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Home , Alexandra Kollontai, Lenin (1916 icebreaker), Pavel Dybenko

Alexandra Kollontai: An Extraordinary Person Mavis Robertson After leaving her second husband, Pavel By any standards, Dybenko, she commented publicly that he was an extraordinary person. had regarded her as a wife and not as an She was the only woman member of the individual, that she was not what he needed highest body of the Russian Bolshevik Party because “I am a person before I am a in the crucial year of 1917. She was woman” . In my view, there is no single appointed Minister for Social Welfare in the statement which better sums up a key first socialist government. As such, she ingredient of Kollontai’s life and theoretical became the first woman executive in any work. government. She inspired and developed far­ Many of her ideas are those that are sighted legislation in areas affecting women discussed today in the modern women’s and, after she resigned her Ministry because- movement. Sometimes she writes in what of differences with the majority of her seems to be unnecessarily coy language but comrades, her work in women’s affairs was she was writing sixty, even seventy years reflected in the Communist Internationale. ago before had invented such words as ‘sexism’. She sought to solve the dilemmas of She was an outstanding publicist and women within the framework of . public speaker, a revolutionary organiser While she openly chided her male comrades and writer. Several of her pamphlets were for their lack of appreciation of and concern produced in millions of copies. Most of them, for the specifics of women’s oppression, she as well as her stories and novels, were the had little patience for women who refused to subjects of controversy. She was proficient in face the realities of class divisions in society. at least seven languages. She became the She was quite scathing of those feminists world’s first woman . who put forward solutions for all women Not least among her claims to fame was a which did not take account of the actual personal life which defied convention and economic and social conditions which do gave rise to much talk, scandalised or affect women differently. admiring, depending on the point of view. Because marxism had only an inadequate There has recently been a revival of view or no view at all on questions she interest in Kollontai. I believe it can be considered of fundamental importance, she attributed principally to the modern set out to develop that view for marxism. women’s movement. She asked many of the Hence she wrote about love, about morality, questions we are asking — the fact that we about jealousy, about women living alone, are still seeking some of the answers about problems of the family, about being a suggests the difficult terrain she chose and mother, about women at work, about enhances her relevance for us. prostitution, alimony and so on. She addressed herself to real problems at every socialists. Within the , after the level. Her weakness was that in practical turbulent years of war, revolution and civil politics she often sought maximum solutions war, many yearned for stability and order, and thus could not always point to the next which means, among other things, a practical step. Like many visionaries before regulated family life where men and women and since she CQuld describe the ultimate occupy defined traditional roles. Her solution but could not answer satisfactorily political opponents were not above using her the questions being immediately posed. controversial views on one matter to help In some circles she is best known for her defeat her in debates on other matters. It is not inconsiderable achievements as a still a familiar situation for most women in diplomat. This is especially so in politics. Scandinavia where she lived and worked, Kollontai may be remembered for her glass with brief interruptions, from 1922 until of water, but she is best known in the Soviet 1945. In others she is identified with the Union as a diplomat. Her diplomatic career ‘workers’ opposition’ movement of 1921. Her is the subject of various books and articles pamphlet was revived in English during the and a film about that part of her life. early 1960s. when interest in was rekindled. That movement She is also known for a specific support she against bureaucracy and for the gave to . When Lenin returned to independence of the trade unions pointed up in early 1917 he presented ten theses many problems which faced the Soviet to his comrades on what should be done. Union, and will perhaps face every Known now as the ‘April Theses’, they revolution. The solutions offered by the proposed immediate preparation for the workers’ opposition were, however, an odd socialist revolution. The bolshevik leaders mixture of commonsense and naivety, a said quite bluntly that it was far too early to combination of democracy and consider revolution. As there was a meeting authoritarianism. Given the realities of the of the in progress on a different time, and they were hard realities in 1921, the floor of the same building, it was agreed that debate was reasonably fair and open and Lenin should present his views to a joint much of what the opposition said was noted meeting. Only one person in that entire and incorporated in the ’ program. audience spoke up in support of Lenin’s That was an achievement even though the views. Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, writes in gains were soon whittled away and distorted her Memories of Lenin (2) of the ‘fervent’ under Stalin. speech Kollontai made that day. As in other circumstances, Kollontai favoured the Alix Holt (1), who is responsible for a ultimate rather than the compromise. In this recent book which provides a large selection case, she and Lenin were right. What better of Kollontai’s writings in English way to remember her? translation, claims that Kollontai is best remembered in the Soviet Union “ as the Still others recall Kollontai as a great proponent of the ‘glass of water theory’, the survivor, implying that she compromised theory that sex should be as easy and herself to survive. It is true that she lived out uncomplicated as drinking a glass of water” . her life until 1952, dying in a few Certainly, Kollontai’s ideas on morality were weeks short of her 80th birthday. It is also a source of considerable debate in the early true that most of her famous comrades, years of the . Later, and friends and lovers died in front of Stalin’s even to a degree at the time, they were firing squads, or disappeared in forced subjected to distortion and ridicule. Anti­ labour camps or were sent into exile. There socialists were already busy showing that are many speculations as to why she nothing was sacred under the dreaded survived, some petty, some malicious, and . A woman who believed in most not convincing. freedom for both sexes, who polemicised What are the sources of our knowledge of against traditional concepts of family and Kollontai? who encouraged women to work and fight for their rights was an obvious subject for their For those who read Russian, there are ridicule. But it wasn’t only the anti­ several fine collections of Kollontai’s work Lindstrom. The circumstances of the collection seem to be these: when Kollontai was transferred from to the Soviet Embassy in in 1930, she chose Ada Lindstrom as her doctor, and they became friends. The collection consists of some 300 pieces. Only 4 or 5 items — a section of a letter, several postcards and an invitation — date from before 1935. But beginning with a postcard in March 1935, there are frequent letters and cards, seemingly everything. In the mid-1980s, when Kollontai went to Moscow for her annual consultation with the Foreign Office, she thought that something might happen to her, a quite reasonable assumption in the time of the purges. It seems that, as a precaution, she left behind in in the care of Ada Lindstrom, a collection of her private papers and some of (the man of peasant origin, 17 years her junior, whom she had married in her middle age shortly after the revolution). She said that these were the papers she would use when, eventually, she published her autobiography. Fortunately she escaped the purges. (Dybenko was not so ’ucky; he was shot in 1938.) Unfortunately or students of Kollontai, she took these papers with her when she retired to Moscow and now, thanks to Alix Holt, there is a in 1945. According to her letters to Ada broad-ranging selection in English but we Lindstrom, she worked on her memoirs after could have been introduced to Kollontai in 1945, revised them and prepared them for Australia through her own words as far back publication in 1948. She expected they would as in 1920 or 1921. be published in America and France, as well as in the Soviet Union that year. In one letter At that time Kollontai’s work The Family she promised to send a copy to Ada, in others and the Communist State, written in 1919, she asks Ada to send her reviews from the was published in Melbourne under the title foreign press. But the book never appeared. and the Family. It was one of She also refers to documents she had the very few writings of the Russian prepared but did not want published for some revolution published here, an indication of years. Kollontai’s place in the bolshevik leadership at the time and some recognition of the Further evidence of the missing material importance given to the topic by early has been given by a woman who was communists. Incidentally, that pamphlet Kollontai’s secretary-companion for many was reissued here in January 1971 by the years. This woman, a Swedish national, of Australia, some time returned to Moscow with her and continued before other publishers in the English to live there after Kollontai’s death. A language had recognised her relevance to the Swedish historian, Agneta Pleijel (2A), modern women’s movement. obtained an interview with her in the early A large unpublished source is a collection 1970s. She wrote an article stating that the of her papers which was placed in the companion, Emy, confirmed what the letters University of Gottenborg, Western Sweden, say, namely, that Kollontai had worked for some years ago. This collection was made several years on her autobiography and had available from the estate of a Swedish expected it would be published and that she medical practitioner and feminist, Ada had also prepared several collections of documents for publication. She had specified saw that as crucial for workers generally and that some should not be published before the women specifically. 