Background

Aleksandra Kollontai was born Aleksandra Mikhailovna Domontovich on April 1, 1872, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Her father was a czarist general, and her early life reflected her family's privileged status.

Education

In August 1896, Kollontai left Russia and became a student of labour history at the University of Zurich. She read widely and was greatly impressed by the writings of George Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky. Kollontai also visited London where she met the labour historians, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb. "I had an introduction to Sidney and Beatrice Webb themselves, but after our first conversations I realized that we were not talking the same language, and I set out to see the labour movement for myself without their guidance. What I saw convinced me that they were wrong." She was now a committed Marxist and rejected their Fabian reformist views.

On her return to Russia, she began to take a keen interest in the Finnish struggle for independence (Kollontai's mother was from Finland). She helped workers in Finland organize themselves into trade unions and wrote articles about the struggle between the Finnish people and the Russian autocracy. Her book, The State of the Working Class in Finland was published in 1903.

Career

Kollontai began political work in 1894, when she was a new mother, by teaching evening classes for workers in Saint Petersburg. Through that activity, she was drawn into both public and clandestine work with the Political Red Cross, an organization set up to help political prisoners. In 1895, she read August Bebel's Woman and Socialism, which had a major influence on her future ideas and activity.

In 1896, Kollontai saw the open face of the capitalist industry for the first time when she visited a large textile factory where her engineer husband was installing a ventilation system. Later that year, she became active in leafletting and fundraising in support of the mass textile strike which rocked the Petersburg area. For the rest of her political career, Kollontai retained her connections with the women textile workers of Saint Petersburg. The 1896 strikes established the primacy of the working-class revolution in Kollontai's mind.

By 1898, Kollontai was fully committed to Marxism and left her husband and child to study in Zurich under the Marxist economist Heinrich Herkner. By the time she arrived, Herkner had become a "revisionist" and Kollontai spent much of her time at the university contesting his views. Upon her return to Russia, she wrote a polemic against Edouard Bernstein which was suppressed by the censors. In 1899, she began her underground work for the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP).

In 1900, Kollontai's first articles on Finland appeared. For the next 20 years, she was generally recognized as the RSDLP's foremost expert on the "Finnish question," writing two books and numerous articles, as well as serving as advisor to RSDLP members in the Tsarist Duma and liaison with Finnish revolutionaries. In 1908, she was forced into exile when a warrant for her arrest was issued for advocating the right of Finland to armed revolt against the Tsarist empire; in 1918, she resigned as Commissar of Social Welfare in the Soviet government as a result of her opposition to the delivery of Finland to the white terror under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Kollontai, like many Russian socialists, was neutral in the Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903. In 1904, she joined the Bolshevik faction and conducted classes on Marxism for it. In 1905, she joined with Leon Trotsky in pressing for a more positive attitude toward the newly-emerged Soviets and in pressing for unity of the party factions. She became treasurer of the Saint Petersburg Social-Democratic Committee. In 1906, she left the Bolsheviks over the question of boycotting elections to the Duma, an undemocratically-elected parliament of limited power in which she felt it was nevertheless possible for left deputies to raise demands and expose the government's machinations.

From 1905 through 1908, Kollontai led the campaign which has most clearly established her place in history - to organize the women workers of Russia to fight for their own interests, against employers, against bourgeois feminism, and where necessary (as it frequently was) against the conservatism and male chauvinism of the socialist organizations. Through interventions at meetings of the Liberal Women's Union, strikes, and protests, the foundations were laid for a mass movement.

At the end of 1908, after three months spent evading arrest, Kollontai was finally forced to flee into exile. From then until 1917, she remained outside Russia, although many of her works were published there. She worked as a full-time agitator for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and traveled in England, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, and Switzerland in the period before World War I. In early 1911, she taught at a socialist school organized by Maxim Gorky in Italy.

In 1914 she organized in Germany and Austria against the coming war, and was arrested and imprisoned after it broke out. Released, she moved to Scandinavia and established contact with V. I. Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland. She was a primary organizer of the Zimmerwald Conference against the war in 1915, and her pamphlet "Who Needs War?," directed to front-line soldiers, was translated into several languages.

In 1915, she undertook a four and one-half month speaking tour of the United States to build support for the left-Zimmerwald position on the war (and to try to find a United States publisher for her English translation of Lenin's pamphlet "Socialism and War"). She attended a memorial rally for Joe Hill in Seattle and spoke from the same platform as Eugene Debs in Chicago. In all, she spoke at 123 meetings in four languages.

