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Alexandra Kollontai

 
Biography: Aleksandra Mikhailovna Kollontai
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The Soviet diplomat Aleksandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (1872-1952) was a champion of women's rights. She is also known for her advocacy of free love and revolutionary opposition.

Aleksandra Kollontai was born Aleksandra M. Domontovich on April 1, 1872, in St. Petersburg. Her father was a czarist general, and her early life reflected her family's privileged status. She was briefly married to a czarist officer but soon separated from him and from the background that he and her family represented. At the turn of the century she became an agitator for woman's rights and joined the nascent Russian Social Democratic movement. When the movement divided into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, she vacillated between both groups. She drifted from both factions, spending her time abroad after 1908, where she moved through various countries arguing that a revolutionary movement must overthrow conventional family structure as well as political and economic structures. Her "winged Eros" theory denounced marriage and the family unit and argued for free love.

The trauma of World War I led Kollontai to play down her emphasis on breaking up families and also radicalized her political outlook. She became reconciled with V. I. Lenin - with whom she had been on bad terms for a decade - and corresponded with him extensively while she lived in the United States. In 1917, after the overthrow of the monarchy, she returned to Russia, where she actively identified with the Bolsheviks, being elected to the party's Central Committee in August 1917 and becoming an enthusiastic participant in the seizure of power in November 1917.

For the first several years of Bolshevik power, Kollontai was actively identified with opposition movements. In 1918 she joined the Left-Communists in opposing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Soviet Russia left the war. In 1920 she was one of the most prominent leaders of the Workers Opposition, where she agitated for relaxation of party and government control of the trade unions and for more state functions to be turned over to the unions. In 1921, after presumably accepting political reconciliation, she became the head of the women's section of the Bolshevik party. However, her renewed espousal and practice of free love scandalized the party leadership, and she narrowly avoided expulsion.

In 1923, having apparently settled down and abandoned her crusade for free love and revolutionary action, Kollontai embarked on a new career as a diplomat, at first in Norway. In 1926-1927 she was briefly in Mexico and then returned to Norway. In 1930 she was named minister (later ambassador) to Sweden, where she served some 15 years, enjoying occasional prominence, as in her 1944 negotiation of the Soviet-Finnish armistice. In 1945 she returned to Moscow, where she lived her remaining years as an adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She died on March 9, 1952.

Further Reading

For the story of Aleksandra Kollontai's life see Isabel de Palencia, Alexandra Kollantay: Ambassadress from Russia (1947).

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Russian History Encyclopedia: Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai
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(1872 - 1952), theoretician of Marxist feminism; founder of Soviet Communist Party's Women's Department.

Kollontai was born Alexandra Domontovich. Her father, Mikhail Domontovich, was a politically liberal general. Her mother, Alexandra, shared Domontovich's free-thinking attitudes and supported feminism as well. They provided their daughter a comfortable childhood and good education, including college-level work at the Bestuzhevsky Courses for Women. When Alexandra was twenty-two, she married Vladimir Kollontai. Within a year she had given birth to a son, Mikhail, but the matronly life soon bored her. She dabbled in volunteer work and then decided in 1898 to study Marxism so as to become a radical journalist and scholar.

Between 1900 and 1917 Kollontai participated in the revolutionary underground in Russia, but mostly she lived abroad, where she made her reputation as a theoretician of Marxist feminism. To Friedrich Engels' and Avgust Bebel's economic analysis of women's oppression Kollontai added a psychological dimension. She argued that women internalized society's values, learning to accept their subordination to men. There was hope, however, for the coming revolution would usher in a society in which women and men were equals and would therefore create the conditions for women to emancipate their psyches. In the meantime socialists should work hard to draw working-class women to their movement. Kollontai was a severe critic of feminism, which she considered a bourgeois movement, but she shared with the feminists a deep commitment to women's emancipation as a primary goal of social reform.

In the prerevolutionary period Kollontai also became known as a skilled journalist and orator. She was a Menshevik, but in 1913, when Bolsheviks Konkordia Samoilova, Inessa Armand, and Nadezhda Krupskaya launched a newspaper aimed at working-class women, they invited Kollontai to be a contributor. She responded enthusiastically. In 1915 she came over to their faction because she believed that Vladimir Lenin was the only Russian Social-Democratic leader who was resolute in his opposition to World War I.

