Soviet Union - Alexandra Kollontai

Kollontai came from a wealthy St. Petersburg family. Her father was descended from Ukrainian landowners and later became a general in the Imperial Russian Army. Her mother was the daughter of a Finnish timber merchant and a Russian noblewoman. As a child, Alexandra (Shura) spent many summers on the family estate in Finland. She was fluent in Russian, Finnish, English, German, and French, language skills that not only benefited the revolutionary movement but later also the Soviet diplomatic service. Within the Russian communist movement, she fought for women’s rights and was also instrumental in the social legislation of the early Soviet republic.

Kollontai’s active political work began when she gave workers evening classes in St. Petersburg in 1894. Through this, she became part of the Political Red Cross, an organization supporting political prisoners, which worked partly underground. August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism left a deep impression in 1895 and influenced her future thinking and work.

In 1896, Kollontai experienced her first direct encounter with capitalist industry in a large St. Petersburg textile factory. Shortly afterwards, she participated in leafleting and fundraising campaigns in support of a mass strike in the textile industry. The 1896 strikes consolidated her certainty of the need for proletarian revolution. In 1899, she joined the illegally operating Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).

In 1905, she began to turn actively to the women’s question. Her work The Social Basis of the Woman Question was the first major exposition by a Russian Marxist on the subject. In it, she not only advocated the overthrow of the capitalist system, but she also explained the need to restructure the family itself in order to achieve true emancipation. Between 1905 and 1908, Kollontai organized women workers in Russia to fight for their own interests against capitalists, against bourgeois feminism, and against conservatism and patriarchy in the socialist organizations. She thus laid the foundation for a mass movement before she was exiled from Russia

With the outbreak of the February Revolution in 1917, Kollontai returned to Russia and advocated a clear policy of non-support for the provisional government. She was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Kollontai continued to agitate for revolution in Russia and began her involvement with the Bolshevik women’s newspaper Rabotnitsa, urging the Bolsheviks and the trade unions to pay more attention to the organization of women workers. In May 1917, she took part in the strike of women laundry workers demanding the communalization of all laundries. The industrial action lasted six weeks, but the Kerensky regime failed to meet the workers’ demands.

She remained active as an agitator and organizer, however, and played a key role in organizing the First All-Russian Congress of Women Workers and Peasants, serving in leading posts and founding the Women’s Committee of the Communist Party in 1919 together with Inessa Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaya. This body directed its work towards improving the living conditions of women throughout the Soviet Union, combating illiteracy, and educating women about the new marriage, education, and labor laws. In Soviet Central Asia, the Zhenotdel sought to improve the lives of Muslim women through literacy, education, and ‘unveiling’ campaigns.

In 1921, she came into conflict with the Communist Party and Lenin directly when she publicly declared her support for the Workers’ Opposition, a grouping against party centralism. The grouping was dissolved and Kollontai remained in critical opposition within the party.

In 1922, at her own request, she entered the Soviet diplomatic service first in Norway, then in Mexico, then again in Norway and Sweden. Alexandra Kollontai also acted as a negotiator of the 1940 Finnish-Soviet peace treaty and served the USSR with great sensitivity. Until her retirement in 1945 on health grounds, Kollontai lived abroad as a diplomat. Thereafter, and until her death on March 9, 1952, she served the Soviet Foreign Ministry as an advisor.

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