When the February revolution of 1917 broke out, Kollontai was in Norway. She delayed her return to Russia only long enough to receive Lenin's "Letters from Afar" so she could carry them to the Russian organization. From the moment of her arrival, she joined Alexander Shlyapnikov and V. M. Molotov in the fight for a clear policy of no support to the provisional government, against the opposition of Kamenev and Stalin. She was elected a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet (to which she had been elected as a delegate from an army unit). At a tumultuous meeting of social democrats on April 4, she was the only speaker other than Lenin to support the demand for "All Power to the Soviets."

For the rest of 1917, Kollontai was a constant agitator for revolution in Russia as a speaker, leaflet writer, and worker on the Bolshevik women's paper Rabotnitsa. In June she was a Russian delegate to the 9th Congress of the Finnish Social Democratic Party and reported back to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets on the national question and Finland. During this period she joined other women activists in pressing the Bolsheviks and the trade unions for more attention to organizing women workers and helped lead citywide laundry workers to strike in Petrograd.

In October 1917, Kollontai participated in the decision to launch an armed uprising against the government and in the revolt itself. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, she was elected Commissar of Social Welfare in the new Soviet government. In 1918 she lead a delegation to Sweden, England, and France to raise support for the new government. Upon her return, she argued against the ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and resigned from the government, feeling that the unity of the Commissariat would be jeopardized by having a member in opposition to such a crucial question. For the rest of 1918, she was active as an agitator and organizer and played a key role in organizing the First All-Russian Congress of Working and Peasant Women (November 1918).

Throughout 1919, although ill with heart and kidney disease and suffering from typhus, Kollontai kept a grueling schedule of meetings, speeches, and writing. She served as a delegate to the First Congress of the Communist International, President of the Political Department of the Crimean Republic, Commissar of Propaganda and Agitation for Ukraine, and an activist in the newly-formed Women's Section of the Communist Party (the zhenskii otdel, or "Zhenotdel" for short), which she, Inessa Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaya had played major roles in founding.

Kollontai's illness continued through much of 1920, but by November she had become head of the Zhenotdel following the death of Inessa Armand, and at December 8th All-Russian Congress of Soviets, she was elected a member of the Executive Committee. At that congress, she joined the "Workers' Opposition," an opposition tendency in the Bolshevik Party opposed to what they saw as the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet state. The Workers' Opposition, which had majority support in the Metalworkers' Union and the Ukrainian Communist Party, was banned along with all other factions at the 10th party congress in March 1921, but its members continued to be active as leaders of both the Bolshevik Party and the Soviets. Kollontai was re-elected to the All-Russian executive committee of the Soviet in December. In 1922, she was one of the signers of the "Letter of the 22" to the Communist International protesting the banning of factions in Russia.

In 1922, Kollontai was appointed as advisor to the Soviet legation in Norway. From then until her retirement for health reasons in 1945, Kollontai was effectively in exile as a diplomat, and her views on the status of women were marginalized and trivialized in the USSR itself. As ambassador to Norway and Sweden, as a trade delegate to Mexico, as a delegate to the League of Nations, and as a negotiator of the Finno-Soviet peace treaty of 1940, she served the USSR with what was generally regarded as great finesse. From 1946 until her death in 1952, she was an advisor to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Achievements

• 

  Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary who was appointed Commissar of Social Welfare after the October Revolution and later one of the world's first woman ambassadors.
  
  Kollontai helped to write many of the Soviet laws legalizing abortion, divorce, birth control, and homosexuality - unheard of in 1917 Prostitution was decriminalized. The concept of illegitimacy was banished. And the USSR was among the first countries to grant women voting rights.
  
  As Commissar of Social Welfare, Kollontai was a primary organizer of childcare, job training, collective kitchens, and free maternity and infant healthcare. Women became educated and moved out of the home and into the political and economic life of the new country.
  
  Through the Department for Work among Women, Kollontai, Armand, and others organized with their enslaved Muslim sisters across Central Asia, establishing schools, dormitories, and land reforms. New laws banned polygamy, child marriage, and limits on freedom of political expression.
  
  Kollontai detested the imperialist war. In exile before the revolution, she wrote "Who Profits from the War?" and was jailed for antiwar propaganda. Undeterred after her release, she crisscrossed Europe, Scandinavia, and the United States, lecturing in four languages against the looming carnage of World War I.
  
  Kollontai was also not afraid to stand up for a minority position, even among comrades. After the tsar fled, Lenin called for workers and peasants to dump the bourgeois interim government and start building socialism - something nobody thought could succeed. Of all the Bolshevik Party members, only Kollontai supported Lenin from the start, because she shared his belief in the potential of workers and the poor.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Selected Writings

    (Kollontai's Selected Writings discuss the social democrat...)

