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ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI |
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 also 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.
Kollontai began political work in 1894, when she was a new mother, by teaching evening classes
or workers in St. Petersburg. Through that activity she was drawn into both public and
clandestine work with the Political
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Red Cross, an
organization set up to help political
prisoners. In 1895, she read August Bebel's Woman and
Socialism, which had a major influence on her future ideas and
activity.
In 1896, Kollontai saw the open face of capitalist industry for the first time when she visited
a large textile factory where her engineer husband was installing a ventilation system.
By 1898, Kollontai was fully committed to Marxism, and left her husband and child to study in
Zurich under the Marxist economist Heinrich Herkner. By the time she arrived, Herkner had become
a "revisionist" and Kollontai spent much of her time at the university contesting his views.
From 1905 through 1908, Kollontai led the campaign which has most clearly established her place
in history -- to organize the women workers of Russia to fight for their own interests, against
employers, against bourgeois feminism, and where necessary (as it frequently was) against the
conservatism and male chauvinism of the socialist organizations. Through interventions at
meetings of the liberal Women's Union, strikes and protests, the foundations were laid for a
mass movement.
At the end of 1908, after three months spent evading arrest, Kollontai was finally forced to
flee into exile. From then until 1917, she remained outside Russia, although many of her works
were published there. In early 1911, she taught at a socialist school organized by Maxim Gorky in Italy.
In 1914 she organized in Germany and Austria against the coming war, and was arrested and
imprisoned after it broke out. Released, she moved to Scandinavia and established contact with
V. I. Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland. She was a primary organizer of the Zimmerwald
Conference against the war in 1915, and her pamphlet "Who Needs War?," directed to front-line
soldiers, was translated into several languages.When the February revolution of 1917 broke out, Kollontai was in Norway. She delayed her return
to Russia only long enough to receive Lenin's "Letters from Afar" so she could carry them to the
Russian organization. From the moment of her arrival, she joined Alexander Shlyapnikov and V. M.
Molotov in the fight for a clear policy of no support to the provisional government, against the
opposition of Kamenev and Stalin. She was elected a member of the executive committee of the
Petrograd Soviet (to which she had been elected as a delegate from an army unit).
For the rest of 1917, Kollontai was a constant agitator for revolution in Russia as a speaker,
leaflet writer and worker on the Bolshevik women's paper Rabotnitsa.
In October 1917, Kollontai participated in the decision to launch an armed uprising against the
government and in the revolt itself. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, she was
elected Commissar of Social Welfare in the new Soviet government. In 1918 she lead a delegation
to Sweden, England and France to raise support for the new government.
Throughout 1919, although ill with heart and kidney disease and suffering from typhus,
Kollontai kept a grueling schedule of meetings, speeches and writing. She served as a delegate
to the First Congress of the Communist International, President of the Political Department of
the Crimean Republic, Commissar of Propaganda and Agitation for the Ukraine, and an activist in
the newly-formed Women's Section of the Communist Party .
In 1922, Kollontai was appointed as advisor to the Soviet legation in Norway. From then until
her retirement for health reasons in 1945, Kollontai was effectively in exile as a diplomat, and
her views on the status of women were marginalized and trivialized in the USSR itself. As
ambassador to Norway and Sweden, as a trade delegate to Mexico, as a delegate to the League of
Nations, and as negotiator of the Finno-Soviet peace treaty of 1940, she served the USSR with
what was generally regarded as great finesse. From 1946 until her death in 1952, she was an
advisor to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Tom Condit
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