1950s and others should not be published There are many other contemporary until 1972. references and some recent pieces on Interestingly enough, her American Kollontai. Here I will mention only three. diaries of 1915-1916 were published in the There is Isabel de Palencia’s book written Soviet Union in 1962 and in 1970 and a body in 1947. Palencia was the representative of of work appeared about her, by several Soviet Republican Spain in Sweden. Her gossipy historians in the 60s and 70s. Some of these book barely qualifies as politics. Alix Holt drew on previously unpublished sources. calls it ‘trivia’. Kollontai refers to it in several In the absence of her definitive biography, letters to Ada Lindstrom as ‘amusing’. we must look elsewhere. At least we should There is Empire of Fear (5) by those not confine ourselves to her short piece, famous Soviet defectors, V. and E. Petrov. written in 1926 and revised by her but as yet They were not known for their accuracy in unpublished in the Soviet Union. This is the the Royal Commission held in this country piece called Autobiography of a Sexually after their defection in 1954. I cannot say if Emancipated Woman. It was published in their description of life in the Soviet English in 1972, together with her own Embassy in Sweden is accurate: they do revisions which some take as an illustration claim that some of Kollontai’s personal of how prepared she was to compromise writings were taken by the KGB, and that herself for Stalin. We will return to this may be so, but they also claim that her child theory and to the significance of the year was fathered by her second husband, Pavel 1926 in Kollontai’s life. Dybenko. Since the child was born around We can follow Kollontai too through the 1896 when Dybenko was all of 6 years old, I eyes of whose book of find that hard to believe. reportage called Six Red Months in Russia And there is Michael Body’s work (6) (3) was published in 1919. She devotes a published in an anti-communist journal in chapter to two women, both Ministers of France in 1952. Body was a French socialist Social Welfare. The first was Panina, a wno worked with Kollontai in Norway in the Minister in the Kerensky Government, the 1920s. Some of his conclusions are suspect second was Kollontai. Bryant tells what I but some are collaborated from other sources. believe to be a quite revealing story. She was present one day when a group of elderly What, then, do we know of Kollontai? people came to visit Kollontai in her office. She was born Alexandra Mikhailovna They were a delegation from an old people’s Domontovich on April 1st, 1872 into a family home. Kollontai explained to Bryant that the of the old Russian nobility, the only child of old people now had the right to run their her mother’s second marriage. In her own institution themselves, to elect their own words she was the youngest, most spoiled officers and choose their own menus. Bryant, and most coddled member of the family and knowing full well the near-starvation rations she claims that in reacting against having then operating in the aftermath of the too much done for her, she began to realise revolution and the war, expressed that she wanted to be free. These words, considerable doubt that the old people could ‘wanting to be free’, are often found in her make a meaningful choice of their menu. writings about herself, about the working Kollontai burst out laughing and then said: people, about women and specifically about “ Surely you can understand that there is a women in their relations with men. great deal of moral satisfaction in deciding whether you want thick cabbage soup or thin She claims to have had an early awareness cabbage soup” . On the basis of this and other of the conditions of peasant children with examples, Bryant concluded that a secret of whom she played. She also had a Finnish Kollontai’s undoubted success as Minister of grandfather, which perhaps explains her Social Welfare was that she allowed other lifelong interest in the problems of the people to take their own decisions. There are Finnish nation, and more generally, the many other examples to illustrate that style. problems of national minorities. She did not She was committed to self-management and go to school but studied at home under a tutor. As luck would have it, her tutor was member of the German social democratic connected to Russian revolutionary circles. party. She travelled to London to join the suffrage campaign, to Italy to lecture, to In 1893, at the age of 21, she clashed with Sweden and Denmark on speaking tours, her parents over an intended marriage of and all the time she was plugging away at convenience and insisted on her right to the woman question. Her appeals for support marry her cousin, Volodya Kollontai. were made to the parties and The marriage lasted only a few years, against what she called bourgeois feminism. during which time her son was born. She By 1914 the mensheviks, with whom wrote in 1926: “ Although I personally raised Kollontai then identified, and the bolsheviks my child with great care, great passion, had recognised the importance of women to motherhood was never the kernel of my the extent that they established magazines existence” . She claimed that when she left for working women, celebrated March 8 and him she still loved her husband but felt she raised matters concerning women workers in was in a ‘cage’. Her sympathies and interests the trade unions. Kollontai, from exile, was were with social questions. It all sounds very called on to help. familiar, but to situate her reactions in their She had strong connections with the time it could be noted that Engels’ basic textile workers’ union and had become work, The Origin of the Family, had been something of an