A. Kollontaĭ

Biography

Ancestry

Kollontai's father, General Mikhail Alekseyevich Domontovich (1830–1902), descended from a Ukrainian family that traced its ancestry back to the 13th century, to Daumantas (Dovmont), prince of Pskov from 1266 to 1299, later canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church. Her father served as a cavalry officer in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. After his participation in the war, he was a member of the Russian staff advising the Bulgarian Constituent Assembly. In May 1879, he was called back to St. Petersburg. He entertained liberal political views, favouring a constitutional monarchy like that of United Kingdom. In the 1880s, he wrote a study of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. This study was confiscated by tsarist censors, presumably for showing insufficient Russian nationalist zeal.

Alexandra's mother, Alexandra Alexandrovna Masalina (Massalina) (1848–1899), was the daughter of Alexander Feodorovich Masalin (Massalin) (1809–1859), a Finnish peasant who had made a fortune selling wood. Alexandra Alexandrovna Masalina became known as Alexandra Alexandrovna Masalina-Mravinskaya after her marriage to her first husband, Konstantin Iosipovich Mravinsky (originally spelled Mrovinsky) (1829–1921). Her marriage to Mravinsky was an arranged marriage which turned out to be unhappy, and eventually she divorced Mravinsky in order to marry Mikhail Domontovich, with whom she had fallen in love. Russian opera singer Yevgeniya Mravina (stage name) was Kollontai's half-sister via her mother. The celebrated Soviet-Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, music director of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra for fifty years (1938–1988), was the only son of Mravina's brother Alexander Kostantinovich and thus Kollontai's half nephew.

Early life

Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born on 31 March [O.S. 19 March] 1872 in St. Petersburg. "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. 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.

Alexandra 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 maternal grandfather in Kuusa (in Muolaa, Grand Duchy of Finland), and was a student of German. Alexandra 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. Instead, Alexandra 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.

In 1890 or 1891, Alexandra, aged around 19, met her cousin and future husband, Vladimir Ludvigovich Kollontai (9 July 1867 – July/August 1917), an engineering student of modest means enrolled at a military institute. Alexandra's mother objected bitterly to the potential union since the young man was so poor, to which her daughter 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!

Her parents forbade the relationship and sent Alexandra 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. Alexandra became pregnant soon after her marriage and bore a son, Mikhail, in 1894. She devoted her time to reading radical populist and Marxist political literature and writing fiction.

Early political activism

While Kollontai was initially drawn to the populist ideas of restructuring society based upon the Mir commune, she soon abandoned this for other revolutionary projects. Marxism, with its emphasis on the class consciousness of factory workers, the revolutionary seizure of power, and the construction of modern industrial society, attracted Kollontai and many of her peers in Russia's radical intelligentsia. Kollontai'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 lessons. 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.

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 Professor Heinrich Herkner. She then paid a visit to England, where she met members of the British socialist movement, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb. She returned to Russia in 1899, at which time she met Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, better known today as Vladimir Lenin.

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

She became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1899 at the age of 27. In 1905, Kollontai was a witness to the series of events in Saint Petersburg, known as Bloody Sunday, where tsarist soldiers opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in front of the Winter Palace causing hundreds of deaths and injuries. At the time of the split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party between the Mensheviks under Julius Martov and the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin in 1903, Kollontai did not side with either faction at first, and "offered her services to both factions". In 1906, however, disapproving of "the hostile position taken by the Bolsheviks towards the Duma" and despite her being generally a left-winger, she decided to join the Mensheviks.

Russian Revolution

When Lenin returned to Russia in April 1917, Kollontai was the only major leader of the Petrograd Bolsheviks who immediately voiced her full support for his April theses, a set of radical and nonconformist proposals. She was a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and "for the rest of 1917, [she] was a constant agitator for revolution in Russia as a speaker, leaflet writer and worker on the Bolshevik women's paper Rabotnitsa". Following the July uprising against the Provisional Government, she was arrested along with many other Bolshevik leaders, but was given again her full freedom of movement in September: she was then a member of the party's Central Committee and as such she voted for the policy of armed uprising that led to the October Revolution. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 26 October, she was elected People's Commissar for Social Welfare in the first Soviet government, but she soon resigned in opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Peace. During the revolutionary period, at the age of 45, she married 28-year-old revolutionary sailor Pavel Dybenko, while keeping her surname from her first marriage.

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 work laws put in place by the Revolution. It was eventually closed in 1930.

