Alexandra Kollontai
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Alexandra Mikhaylovna Kollontai (Алекса́ндра Миха́йловна Коллонта́й — born 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. She was effectively exiled by Stalin, who sent her to Mexico, Sweden and Norway as a diplomat, and was thus one of the very few "Old Bolsheviks" to escape death during the Great Purges of the 1930s.
Kollontai was born in St. Petersburg to Mikhail Domontovich, a general in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 and the head of the chancellery of the Russian administration in Bulgaria from 1878-1879, and Alexandra Masalin-Mravinsky, the daughter of a wealthy Finnish timber merchant.
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[edit] Revolutionary career
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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 opted to join the Mensheviks.
In 1914, Kollontai joined the Bolsheviks and returned to Russia, after a period of exile in Scandinavia and America, for her earlier political activities. After the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, she 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. She was well recognized later for socialist feminism. 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 totally 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. She died in 1952.
Alexandra Kollontai is a profoundly unusual figure in the history of the Soviet Union, as she was an "Old Bolshevik" and a major public critic of the Communist Party who was neither purged nor executed by the Stalin regime, though as a diplomat serving abroad, she had little or no influence in government policy or operations and so was effectively exiled.
Kollontai also raised eyebrows with her strong promotion 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 is that sexuality was a human instinct as natural as thirst, but this was misunderstood by Lenin, who used it to discredit her[citation needed].
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 Communists succeeded in building heaven on earth. 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 by, society, not their families. Kollontai admonished men and women to discard their nostalgia for traditional family life and directed mothers, especially, to resist their maternal feelings and accept that there are no "my" children and "others' children, but "only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers." A. Kollontai, "Communism and the Family," textKommunista (1920)
[edit] Works
- The social basis of the woman question 1909
- Towards a history of the working woman's movement in Russia 1920
- Letopis mojei zizni (memoirs) 1946
- Published in Finnish as Hetkiä elämästäni, Progress Publishers 1990 ISBN 951-615-706-8
[edit] Films
- 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, played by Greta Garbo, appeared in the movie Ninotchka.