expert on maternity welfare. published for the first time in the year when She studied the then 14 countries which had Kollontai turned 12. forms of maternity assistance, specifically Although she read and studied widely, she praising Australia for its legislation which says that a turning point in her life came gave a lump sum payment to all mothers. when she visited a textile factory and saw the That lump sum payment is now also history. conditions of work of the 12,000 employees, Later she was to use these studies to draft the men and women. In the years after leaving first Soviet insurance laws. In Paris in 1911 her husband, she studied in Europe, she organised a housewives’ strike and travelled, taught, attended conferences and thereafter placed growing emphasis on the congresses, met names from the history books — ’s daughter Laura, , Plekanov, among others. By 1905 she had become an energetic orator for the revolution. She dates her concern for women’s liberation to this time, saying that she became conscious of ‘how meager’ was the interest shown by the workers’ movement in the fate of women. Since she was convinced that women’s liberation could take place only as a result of a new social order, she fought so that the workers’ movement would make women’s liberation one of its aims. She didn’t obtain much support but the first working women’s club was formed in St. Petersburg in 1907. Soon after, to escape imprisonment, she went into exile. She records how she was accused by male comrades of feminism and of giving too much time to women. That’s familiar, too. In her case, it was hardly just. In the same period, she was very active on behalf of Finland and in developing a theoretical position on the rights of national minorities. From 1908 until 1917 she* lived abroad, mainly in Germany, where she worked as a secondary in society, impetuous. She too was arrested and held for housework. 6 weeks. In this time she became a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik She tells us frankly that despite all the Party, elected at the 6th Party Congress. travel, excitement and activity she still found time for personal relationships but she There is considerable evidence that her was annoyed by the fact that love affairs elevation to the leadership had more to do consume so much energy, that men try to with her Finnish connections, her concern mould women into willing sounding boards for and detailed knowledge of the Finnish for their egos. She also regrets that, as a people than the fact that she was a woman. woman, she had no space, no welcoming Nevertheless, within weeks she was Minister hearth to return to as male comrades usually for Social Welfare, where she considered her do. She writes scathingly of double greatest achievement was the formation of standards, mentioning specifically that men homes for maternity and infant care. are not judged by whom they marry but Life was a struggle. A model ‘Pre-natal women are, particularly if he is less educated, Care Palace’ and a model day nursery she younger and handsome. During some of this had established were burnt down in time her son was cared for by friends, at other suspicious circumstances. Free maternity times he lived with her. care was portrayed by reaction as At outbreak of war she and her son were nationalisation of women. Responsible too arrested in Germany. Later she went to for the war wounded, she took over a Sweden and served a term in prison these. monastery as a hospital. Her party criticised From Norway in 1915 she contacted Lenin in her for this confrontation with the church . They continued an exchange of while the church organised a demonstration letters and ideas until Lenin’s death. She was against her. But she achieved much and totally opposed to the war, and shocked at some of it lasting. Legislation was passed on the response of the majority of German social maternity leave, child care, abortion and related areas. However, in a short time, she democrats who became enthusiastic supporters of the war. Finding that Lenin was at odds with the leaders of the took an internationalist position in bolsheviks. opposition to the war, she joined the bolsheviks. Of the differences which developed in the She undertook a lengthy speaking tour of party at that time, she wrote in 1926: “ Now the and was back in Norway began a dark time of my life which 1 cannot only a short time before the czar was treat of here since the events are still too overthrown. She notes that in the war years, fresh in my mind. But the day will also come women’s liberation took a secondary when I will give an account of them.” (7) It position. She felt that was justified, that the seems likely that such an account was greatest efforts had to be made in stopping written in her unpublished autobiography. the war and that no real advance could be Be that as it may, she felt it necessary to made by anyone while it continued. resign from the Ministry. After a short time Back in Russia she found she could join her in the field, the untimely death of Inessa two concerns. In May, the bolsheviks began Armand (8) caused her to return to Moscow to a weekly publication entitled The Women head the Central Women’s Department. The Workers and Kollontai’s first article dealt first post-revolution Women’s Congress had with the high cost of living resulting from the taken place in November 1918. Then and war. In the same month she participated in a more particularly when she worked in the strike of laundry workers. She tried during Women’s Department, she was involved in this time to get her party to agree to form forming people’s kitchens, day-care centres, organisations of women, but failed. She drawing women into the educational system settled instead on organising a conference of and countless other tasks which together, women workers. In the of 1917 she she felt, would lay the basis for women’s was in Sweden. Hearing of the arrest of her liberation. comrades she insisted on returning herself, At the start of the civil war she had been in although later she admitted this was the field where she engaged in propaganda \