In political life, Kollontai increasingly became an internal critic of the Communist Party and, with an article published in Pravda on 28 January 1921, she publicly sided with the Workers' Opposition, a left-wing faction of the party that had its roots in the trade union milieu and was led by Shliapnikov and by Sergei Medvedev, both of working class extraction. Three days earlier, on 25 January, after about a month delay, Pravda finally published the faction's platform for the upcoming Tenth Party Congress: it mainly advocated unionized workers' control over factories and generally over "the management of the national economy", on the grounds that the construction of a communist society could only be carried out by the industrial proletariat through its class work in history and through the intelligence it would acquire in concrete economic experience.

In the run-up to the congress, scheduled for 8–16 March, at Shliapnikov's urgent request, Kollontai had a pamphlet printed with the title of The Workers' Opposition: it expounded her personal views on the subjects under discussion, was intended to be distributed only to the delegates and has since remained probably her most famous work. "Kollontai's propositions for reform mostly repeated those enumerated by the Workers' Opposition, but she placed a greater emphasis on reducing 'bureaucratisation'," and denouncing petty-bourgeois or non-proletarian influences on Soviet institutions and on the party. Her language "conveyed much harsher criticism of the party and CC than did Shlyapnikov's language" in the official faction platform. Lenin was very upset about Kollontai joining the Workers' Opposition and, when he was given a copy of her pamphlet, he just 'leafed through' it and immediately castigated Kollontai. He stated she had written 'the platform of a new party', threatened to submit her pamphlet to the court of the Communist International, and said clearly to her face: "For this you should not only be excluded, but shot as well."

Soviet diplomatic career

After the Eleventh Congress, Kollontai became a political outcast. She was badly shaken by having teetered dangerously close to expulsion, and regarded the idea of being excluded from the 'revolutionary community of the elect' as a dreadful "nightmare". She even speculated she might be arrested. Italian writer and former communist leader Ignazio Silone later recounted that, on his departure from Moscow in 1922, Kollontai jokingly warned him not to believe any news of her being arrested for stealing Kremlin silverware, for such news could only mean that she was "not entirely in agreement with [Lenin] about some little problem of agricultural or industrial policy."

During this time, Kollontai was also in the process of a painful divorce from her second husband, Pavel Dybenko, which made her want a change of scenery. In the latter half of 1922 she wrote a "personal letter" to the newly appointed General Secretary of the Central Committee and her recent inquisitor, Joseph Stalin, asking to be sent on a mission abroad. Stalin granted her request and, starting from October 1922, she began to be entrusted with diplomatic appointments abroad and was thus prevented from playing any further political role at home. At first she hoped it was just a passing phase in her life and that she would soon return to her political work in the Zhenotdel, but eventually she had to realize that the diplomatic assignment had become a sort of exile.

Initially, she was sent as an attaché to the Soviet commercial mission in Norway, becoming one of the first women serving in diplomacy in modern times. In early 1924, Kollontai was first promoted to Chargé d'affaires and from August to Minister Plenipotentiary. As such, she later served in Mexico (1926–27), again in Norway (1927–30) and eventually in Sweden (1930–45), where she was finally promoted to Ambassador in 1943. She was also a member of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations.

When Kollontai was in Stockholm, the Winter War between Russia and Finland broke out; it has been said that it was largely due to her influence that Sweden remained neutral. After the war, she received Vyacheslav Molotov's praises. During late April 1943, Kollontai may have been involved in abortive peace negotiations with Hans Thomsen, her German counterpart in Stockholm. Kollontai was cared for by her friend, Swedish doctor Ada Nilsson as her health began to fail and retired in 1945.

Political retreat and attitude toward Stalinism

Being sent abroad in a sort of de facto exile for over twenty years, Kollontai gave up "her fight for reform and for women, retreating into relative obscurity" and bowing to the new political climate. She discarded her feminist concerns and "offered no objection to the patriarchal legislation of 1926 and the constitution of 1936, which deprived Soviet women of many of the gains they had achieved after the February and October Revolutions". The following words she allegedly pronounced in a private conversation with her friend Marcel Body in 1929 give a suggestion of her attitude towards advancing Stalinism: "Everything's changed so much. What can I do about this? One cannot go against the 'apparatus'. For my part, I have put my principles aside in a corner of my conscience and I pursue as best I can the policies they dictate to me."

Three years earlier, in 1926, when she was requested to write her own autobiography for a series on famous women by Munich publisher Helga Kern, she deemed it necessary to completely revise the first draft of her work she had handed over to the publisher, by deleting practically all references to 'dangerous' topics, as well as the parts mentioning or just hinting at her former critical positions and those having a personal nature that might be regarded as forms of self-celebration. On asking the publisher to make the changes requested, Kollontai apologized with obvious embarrassment, inviting repeatedly to debit her all expenses and writing twice that, under current circumstances, it was not absolutely possible "to do otherwise".