Kollontai returned to Russia in the spring of 1917. She spent the revolutionary year working with other Bolshevik feminists on projects among working-class women. She also became one of the Bolsheviks' most effective speakers; her popularity earned her election to the Central Committee. After the party seized power in October, Kollontai became Commissar of Social Welfare, and in that capacity she laid the foundation for socialized obstetrical and newborn care. In early March 1918 she resigned her post to protest the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany, and for the next two years she divided her energies between agitation on the front, writing, and organizing activities with working-class women. In fall 1920 she was appointed head of the Zhenotdel, the Communist Party's Women's Department.

Kollontai had argued for a woman's department since before the revolution. When she became its head she worked diligently to build up the organization, which suffered from poor funding and lack of support. She managed to stave off efforts to abolish the Zhenotdel and also publicized widely the party's program for women's emancipation. Kollontai's tenure in this office was short, however, because in 1921 she joined the Workers Opposition, a group critical of Party authoritarianism. She was fired from the Zhenotdel the next year.

In the following two decades Kollontai became a distinguished Soviet diplomat. She served as Soviet ambassador to Sweden from 1930 to her retirement in 1945. Her most important contribution was as mediator in negotiations to end the Winter War between the USSR and Finland (1939 - 1940). In the 1920s she also published novels and essays that analyzed the gender and sexual liberation that would come with the construction of a communist society. These works drew strong criticism from more conservative communists, and Kollontai ceased to publish on her favorite subject after the Stalinist leadership consolidated power in the late 1920s. Thereafter she wrote multiple versions of her memoirs. She survived the party purges in the 1930s, probably because she was a respected diplomat who lived far away from party politics.

Kollontai died in Moscow on March 9, 1952. With the revival of feminism in the 1960s, her writings were rediscovered, and she came again to be seen an important Marxist feminist.

Bibliography

Clements, Barbara Evans. (1979). Bolshevik Feminist: the Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Farnsworth, Beatrice. (1980). Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Holt, Alix, ed. (1977). Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill.

Kollontai, Alexandra. (1978) The Love of Worker Bees, tr. Cathy Porter. Chicago: Academy Press Limited.

—BARBARA EVANS CLEMENTS

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Aleksandra Mikhaylovna Kollontai
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Kollontai, Aleksandra Mikhaylovna (əlyĭksän'drə mēkhī'ləvnə kələntī'), 1872-1952, Russian revolutionary, diplomat, and novelist, whose maiden name was Aleksandra M. Domontovich. The daughter of a general, she early rebelled against her society. Although she married an officer of the czarist army, she was active in revolutionary circles and in 1908 was forced to flee abroad. She visited the United States in 1916 and edited, with Bukharin, the Communist daily Novy Mir [new world] in New York City. In 1917 she returned to Russia to take part in the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1920 she became people's commissar for social welfare. She was a leader of the "Workers' Opposition" that opposed party and government control of trade unions; this position was defeated by Lenin in 1921. Kollontai joined the people's commissariat for foreign affairs and became (1923) minister to Norway-the first woman to hold that diplomatic rank. After several ministerial appointments she became (1930) minister to Sweden and remained there until 1945. She was raised to ambassadorial rank in 1943 and was instrumental in conducting the Soviet-Finnish armistice negotiations of 1944. Known as a proponent of free love, she wrote extensively on this and on other social questions.

Bibliography

See her autobiography (tr. 1971).

Wikipedia: Alexandra Kollontai
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Alexandra Kollontai

Alexandra Mikhailovna "Shura" Kollontai (Алекса́ндра Миха́йловна Коллонта́й — née Domontovich, Домонто́вич) (March 31 [O.S. March 19] 1872 – March 9, 1952) was a Russian Communist revolutionary, first as a member of the Mensheviks, then from 1914 on as a Bolshevik. In 1923, she was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Norway, becoming the world's first female ambassador.