work with the troops but more and more it she said she would leave the diplomatic was work among women which had her service and ‘be free’. But if, in the early part attention. During the time she headed the of 1926, that had been her plan, she changed Women’s Department, abortion was it. Again, according to Body, she agreed to legalised, a women’s newspaper founded, stay on in the diplomatic service and write and two world conferences of communist for history. 1926 was the year of the attempt women were held. to develop a united opposition to Stalin. Perhaps she thought it would succeed. Her books and articles on morality were More likely Alix Holt is right. She believes only one of the many controversies she was that Kollontai had wanted to re-enter active involved in. According to her own words she polities in 1926 after several years as a accepted the position in the Soviet legation in diplomat, but found that political life had Norway in 1922 because she assumed it changed considerably in ber absence. The would be a mere formality and she would debates in the Party had all but ceased. If she have time to write and think. She did write a had been unsuccessful in putting forward little. Perhaps her most controversial pieces concrete plans to assist women in the period were The Winged Eros (9) in which she of the NEP (11) — and this is clearly her advises young people on attitudes to love, weakness — what could she do in the and her three short novels, recently reissued situation of 1926? It must be added that while in English under the title Love of Worker Lenin and Trotsky had not endorsed many of Bees (10). But diplomatic life, as she found it, her views, they had encouraged debate and was no formality. In 1923 she was appointed they had been supportive of the rights of head of the mission and by 1924 was women. Now one was dead and the other ambassador. She became a skilled negotiator isolated. in matters of trade as in other areas of In 1926 she did enter the party political diplomatic life. In 1926 she was appointed to debates briefly on the laws concerning , but stayed only a short time because marriage, with particular reference to the climate adversely affected her health. alimony. She made telling points with According to Michael Body, in 1926 when considerable humour but there is a certain she wrote the short autobiography unreality about her proposals. She knew that previously mentioned, she had planned to the Soviet Union was then much too poor to retire and write. He says she wanted to write afford a comprehensive social security about what had gone wrong with the system but she balked at the idea that the revolution. It is certainly true that in several property of a marriage or a common law letters to different people around this time relationship (then recognised as valid for the first time) be divided when that marriage is she praises Stalin and this is especially dissolved and that men be made responsible surprising because everyone, Lenin’s widow for the upkeep of their children. She looked at Krupskaya included, had to sing his praises the question through the eyes of the poor sometime. workers and peasants. Poor workers had little or no property anyway, a peasant In 1927 her novel, A Great Love, was couldn’t really divide a single cow. She was published. It appeared in English in 1929. also realistic enough to recognise that many There are a few theories about this. Robert people have more than one relationship in a McNeal (12) in his biography of Krupskaya, lifetime. The cow might have to be divided Bride of the Revolution, draws on what not once but twice. She proposed instead a Michael Body claims Kollontai had told him tax — to guarantee the upkeep of the children of a relationship which had existed between of the poor, together with a system of Lenin and Inessa Armand. Both McNeal and contracts to replace marriage registration for Body and some others consider that all those who had property and income Kollontai’s A Great Love is a thinly which could be divided. In a sense, hers was disguised account of that relationship. And a class comment on alimony and a comment McNeal goes further, he claims that the free of hypocrisy. For example, she used the novel was written and published in 1927 as occasion to raise again the need for part of Stalm’s campaign to destroy the satisfactory birth control. But she found, as authority of Krupskaya and, through her, others have found since, that there is no the opposition. point in having elaborate plans, no matter It is true that there are similarities between how just and logical, which answer the content of the book and what is thought questions which no-one is asking or which to have happened between Armand, Lenin society has no means to solve. and Krupskaya but the