Freedom Socialist • Vol.24, No. 3 • October-December

Alexandra Kollontai: Passionate architect of feminism in the early Soviet Union

by Toni Mendicino

THERE'S NO BETTER ANTIDOTE to times of bleak repression and corporate plunder than a good, bracing dose of insurgent workingclass history. And any significant list of radical heroes must include Alexandra Kollontai, the gifted Russian orator, writer, and passionate forerunner of socialist feminism.

Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born in 1872 into a family of liberal aristocrats. A rebel early on, she gave up a life of leisure to marry a poor engineer named Vladimir Kollontai.
But, after touring the huge Krengolm weaving factory in 1896, she made the wrenching decision to leave her husband and young child in order to devote herself to Marxist politics. The barbaric living and labor conditions of the mostly female textile workers later led her to state, "Women, their fate, occupied me all my life; women's lot pushed me to socialism."

KOLLONTAI SAW SOCIALIST revolution and women's liberation as inseparable. She recognized that in order for women to participate equally in society, our second-class standing as workers must be eliminated and our unpaid domestic labor transformed into communal responsibility.

Other visionary leaders of the 1917 Russian revolution — V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya — made the same connection. The Bolshevik commitment to elevating women's status was put into practice from the first.

Kollontai helped to write many of the Soviet laws legalizing abortion, divorce, birth control, and homosexuality — unheard of in 1917! Prostitution was decriminalized. The concept of illegitimacy was banished. And the USSR was among the first countries to grant women voting rights.

As Commissar of Social Welfare, Kollontai was a primary organizer of childcare, job training, collective kitchens, and free maternity and infant healthcare. Women became educated and moved out of the home and into the political and economic life of the new country. Thrilling times!

Through the Department for Work among Women, Kollontai, Armand, and others organized with their enslaved Muslim sisters across Central Asia, establishing schools, dormitories, and land reforms. New laws banned polygamy, child marriage, and limits on freedom of political expression.

Kollontai detested imperialist war. In exile before the revolution, she wrote "Who Profits from the War?" and was jailed for antiwar propaganda. Undeterred after her release, she crisscrossed Europe, Scandinavia, and the U.S., lecturing in four languages against the looming carnage of World War I.

Kollontai was also not afraid to stand up for a minority position, even among comrades. After the tsar fled, Lenin called for workers and peasants to dump the bourgeois interim government and start building socialism — something nobody thought could succeed. Of all the Bolshevik Party members, only Kollontai supported Lenin from the start, because she shared his belief in the potential of workers and the poor.

Kollontai often faced grief for her iconoclastic writings. Love of the Worker Bees and "Communism and the Family" explore how traditional sexual and family relations could change once freed from the demands of property and dependence. I found these works exhilarating and prophetic, but Kollontai was frequently accused of debauchery, and her theories were later officially denounced during Stalin's sexist reintroduction of the monogamous nuclear family.

INDEED, STALINISM MEANT a sweeping reversal of gains made by Soviet women and workers.

The causes of its rise were rooted in the cultural and industrial backwardness inherited from imperial Russia. Years of civil war and attack by Western capitalist powers drained the already poor country. Soviet hopes for the success of revolutions in other countries were dashed, and the USSR remained an isolated workers state. The need to administer scarcity rather than plenty allowed for the emergence of a privileged, repressive bureaucracy.

The effects for women were especially devastating. Collectivized kitchens and nurseries were closed. Mothers with lots of children were rewarded with medals. Poor working conditions and long lines for goods made a misery of women's daily lives.

Sadly, Alexandra Kollontai did not escape the effects of this terrible backlash. Suffering from ill health and undoubtedly demoralized, Kollontai the fierce fighter allowed herself to be silenced and sidelined with an appointment as the USSR's representative to Norway in 1922. But even in what amounted to exile, she still broke new ground as the world's second female ambassador. She remained abroad through the 1940s as a Soviet diplomat until her retirement and eventual death in 1952.

The Russian Revolution permanently raised humanity's expectations, and inspired insurrectionary socialist movements across the globe. Its influence is still with us today.

So too does the legacy of one of its leading lights. Anywhere and everywhere women are fighting for full emancipation, Alexandra Kollontai lives on.

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