Contents

Biography

Early life

Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born on March 31 [O.S. March 19] 1872 in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire. Her father, General Mikhail Alekseevich Domontovich, from a Ukrainian family which traced its ancestry back to the 13th Century,[1] served as a cavalry officer in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 and as an advisor to the Russian administration in Bulgaria after the war until 1879. He entertained liberal political views, favoring a constitutional monarchy like that of Great Britain, and in the 1880s had written a study of the Bulgarian war of independence which was confiscated by the Tsarist censors, presumably for showing insufficient Russian nationalist zeal.[2] In a storyline straight out of a Russian novel, Alexandra's mother, Alexandra Androvna Masalina-Mravinskaia,[3] the daughter of a Finnish peasant who had made a fortune selling wood, obtained a divorce from an unhappy forced first marriage so that she could marry Domontovich, the man who had won her heart.[2] The saga of her parents' long and difficult struggle to be together in spite of the norms of society would color and inform Alexandra Kollontai's own views of relationships, sex, and marriage.

Alexandra Mikhailovna — or "Shura" as she was called growing up — was close to her father, with whom she shared an analytical bent and an interest in history and politics.[4] Her relationship with her mother, for whom she was named, was more complex. She later recalled:

"My mother and the English nanny who reared me were demanding. There was order in everything: to tidy up toys myself, to lay my underwear on a little chair at night, to wash neatly, to study my lessons on time, to treat the servants with respect. Mama demanded this."[5]

Shura was a good student growing up, sharing her father's interest in history, and mastering a range of languages. She spoke French with her mother and sisters, English with her nanny, Finnish with the peasants at a family estate inherited from her mother's father in Kuusa, and was a student of German.[6] Shura sought to continue her schooling at a university, but her mother refused her permission, arguing that women had no real need for higher education, and that impressionable youngsters encountered too many dangerous radical ideas at universities in any event.[7] Instead, Shura was to be allowed to take an exam to gain certification as a school teacher before making her way into society to find a husband, as was the custom.[7]

In 1890 or 1891, Shura, aged around 19, met her future husband Vladimir Ludvigovich Kollontai, an engineering student of modest means enrolled at a military institute.[8] Shura's mother objected bitterly to the potential union since the young man was so poor, to which Shura replied that she would work as a teacher to help make ends meet. Her mother bitterly scoffed at the notion:

"You work! You, who can't even make up your own bed to look neat and tidy! You, who never picked up a needle! You, who go marching through the house like a princess and never help the servants with their work! You, who are just like your father, going around dreaming and leaving your books on every chair and table in the house!"[9]

Her parents forbade the relationship and sent Shura on a tour of Western Europe in the hope that she would forget Vladimir, but the pair remained committed to one another despite it all and married in 1893.[10] Shura became pregnant soon after her marriage and bore a son, Mikhail, in 1894. She filled her time reading radical populist and Marxist political literature and writing fiction.[11]

Revolutionary activities

While Shura was initially drawn to the populist ideas of a restructuring of society based upon the peasant commune, effective advocates of such theories in the last decade of the 19th Century were few.[12] Marxism, with its emphasis on the enlightenment of factory workers, the revolutionary seizure of power, and the construction of modern industrial society, held sway with Kollontai as with so many of her peers of Russia's radical intelligentsia. Shura's first activities were timid and modest, helping out a few hours a week with her sister Zhenia at a library that supported Sunday classes in basic literacy for urban workers, sneaking a few socialist ideas into the lesson sideways.[13] Through this library Kollontai met Elena Stasova, an activist in the budding Marxist movement in St. Petersburg. Stasova began to use Kollontai as a courier, transporting parcels of illegal writings to unknown individuals, which were delivered upon utterance of a password.[14]

Years later, she wrote about her marriage, "We separated although we were in love because I felt trapped. I was detached, (from Vladimir), because of the revolutionary upsettings rooted in Russia". In 1898 she left little Mikhail with her parents to study economics in Zürich, Switzerland, with Prof. Heinrich Herkner. She then paid a visit to England, where she met members of the British Labour Party. She returned to Russia in 1899, at which time she met Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, a.k.a. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Alexandra Mikhailovna became interested by Marxist ideas while studying the history of working movements in Zürich, Switzerland under Herkner, later described by her as a Marxist Revisionist.

She became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, aged 27, in 1899. She was a witness of the popular rising in 1905 known as Bloody Sunday, at Saint Petersburg in front of the Winter Palace.