similarities are such After 1926 her diplomatic life continued that they could more or less be accounted for but her party political life ceased. by the fact that in many affairs there are an older woman — the wife — who is hurt, and a In 1927 she was in Norway. In 1930 she younger woman — the mistress — who isn’t was transferred to Sweden where she very happy either. remained till her retirement in 1945. Her If we are to believe that Kollontai wrote main achievement, in this period, was the this novel vindictively, we have to believe negotiation of the Finnish-Soviet peace in that she had lost all sympathy with the 1940: Lenin’s far-sightedness had paid off. opposition in the Bolshevik Party, yet Finland needed a sympathetic negotiator on everything else points to the fact that she the Soviet side at that time. She received gave less support to than most. We several decorations and awards from the would also have to believe that she would Soviet, Finnish and Swedish governments. sacrifice a women friend for a male political She lived quietly in her Moscow flat, writing opponent. If she did that, it is entirely out of and putting her papers in order. She died of a character. It seems more likely that she wrote heart attack one day after International the novel to carry on her theme that women Women’s Day in 1952. need to be independent but those of her Alix Holt gives particular emphasis to generation, even the most emancipated, the another aspect of the period after 1926: she ‘single women’ as she calls them, continue to published almost nothing. seek close personal ties with a man and are usually disappointed. She said over and over Indeed, from 1923, when she first retired in articles, stories and novels that women from active politics, there is nothing recorded need to learn to make personal life a part of at all until 1926 when she again, temporarily existence, as men do, and not their whole entered into debate. Thereafter, until her existence — even temporarily. In an essay on death there are no more than 15 pieces, a variety of ‘single women’ as portrayed in covering a period of 25 years. Most of these literature, she tries to define her new woman, are non-controversial reportage — about life she says: in Mexico, reminiscences about Lenin and This new woman brings with her various famous women and stories from her something alien, that at times repels us own life. You can find nothing in print where because of its newsness as a breed, so to speak. We peer at it closely, looking for made two public statements on the position familiar, agreeable traits of which our of contemporary Soviet woman. The first mothers and grandmothers were the occasion was in 1935, when as a member of bearers. But the type who stands before the Soviet delegation to the League of us has broken with the past and harbors Nations she spoke in the legal commission within herself a whole world of new on questions of the legal and economic feelings, experiences, and demands. position of women. Kollontai kept to the facts Doubt rises in us, we are almost as much as possible, emphasising the disappointed. Where is the engaging impressive legal equalities that Soviet submissiveness and softness of women had won; considered only yore?....Before us stands woman as one short extract to be worth quoting. personality....with her own On the second occasion, in her article individuality, who asserts herself — in “ Soviet Woman: Citizeness with Equal short, the woman who has broken the Rights” which appeared in (the journal) rusted fetters of her sex. Soviet Woman in the autumn of 1948, she Her 1927 novel is about such a woman. A limits herself to a survey of legal benefits, Great Love could have been based on any with another long diversion into history. Her number of women; certainly Armand had left only moving bow is the congratulations her husband and sought a political life of her which she offers the government on having own. And Armand, like Kollontai, believed in created the conditions for women to be able to living her life on her own terms but it is ‘fulfil her natural duty....to be a mother, the drawing a long bow to claim that A Great educator of her children and the mistress of Love was written as a key part in Stalin’s her home” . struggle for hegemony. I would add that anyone familiar with If Kollontai had consciously aided Stalin Kollontai’s views, her commitment to in 1927, there is no explanation why she did women’s liberation and her use of irony in not aid him later, especially in the mid-1980s. many of her earlier speeches might have Alix Holt is correct to draw attention to the harboured doubts that a tribute couched in fact that her main writing ended in 1923. such terms was intended as praise. This followed her failure to make progress No one can say with certainty why with her policies for women in the NEP Kollontai stayed on in the diplomatic service period and her subsequent retirement from of a country whose leadership was to destroy party politics. It preceded the rigidifying of so many of its early revolutionary gains, stalinism as a system. By maintaining a particularly the gains made for women, and situation where she wrote nothing in later was to condemn to death or imprisonment years, she avoided praising Stalin. Even in many of her closest comrades. It seems most her many private letters to Ada Lindstrom, likely that she felt some contribution was she seldom mentions Soviet politics and better than none — and her diplomatic never mentions Stalin. Sometimes she contribution was both positive and mentions she is “happy for her country” , in considerable. It is also clear from her letters April 1948 she is “happy about the treaties” to Ada Lindstrom that she understood the (a further reference to Soviet-Scandinavian fascist danger quite early. Since she had a relations), at the end of 1947 she wrote that burning hatred of war she must have wanted “ the monetary reform is a brilliant act” and to contribute to avoiding a new war. not much more. On the other hand, those same letters have quite a few references to As to why she escaped the purges — the everyday life and some unflattering things to most likely reasons are the obvious ones: that say about the inefficiency of the Soviet postal she lived abroad and that she had ceased to service. Alix Holt comments on Kollontai’s be a controversial figure. Her silence may silence as follows: have irritated Stalin but at least she did not give him any new ammunition to use against In view of the fact that she had long her. considered work among women to be the main area of her political activity, the silence What then can one say of her contribution? was particularly striking. In the last twenty- She developed for marxism a whole body of five years of her life she appears to have only ideas. She is a pathfinder who shows that the institution of the family, attitudes to love and And finally she was committed to the personal responses and concepts of morality abolition of domestic labour. She well are not fixed and immutable but socially understood the significance of domestic conditioned and economically based. She labour in the economy and the sexual understood, if somewhat inadequately, that as the source of women’s there is no simple equation between one’s oppression. She tried to convince the consciousness and one’s social situation, bolsheviks that it was necessary to devote rather that one must struggle for resources to solving this question. The consciousness. Her article, “Sexual consequences of her failure in this respect Relations and the Class Struggle” (13), is an represent a warning to us all. She did not excellent example of an attempt to grapple invent the slogan, “ There can be no with the way consciousness is moulded. without women’s liberation and no While she is, in my view, over-optimistic on women’s liberation without socialism” but the potential of the working class to develop that, I believe, is her essential message. new forms of personal relations, she states the problems in all their complexity and points to some solutions and she is quite clear REFERENCES that we cannot wait until there is a new society to change , rather, “ a social (1) Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings, group works out its ideology, and translated with an introduction and consequently its sexual morality, in the commentaries by Alix Holt, Allison & Busby, process of its struggle”. London. Of course she dreamed. In one article she (2) Memories of Lenin, N. Krupskaya, imagines a situation in 1970. The article is Lawrence & Wishart. called “ Soon” (14). It was written in 1922. (2A) An extensive article (in Swedish) appeared Sadly, much of what she predicts is far from in Ord & Bild, No. 23/1975. The pictures being achieved anywhere but the vision of illustrating this text are taken from that journal. the future is important anyway, even if it will (3) Six Red Months in Russia, Louise Bryant, come later and not soon. George H. Doran Company, New York. And there are gaps in her theory — which (4) Alexandra Kollontay, by Isabel de also includes a certain idealisation of Palencia, New York, 1947. motherhood. But I think if she had done (5) Empire of Fear, by V. and E. Petrov, nothing else but write one speech, which she London, 1956. gave to a women’s meeting in 1921, she (6) “Alexandra Kollontai” in P reuves, April, would be worthy of a place in any collected 1952. works of socialists and feminists. It is (7) See Autobiography of a Sexually entitled “ On prostitution and ways of Emancipated Woman by A. Kollontai, Orbach & fighting it” (15). Without oversimplifying, Chambers, London, 1972. it’s worth noting her all-sided treatment of (8) She died of cholera in September, 1920. the question, that she understood that prostitution, as an institution, is akin to the (9) “ Make Way for the Winged Eros” , article in institution of marriage, that both flourish Molodaya quardiya, No. 3, 1923. because women are conditioned by centuries (10) Love of the Worker Bees, Petrograd, 1923. of education to expect material favours from In English as , London, 1932. New men in return for sexual favours. She sought edition translated by Cathy Porter and published to change the situation where women are by Virago, London, 1977. deprived, or refuse, or are prevented from (11) The , which followed engaging in socially useful work (16). She ‘War Communism’. It was considered a step back hated everything which acted against by Kollontai (and others). equality, and comradeship. In her (12) Bride of the Revolution, Robert II. view a man who buys the favours of a woman McNeal, Victor Gollancz, 1973. inside or outside of marriage — and the verb (13) Appears in Alix Holt’s translations. is buy — cannot see a woman as a comrade or as a person with equal rights. I think that is (14) Appears in Alix Holt’s translations. profoundly truthful. (15) Appears in Alix Holt’s translations.