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Alexandra Kollontai
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Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary and one of the main leaders of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1920-21 she was a leader of the Workers' Opposition within the party. From 1923 onwards she withdrew from directly political activity and became a Soviet diplomat and ambassador to Norway, Mexico and Sweden. Kollontai played a pioneering role in analysing the oppression of women from a socialist and Marxist perspective and in developing political work among working-class women, and was responsible for many practical measures to improve the situation of women in the early years of the revolution. Many of her ideas, controversial at the time, were rediscovered and taken up by the women's liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s.
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Alexandra Kollontai was a major figure in the Russian socialist movement from the turn of the century through the revolution and civil war. During periods of exile she was ... active as a speaker and writer in Germany, Belgium, France, Britain, Scandinavia and the United States. Born into a wealthy family of Ukrainian, Russian and Finnish background, Kollontai was raised in both Russia and Finland, and acquired an early fluency in languages which not only served the revolutionary movement well, but later led to a career in the Soviet diplomatic service. She played a major role in forcing the Russian socialist movement to organize special work among women and in organizing mass movements of working-class women and peasants, and was the author of much of the social legislation of the early Soviet republic.
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Alexandra Kollontai, born in 1872, had a typical bourgeois intellectual background in common with many Russian Marxists at the time. True to form for radical women, she left her husband and child in 1898 in order to study Marxism in Zurich.
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Between April and June 1921, on the eve of the Third Congress of the Communist International, Alexandra Kollontai delivered fourteen lectures at Sverdlov University on Women’s Labour in the Evolution of the Economy. [1] These were intended for women workers and peasants who were either members or close sympathizers of the Bolshevik Party. Their substantive importance is evident, in comparison with most texts of that period on the question of women’s liberation: for they systematically tackled all the problems debated by revolutionaries concerning the specific oppression and exploitation of women, demonstrating the richness of Kollontai’s thought and her then unrivalled historical and anthropological knowledge. But they are ... of interest in so far as they clearly show the limitations of a figure who, among Bolshevik leaders, went furthest in studying the origins of women’s oppression and in calling into question the family and traditional sexuality. Perhaps more than all the rest of her political works, her novels and her autobiography, this course of lectures reveals the contradictions from which she struggles to free herself. These remain incomprehensible unless they are situated in their context: not only political and social upheaval and the shaking of all bourgeois values in the aftermath of revolution, but also the immense economic difficulties which affected the backward country of Russia, particularly after the Civil War, and which imposed the recourse to
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Alexandra Kollontai's text The Workers 'Opposition was written in Russian, during the early weeks of 1921. It was an attempt to give a more detailed justification to the Theses on the Trade Union Question, submitted by the Workers' Opposition for discussion at the 101 Congress (March 1921) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (The Theses themselves were published in Pravda on January 25, 1921). The document was published in England almost immediately, in Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers ' Dreadnought (April 22 - August 19, 1921) and reprinted in Chicago later that year. In Russia, it was circulated at the 10th Congress, but banned immediately afterwards (as part of the outlawing of the Workers' Opposition), following the ban on organised factions which had been voted at that Congress. Solidarity republished Kollontai's text in 1961. The publication aroused considerable interest (as judged by sales) but little comment at the time.
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This series of interviews on the life and career of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) was undertaken by Sonya Baevsky as part of a larger project on the Russian revolutionary and diplomat, involving ... a documentary film. Some of the taped interviews are with persons who knew Mme. Kollontai; others discuss the significance of her career for Russian history, revolutionary movements, and women's history.
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Alexandra Kollontai