She went into exile after publishing "Finland and Socialism", which called on the Finnish people to sublevate against oppression within the Russian Empire. She visited England, France, and Germany, and became acquainted with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Political career

To dear comrade Louise Bryant[15] from her friend Alexandra Kollontay, Petrograd, Sept. 1, 1918.

At the time of the split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party into the Mensheviks under Julius Martov and the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin in 1903, Kollontai did not side with either faction. However, she came to dislike aspects of Bolshevism and eventually joined the Mensheviks.

It is or it was said that, in 1914, Kollontai joined the Bolsheviks and returned to Russia, after a period of exile in Scandinavia and America, for her earlier political activities. In September 1915 she participated in Switzerland in the Zimmerwald Conference.

This Conference was called by people sometimes opposed to Vladimir Lenin's lines of thought, and keen on Leon Trotsky, like the Bulgarian-born Romanian Christian Rakovsky. The Third Zimmerwald Conference took place in Stockholm around the end of August 1917 and there they would meet the Jewish Austrian-Hungarian from Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine), Karl Radek.

After the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, Kollontai became People's Commissar for Social Welfare. She was the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration and was best known for founding the Zhenotdel or "Women's Department" in 1919 . This organization worked to improve the conditions of women's lives in the Soviet Union, fighting illiteracy and educating women about the new marriage, education, and working laws put in place by the Revolution. As a foremost champion of women's equality like the other Marxists of her time, she opposed the bourgeois ideology of liberal feminism[16][17]; though later feminists have claimed her legacy. The Zhenotdel was eventually closed in 1930.

In the government, Kollontai increasingly became an internal critic of the Communist Party and joined with her friend, Alexander Shlyapnikov, to form a left-wing faction of the party that became known as the Workers' Opposition. However, Lenin managed to dissolve the Workers' Opposition, after which Kollontai was more or less politically sidelined.

Kollontai lacked political influence and was appointed by the Party to various diplomatic positions from the early 1920s, keeping her from playing a leading role in the politics of women's policy in the USSR. In 1923, she was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Norway, becoming the world's first female ambassador. She later served as Ambassador to Mexico and Sweden. During World War II, there were some Nazi discussions that her embassy in Stockholm could have potentially been a channel for German-Soviet negotiations, although they never came to pass. She was also a member of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations.

Social ideas

Kollontai raised eyebrows with her unflinching advocacy of free love. However, this does not mean that she advocated casual sexual encounters; indeed, she believed that due to the inequality between men and women that persisted under socialism, such encounters would lead to women being exploited, and being left to raise children alone. Instead she believed that true socialism could not be achieved without a radical change in attitudes to sexuality, so that it might be freed from the oppressive norms that she saw as a continuation of bourgeois ideas about property. It is a myth that she said that "...the satisfaction of one's sexual desires should be as simple as getting a glass of water"; what she actually said, in number 18 of her Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations, was that "...sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst."

Kollontai's views on the role of marriage and the family under Communism were arguably more subversive and more influential on today's society than her advocacy of "free love." Kollontai believed that, like the state, the family unit would wither away once the second stage of communism became a reality. She viewed marriage and traditional families as legacies of the oppressive, property-rights-based, egoist past. Under Communism, both men and women would work for, and be supported by, society, not their families. Similarly, their children would be wards of, and reared basically by society.

Kollontai admonished men and women to discard their nostalgia for traditional family life. "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." However, she also praised maternal attachment: "Communist society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child, but the joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them."[18]

Death and legacy

Alexandra Kollontai died March 9, 1952, less than a month away from her 80th birthday.

Kollontai was the subject of the 1994 TV film, A Wave of Passion: The Life of Alexandra Kollontai, with Glenda Jackson as the voice of Kollontai. A female Soviet diplomat in the 1930s with unconventional views on sexuality, probably inspired by Kollontai, played by Greta Garbo, appeared in the movie Ninotchka (1939).[citation needed]

The resurgence of radicalism in the 1960s and the growth of the feminist movement in the 1970s spurred a new interest in the life and writings of Alexandra Kollontai in Britain and America. A spate of books and pamphlets were subsequently published by and about Kollontai, including full-length biographies by historians Cathy Porter and Barbara Evans Clements.