    1980
  • A Great Love

    (A Great Love examines the latent oppression of women by t...)

    1929
  • The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman

    (Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai was a Russian Communist r...)

    1971
  • Love of Worker Bees

    (A rare, graphic portrait of Russian life in 1917 immediat...)

    1924
  • The Social Basis of the Woman Question 1909

Religion

Kollontai was an atheist.

As a champion of her sex, she cried to the women of Russia: "Cast off your chains! Do not be slaves to religion, to marriage, to children. Break these old ties, the state is your home, the world is your country!"

Politics

Initially, Kollontai became aware of politics through contact with radical liberals, impressed by their statement of belief in the emancipation of women through education. However, during the women's textile workers' strikes of 1896 upon accompanying her husband on an inspection of a large textile factory, she was shocked to discover the body of a young boy and was appalled at the conditions of ordinary women workers. Kollontai became convinced of the need to overthrow capitalism and that the subjugation of women was tied not just to their subjugation to men, but ultimately to the capitalist mode of production.

As time passed Kollontai felt more and more trapped by her marriage, which left her little freedom to pursue her own interests. She increasingly spoke of the capture of women in domestic subjugation. In 1898 she left her husband to study political economy in Zurich. During this trip, she undertook an in-depth study of the works of Marx and Lenin as well as those of Luxemburg and Kautsky. Before returning to Russia in 1899 she visited London and was introduced to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, but rejected their reformist ideas.

Following her return to Russia, Kollontai joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and became an important revolutionary agitator and writer. She was neutral through the 1903 split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks although from 1904 she officially joined and worked for the Bolsheviks. She would subsequently leave again in 1908 due to the Bolshevik refusal to take part in the Duma, which she argued was undemocratic but a potential platform for left agitation. She participated in the 1905 workers procession to the Winter Palace which ended in the Bloody Sunday Massacre and was prominent throughout the 1905 revolution agitating and arguing alongside Trotsky for a positive attitude towards the emerging Soviets which she regarded as the bud of a true workers democracy.

Although history has remembered her primarily for her work on the women's question, at this time she was a widely regarded political economist and expert on the Finnish question. In 1906, under a wave of Tsarist repression, Kollontai published a collection of articles on Finland and Socialism for which she was accused of calling on armed insurrection against the state and fled to Germany to avoid arrest.

It was during this period that Kollontai first began to systematically develop her understanding of the women question, in particular in her 1909 work "The social basis of the Woman Question." Along with other women, she felt that the issue was denigrated by many on the left and seen as secondary to the "real" class struggle or even dismissed as a bourgeois deflection. She agreed with the Marxist argument that women would not be emancipated solely by the legal and political equality demanded by the mainstream women's movement. However, equally, she argued that a revolutionary party must organize and relate to the particular needs of women as part of the working class and that this must be central to the work of all revolutionaries.

Kollontai argued for a women workers' bureau to be established to look into women's issues and the particular concerns of women workers but faced opposition from inside the left. She reported having set up a women's meeting only to arrive to find that male comrades had locked the doors and put up a sign advertising a men's meeting. Additionally, Kollontai faced constant scrutiny of her home life and criticism for having a relationship with a much younger man. She fought to point out the double standards held by many men on the left in their expectations that their wives would take care of their children and the home so that they could take part in political activity and well as the space between rhetoric and the way in which men acted towards women in their lives.

In exile in Germany, Kollontai was a member of the German SPD but in 1914 she was devastated to watch the collapse of the second international into chauvinism with the outbreak of World War One. She was one of a small minority who remained consistently opposed to the war in the European left and rejoined the Bolsheviks. Having been in contact with Lenin since 1905, Kollontai began to assist him more closely and her revolutionary activities resulted in her imprisonment in Germany and Sweden. In the turmoil of early 1917, Kollontai returned to Russia, and at the famous 4th of April meeting with the return of Lenin to Russia she was the only speaker to formally back him in calling for "All power to the Soviets." She was also appointed as the only female member ever of a Bolshevik Central Committee.

Following the success of the 1917 revolution, Kollontai was appointed as Commissar for Welfare, the only female member of the Bolshevik government. Under her leadership married women were granted more rights along with children of single women, divorce was granted on request, and abortion was legalized. Additionally, homosexuality was legalized and free public child care was set up for working women. Most of these advances were later reversed, partially under the NEP, and then fully following the rise of Stalin.

