Alexandra Kollontai
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Alexandra Mikhailovna 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. A Soviet diplomat since 1923, she was appointed USSR Ambassador to Mexico in 1926, becoming one of the earliest female ambassadors.[1]
Kollontai was born in St. Petersburg to Tsarist General Mikhail Domontovich, a descendent of Prince Dovmont (Daumantas in Lithuanian), a Prince of Pskov who was famous for taking sides with Novgorod against the Teutonic knights in the XIII Century.
Her father, Mikhail Domontovich was 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, while mother, Alexandra Masalin-Mravinsky, was the daughter of a wealthy Finnish timber merchant.
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[edit] Early Life
In 1891, "Shura", aged around 19, met her future husband Vladimir Kollontai, a modest student in a military school. Her parents decided to send her to Paris, France, in order to break off the relationship. Two years later, still in love with Kollontai, she married him and had a baby named Mikhail. While abroad, she had become acquainted with members of a group known today as "Utopic Socialists": Saint Simon, Owen, Fourier, etc. She also read the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, some of them published in American newspapers.
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.
Wealthy and well educated by private teachers, 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.
[edit] Revolutionary career
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 lines of thought, keen on Leon Trotsky, like the Bulgarian-born Romanian Christian Rakovsky. See:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conf%C3%A9rence_de_Zimmerwald. In French.
The Third Zimmerwald Conference took place in Stockholm around the ends of August 1917 and there they would meet Jewish Austrian-Hungarian from Lemberg, now Lviv in Ukraine, Karol Sobelsohn, a.k.a. Karl Radek, a.k.a. Karl Berngardovich Radek.
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. As a foremost champion of womens equality like the other Marxists of her time, she opposed the bourgeois ideology of feminism[2][3]; 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's first marriage was with a Tsarist officer, but she left husband and child in 1898 to become a Social-Democrat. She had an affair with Pavel Dybenko, a Ukrainian, 17 years her junior, who later became the commissar for the navy, so powerful that he overruled Trotsky's decisions. Trotsky had him courtmartialed. Prosecutor Krylenko only released Dybenko after Kollontai promised to marry Dybenko, whom she later cast off as well.[4]
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 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, in number 18 of her Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations, is that sexuality was 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." A. Kollontai, "Communism and the Family," text Kommunistka (1920)
[edit] Awards
- Order of Lenin (1933)[5]
- Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1945)[5]
- Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav (Norwegian highest award at the time)[6][7]
- Order of the Aztec Eagle (1944)[5][8][9]
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.
[edit] Works
- The social basis of the woman question 1909
- Towards a history of the working woman's movement in Russia 1920
- "Tezisy o kommunisticheskoi morali v oblasti brachnykh otnoshenii" (Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations), Kommunistka No 12-13 (May) 1921, pp.28-34.
- 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 (1939).
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ She may have been preceded by at least Ruth Bryan Owen.
- ^ Kollontai, Alexandra The Social Basis of the Woman Question 1909
- ^ Kollontai, Alexandra Women Workers Struggle For Their Rights 1919
- ^ Stalin and his Hangmen, by Donald Rayfield, published in 2004 by Random House, pages 267-270
- ^ a b c (Russian)Alexandra Kollontai - the Soviet Ambassador
- ^ The Nobel Peace Prize: Revelations from the Soviet Past
- ^ http://books.google.com/books?q=kollontai+Order+of+St.+Olaf
- ^ The Voice Of Russia
- ^ http://books.google.com/books?q=kollontai+azteca
[edit] External links
- Guide to the Louise Bryant Papers, Manuscript Group 1840, (Yale University Library), compiled by Sahr Conway-Lanz, January 2005
- Alexandra Kollontai archive
- A Wave of Passion at the Internet Movie Database
- For socialism and women's liberation
- Alexandra Kollontai Short Biography