Awards

Works

  • "The Attitude of the Russian Socialists," The New Review, March 1916, pp. 60-61.
  • Red Love. [novel] New York: Seven Arts, 1927.
  • Free Love. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1932.
  • Communism and the Family. Sydney: D. B. Young, n.d. [1970].
  • The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman. n.c. [New York]: Herder and Herder, n.d. [1971].
  • Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle: Love and the New Morality. Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972.
  • Women Workers Struggle for their Rights. Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1973.
  • The Workers' Opposition. San Pedro, CA: League for Economic Democracy, 1973.
  • International Women's Day. Highland Park, MI: International Socialist Publishing Co., 1974.
  • Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai. Alix Holt, trans. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977.
  • A Great Love. [novel] Cathy Porter, trans. London: Virago, 1981. Also: New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982.
  • Selected Articles and Speeches. New York: International Publishers, 1984.
  • Love of Worker Bees. [novel] London: Virago, 1988.
  • The Essential Alexandra Kollontai. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008.
  • The Workers Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: The Fight for Workers Democracy in the Soviet Union. St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2009.
A comprehensive bibliography of Russian-language material by Kollontai appears in Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pp. 317-331.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Alexandra Kollontai. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1979; pg. 3.
  2. ^ a b Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pg. 4.
  3. ^ Adding to the Dostoevskian melodrama, the first husband of Alexandra Kollontai's mother, an engineer named Mravinskii, was enlisted by the Tsar's secret police in 1881 to help ferret out a plot to kill the Tsar with dynamite placed under the street in a tunnel. Mravinskii helped police agents check for secret tunnels made by Narodnaia Volia terrorists — who managed to plant dynamite in this manner anyway. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated two weeks later by less sophisticated means when he changed his ordinary route through the streets, but Mravinskii was arrested when the dynamite tunnel was discovered, charged with misleading the police. Alexandra's mother persuaded her second husband to use his influence to aid her first, and as a result Mravinskii was saved from harsh Siberian exile, stripped of his rights and exiled to European Russia instead. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pg. 9.
  4. ^ Clements, Bolsehvik Feminist, pg. 5.
  5. ^ Aleksandra Kollontai, "Iz vozpominanii," Oktiabr', 1945, No. 9, pg. 61. Cited in Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pg. 6.
  6. ^ Clements, Bolshevik Feminists, pg. 11.
  7. ^ a b Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pg. 12.
  8. ^ Clements, Bolshevik Feminists, pg. 14.
  9. ^ Aleksandra Kollontai, Den första etappen. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1945; pp. 218-219. Cited in Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pg. 15.
  10. ^ Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pg. 15.
  11. ^ Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pg. 16.
  12. ^ Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pg. 18.
  13. ^ "The library loaned maps, globes, textbooks, and other materials to groups meeting in various parts of the city and sent out illegal populist and Marxist tracts under the cover of the legal activity." Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pg. 18.
  14. ^ Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, pp. 18-19.
  15. ^ Louise Bryant (1885-1936) was a radical journalist and the wife of American journalist and Communist Party founder John Reed (1887-1920).
  16. ^ Kollontai, Alexandra The Social Basis of the Woman Question 1909
  17. ^ Kollontai, Alexandra Women Workers Struggle For Their Rights 1919
  18. ^ A. Kollontai, "Communism and the Family," text Kommunistka (1920)
  19. ^ a b c (Russian)Alexandra Kollontai - the Soviet Ambassador
  20. ^ The Nobel Peace Prize: Revelations from the Soviet Past
  21. ^ http://books.google.com/books?q=kollontai+Order+of+St.+Olaf
  22. ^ The Voice Of Russia
  23. ^ http://books.google.com/books?q=kollontai+azteca
  24. ^ Kollontai was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle on the basis of her friendship with Mexican Presidents Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (May 21, 1895 – October 19, 1970), who served between 1934 and 1940, and Manuel Ávila Camacho (April 24, 1897 – October 13, 1955), who served between 1940 and 1946.

Further reading

  • Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1979.
  • Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: The Lonely Struggle of the Woman Who Defied Lenin. New York: The Dial Press, 1980.

See also

External links


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