In 1917 Kollontai had begun to argue for a women's section, to address the particular concerns of women workers. She pointed out that although the Bolsheviks claimed to represent the needs of all workers at this time, their claim for neutrality in fact obscured their focus on male workers. She also indicated that if the Bolsheviks did not begin to take the concerns of women on board, they would be drawn to bourgeois or even Menshevik feminism. This was a long argument, in which Kollontai often faced ridicule from her fellow Bolsheviks but eventually in 1920 various special sections were set up, including the Women's Section or Zhenotdel.

The Zhenotdel was originally put under the command of Inessa Armand, however, on her death that same year, the far more controversial Kollontai took over the leadership. From the start, the Zhenotdel faced problems, with the most active members frequently redeployed into other areas, resistance in rural areas to outside organization, and continued resistance from male Bolsheviks who thought it was unnecessary or at best-removing attention and resources from more important work.

Nonetheless, the opening conference of the Zhenotdel surprised the Bolshevik leadership in gaining over 1000 delegates, many of whom were peasants who traveled for days on foot to attend. Even in the first year, they began to make some inroads into dealing with female-specific unemployment, abortion rights, and awareness of services and work on prostitution. However, with the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, Zhenotdel activists faced increasing problems with cutbacks when the services advocated were required more than even.

In the years following 1917 Kollontai also attempted to develop a theory of sexual politics, writing both political articles and novels dealing with the theme. She has been variously denounced and extolled for this work and she certainly opposed traditional sexual morality, seeing the nuclear family as oppressive for women and based on property rights. However, whilst she was of the opinion, radical at the time, that "sexuality is an instinct as natural as hunger or thirst," she also roundly condemned men who used a twisted ideology of free love to coerce women into sexual encounters and argued against such exploitation and the abandonment of women to raise any resultant children alone. Only with a change in social norms towards sexuality, equalizing the responsibility for children between men and women and the rise of communal care could free love to be fully realized.

In the same period as Kollontai was working full time with the Zhenotdel, she had also joined the Workers' Opposition, an internal faction which argued for increased democracy in the Bolshevik party and more power to be put in the hands of workers and the unions. In 1922 she signed the Letter of 22 against the suppression of dissent in the party. Kollontai avoided expulsion from the party, but faced accusations of feminist "deviation" and was removed from her position in the Zhenotdel. There began a slow retreat away from women's issues, and in 1930, when there had been an almost complete reversal of all gains for women, the Zhenotdel was shut down with the claim that it had achieved its historical mission.

With the defeat of the Workers' Opposition, Kollontai appeared to give up her fight for reform and for women, retreating into relative obscurity. With the rise of Stalin, her life became one of de facto exile, although formally she was a USSR diplomat for Mexico and Norway before settling in Sweden. She was thus the first female diplomat in western history. Dying of natural causes in 1952, Kollontai was the only member of the Workers' Opposition to survive the purges. She lived the last 20 years of her life in constant fear of assassination or imprisonment.

It would take around 50 years for the idea that sexual relations are political to re-emerge in the mainstream in the social movements of the 1960s. Moreover, Kollontai's fight for feminist socialism against both the chauvinism of male socialists on one hand and bourgeois feminism on the other still reverberates today. As she said, if in a new society women are still oppressed, we are nowhere near a true socialist society.

Views

Quotations: "It is only in the revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of every country, and only in union with the working women and men of the whole world, that we will achieve a new and brighter future-the socialist brotherhood of the workers."

"The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia's communist workers."

"Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy."

"Sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst."

Personality

Kollontai possessed much charm. She was slim and pretty and vivacious. With a little too much the manner of a public speaker she talked so easily on any subject, even to reporters, that it almost gave an impression of insincerity. Her open mind was in reality an evidence of the kind of sincerity which had no fear of publicity.

Interests

• Reading

Connections

In 1893 Alexandra married the engineer Vladimir Kollontai. In her autobiography, Alexandra admitted that she "married early, partly as a protest against the will of my parents." Alexandra had a son but left her husband after three years of marriage. She later claimed that this was mainly motivated by her growing interest in politics: "We separated although we were in love because I felt trapped. I was detached, (from Vladimir), because of the revolutionary upsettings rooted in Russia."

Father:

Mikhail Alekseevich Domontovich

Mother:

Alexandra Androvna Masalina-Mravinskaya

ex-spouse:

Vladimir Kollontai

Son:

Mikhail Kollontai

References

• Alexandra Kollontai: The Lonely Struggle of the Woman Who Defied Lenin by Cathy Porter
  1980