremely precarious. The baroness seized the occasion to leave for the baths of Teplitz, whence she wrote to her husband that the doctors had ordered her to winter in the south. He died on the 14th of June 1802, without ever having seen her again.