Background
Aleksandra Kollontai was born on March 31, 1872 in Petersburg. Daughter of a general.
Diplomat Feminist Revolutionary
Aleksandra Kollontai was born on March 31, 1872 in Petersburg. Daughter of a general.
Aleksandra studied at the University of Zurich in 1898.
Kollontai joined the revolutionary movement in the 1890s. She then lived abroad between 1908 and 1917, taking an active part in the social-democratic movement in Europe. During World War I, she was close to Lenin, helping him to set up an international Bolshevik branch. After her return, became a great success as an orator, addressing revolutionary soldiers, sailors and crowds, preaching political radicalism and free love. In July 1917, she was arrested with other Bolsheviks after an unsuccessful attempt to seize power.
After the October Revolution 1917, she was Commissar for Social Security in the first Soviet government; resigned after Brest-Litovsk, disapproving of the peace treaties. Kollontai was leader of the left-wing Bolsheviks in 1918, later she returned to the general line of the party.
In charge of the women’s department of the Central Committee in 1920. Head of the International Women’s Secretariat of the Comintern, 1921-1922. From 1923, she embarked on a diplomatic career. Kolontai was Soviet Ambassador in Norway from 1923 to 1926 and from 1927 to 1930, Mexico between 1926 and 1927, and Sweden in 1930-1945. She died on March 9, 1952.
Kollontai began studying political economy in Zurich in 1898, and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and the international socialist and socialist women’s movements. She became Commissar of Social Welfare after the October Revolution, and later Director of the Party’s Women's Department. Disgraced in 1922 for her leading part in the libertarian Workers’ Opposition, she turned to fictional explorations of sexual morality and spent the remainder of her working life as a diplomat, becoming the world’s first woman ambassador.
Kollontai was exceptional among the Bolsheviks in attempting a Marxist account of sexual morality.
Although now regarded as an important feminist theorist, she rejected the ‘bourgeois’ feminism of her day, insisting that the achievement of socialism was a necessary condition of women’s emancipation. In Society and Maternity she argued for maternity insurance as a step towards the transfer of responsibility for childcare from the family to the community, and more generally towards a new morality of comradeship based on the economic independence of the sexes. Unfairly accused by political opponents of preaching sexual promiscuity, her advocacy of free love was predicated upon a critique of sexual double standards, prostitution, the economic function of the family, and women’s psychological and material subordination to men in capitalist society.
Aleksandra married Vladimir Kollontai in 1893, but later they separated. She had a son.