In his memoirs, Leon Trotsky was contemptuously critical of Kollontai's political attitude, writing that 'In Russia, Kolontay took from the very first an ultra-left stand, not only toward me but toward Lenin as well. She waged many a battle against the "Lenin-Trotsky" regime, only to bow most movingly later on to the Stalin regime.' Yet, it could also be argued that she had just internalized for good the lesson Trotsky had taught her at the aforementioned 1922 meeting of the Comintern, when he had tamed her last remnants of recalcitrance, forcing her into bowing to party discipline. Kollontai had, as it were, countered in advance, in her 1927 article through which she finally aligned herself, once and for all, with the Stalinists:

The masses do not believe in the opposition. They greet every statement of the opposition with smiles. Is it possible that the opposition thinks the masses' memory is so short? If they come across defects in the party, in the political line, who, if not the famous members of the opposition, established them and built them? It seems that the policy of the party and the structure of the apparatus become unfit only from the day that a group of oppositionists breaks with the party.

Death and legacy

Alexandra Kollontai died in Moscow on 9 March 1952, less than a month from her 80th birthday, and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.

She was the only member of the Bolsheviks' Central Committee that had led the October Revolution who managed to live into the 1950s, other than Stalin and his devoted supporter Matvei Muranov. She has sometimes been criticized and even held up to contempt for not raising her voice during the Stalinist purges, when, among countless others, her former husband, her former lover and fighting comrade, and so many friends of hers were executed. And, it has been noted, at the time she "was safe in her sumptuous Stockholm residence". Notwithstanding, it should also be pointed out that, even so, Kollontai did not enjoy a full liberty of action and had to worry about the possible fates of her family. It might not have been pure chance if both her only son and her musician half-nephew (whom she had much supported at the beginning of his career) also came unscathed through the persecution of the Stalinist regime, to the establishment of which she had, however, significantly contributed.

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 all around the world. A spate of books and pamphlets by and about Kollontai were subsequently published, including full-length biographies by historians Cathy Porter, Beatrice Farnsworth, and Barbara Evans Clements. In 1982 Rosa von Praunheim made the film Red Love based on the novella with the same title by Kollontai; the film was shown in the Museum of Modern Art. 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, had been played by Greta Garbo in the movie Ninotchka (1939).

Contributions to Marxist feminism

Kollontai is regarded as a key figure in Marxist feminism for her commitment both to women's liberation and Marxist ideals. She opposed the ideology of liberal feminism, which she saw as bourgeois. At the same time, Kollontai was a champion of women's liberation, believing that it "could take place only as the result of the victory of a new social order and a different economic system". She criticized bourgeois feminists for prioritizing political goals, such as women's suffrage, that would provide political equality for bourgeois women but would do little to address the immediate conditions of working-class women, and was further distrustful that bourgeois champions of feminism would continue to support their working class counterparts after succeeding in their struggle for "general women's" rights:

Class instinct – whatever the feminists say – always shows itself to be more powerful than the noble enthusiasms of "above-class" politics. So long as the bourgeois women and their [proletarian] "younger sisters" are equal in their inequality, the former can, with complete sincerity, make great efforts to defend the general interests of women. But once the barrier is down and the bourgeois women have received access to political activity, the recent defenders of the "rights of all women" become enthusiastic defenders of the privileges of their class, content to leave the younger sisters with no rights at all. Thus, when the feminists talk to working women about the need for a common struggle to realise some "general women's" principle, women of the working class are naturally distrustful.

Kollontai is known for her 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. A common myth describes her as a proponent of the "glass of water" theory of sexuality. The quote "...the satisfaction of one's sexual desires should be as simple as getting a glass of water" is often mistakenly attributed to her. This is likely a distortion of the moment in her short story "Three Generations" when a young female Komsomol member argues that sex "is as meaningless as drinking a glass of vodka [or water, depending on the translation] to quench one's thirst." In number 18 of her Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations, Kollontai argued that "...sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst."

Awards

Order of Lenin (1933)

Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1942)

Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1945)

Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav

Order of the Aztec Eagle with Sash (1944)

Works

The Social Basis of the Woman Question (Социальные основы женского вопроса). Including the introduction written by Kollontai in 1908. St. Petersburg: Znamie, 1909.

"New Woman" ("Новая женщина"), Modern World (Современный мир), 9, 151–185, 1913 (republished in New morality and working class (Новая мораль и рабочий класс), Moscow, 1919, pp. 3–35).

"The Attitude of the Russian Socialists", The New Review, March 1916, pp. 60–61.

Vasilisa Malygina (Василиса Малыгина), novel, 1923

Red Love [English translation of Vasilisa Malygina, 1923]. 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. London: Allison & Busby, 1977. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.