Scintilla: Alexandra Kollontai, Communist Revolutionary

Originally posted November 13th at:  piattaformacomunista.com/index.php/aleksandra-kollontaj-rivoluzionaria-comunista/ ; slightly edited.

Scintilla n. 149, November 2024

edited by Piattaforma Comunista – for the Communist Party of the Proletariat of Italy

Alexandra Kollontai, Communist Revolutionary

It is not easy to summarize the life and work of a woman like Alexandra Kollontai, who dedicated all her energies to the struggle against capitalism, the exploitation of the proletariat and the oppression of women, for socialism. A communist to whom women and feminist movements owe a lot.

She is deliberately cited as the proponent of "free love", thus reducing her work on the family and marriage to an erroneously libertine vision of relations between the two sexes, when instead the new communist morality always opposed bourgeois licentiousness and hypocrisy.

For Kollontai, bourgeois marriage is a chain that binds women to traditional values, values that oppress them and do not emancipate them. Marriage, which capitalism had transformed into a mere economic contract, would thus be transformed into the union of two people in love, ready to respect each other and with equal rights and duties in the family.

Aleksandra Kollontai was born into a wealthy family in St. Petersburg on March 31, 1872. She refused a marriage of convenience with a high officer who was the tsar's attendant and in 1893, against her parents' wishes, she married a distant cousin, the engineer Vladimir Kollontai, with whom she had a son Mikhail. They separated after 3 years because she considered an exclusive life as a wife and mother suffocating.

In August 1898 she moved to Zurich to attend lectures on political economy by Heinrich Herkner, a Marxist. Here she joined the social democratic movement. In 1904 Lenin called her to collaborate with a Bolshevik periodical and in November Kollontai definitively joined the Bolsheviks and also started courses in Marxism for the workers. On January 9, 1905, Kollontai was among the workers who marched to the Winter Palace and took part in the days that followed, where she distinguished herself as a brilliant orator.

In the same period she began to deepen her commitment to the question of women's emancipation and liberation by publishing "The Social Elements of the Woman Question". In 1905, in Mannheim, she participated in the Fourth Women's Conference of German Social Democracy and two years later in Stuttgart, in the Women's Conference of the Socialist International, with her friend Clara Zetkin, supporting women's right to vote. In 1908 she was tried twice on charges of anti-government activity among the textile workers and of calling for revolt in the pamphlet "Finland and Socialism". She was then forced to emigrate from Russia and go underground.

She spent her years abroad in intense political activity. In Germany she helped the Social Democratic Party in propaganda and agitation; in England she fought with the workers for universal suffrage; in Paris she organized a strike of workers for the Socialist Party; she took part in workers' struggles in Belgium, Sweden and Norway.

In 1910 she participated in the 8th Congress of the Second International. She wrote many works including "Woman and Motherhood" and "The Social Basis of the Woman Question" and worked intensively for the newspapers Rabotnitsa and Pravda.

At the International Socialist Congress in Basel in 1912, Alexandra Kollontai implemented a maternity care plan that was largely adopted in Russia in 1918. In 1915, at the outbreak of war, she took part in the Zimmerwald Conference advocating the need to boycott the war, and wrote the pamphlet "Who Needs the War?", intended for soldiers. Between 1915 and 1916 she traveled throughout the United States to plead the socialist cause and held anti-war conferences.

In February 1917, when the tsarist regime was overthrown, Kollontai returned from exile. Before leaving, Lenin sent her a pamphlet, "Letters from Afar", in which he explained that the events of February were only the first phase of the revolution and that the way to achieve peace was the seizure of power by the proletariat. She was therefore elected – first among women – to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. It was she who organized Lenin's return to Russia and immediately supported the "April Theses".

She actively participated in the meetings of the Central Committee, including the one on October 10 in which the armed insurrection against the bourgeois government was decided. On the night between October 24 and 25 1917 she was in Smolny, the headquarters of the October Revolution.

With the seizure of power, Kollontai joined the revolutionary government and was appointed People's Commissar for Social Welfare, the first woman in the world to be a government minister.

During her tenure, she decreed the distribution of land belonging to monasteries to the peasants, the establishment of state nurseries, the creation of canteens, social laundries and maternity care. The socialization of housework would free women from gender oppression.

In 1918 Kollontai was one of the organizers of the First Congress of Russian Working Women from which the Żenotdel was born, an organization for the promotion of women's participation in public life, for social initiatives and the fight against illiteracy.

Thanks to her commitment, women obtained not only the right to vote and be elected, but also access to education, equal pay and in 1920 divorce and the right to abortion. Kollontai criticized the introduction of the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) and in 1920-21 with Alexander Shlyapnikov formed a current known as the "Workers' Opposition", which was dissolved when it lost the party congress.

After this defeat, according to the detractors of socialism, she withdrew from political life because she was no longer welcome to Lenin. In reality, since with the emergency of the civil war it was impossible for her to implement her political program, she responsibly considered it right to put herself at the disposal of the socialist cause wherever her skills were needed.

Thanks to her knowledge of languages, in 1923 she first became a member of the Soviet trade delegation in Oslo and, when Norway officially recognized the USSR, as ambassador, she became the first female ambassador in the world. In 1926 she held the same post in Mexico and in 1930 she was at the embassy in Stockholm. In 1933 she obtained from Sweden the return of the gold reserves that the anti-Bolsheviks had hidden there after the revolution. In the same year she was awarded the Order of Lenin for her activity. From 1934 to 1938 he was a member of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva.

The revisionists claim that she was disliked by Stalin and therefore sent abroad. She was certainly an extraordinary woman with a strong personality, who refused any relationship with the Trotskyites and other enemies of Soviet power.

It was to her that Stalin in 1939, while Nazism was about to enter the war and the USSR was still trying to negotiate with the British and French, entrusted these important words: "Many issues of our party and our people will be distorted and abused, especially abroad and, yes, also in our country. Zionism [Nazism?], in its desperate rush to gain world supremacy, will be hard on us and will retaliate because of our successes and achievements. They still consider Russia a barbaric country, a reserve of raw materials. And even my name will be calumniated; it is slandered even now. They will attribute many crimes to me".

Alexandra Kollontai died in Moscow in 1952, without ever having betrayed socialism and the Bolshevik Party, supporting the cause of the definitive emancipation of working men and women to the end.

To learn more about her person and her work, little known in our country, we recommend the following writings and books: Communism and the Family [1918, available from redstarpublishers.org ]; Conferences on the Liberation of Women (1921); Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman; the novel Vassilissa (published in Italy in 1978) which tells the story of a militant communist worker, her path to emancipation as a woman and as proletarian revolutionary.