5 – Alexandra Kollontai

“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.” Alexandra Kollontai

If Emma Goldman was not taken with the post-Russian Revolution regime, then our next subject certainly was. Alexandra Kollontai was the poster woman of the Bolshevik regime, the most highly-ranked female in the new government. In the aftermath of the October Revolution, she was named People’s Commissar for Social Welfare and founded the Women’s Department of the government, before being appointed as an Ambassador, thought to be among the first women in history to hold such a role.

Alongside her public duties, she was also a noted intellect of the early Soviet period, with views on the power relationship between men and women, and its effect on sex, that were decades ahead of their time. Her works on marriage, the family and the role of women under socialism are still among the most influential in Marxist theory.

Alexandra Kollontai lived at the same time as Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman – in fact, she knew Luxemburg – and had a similar upbringing to the pair. Born in St Petersburg in 1872, she was from a richer than the other two women, but her upbringing would have a similarly influential effect on her later life. Her parents were from different social strata – her father an army officer, her mother the child of a Finnish peasant who had become rich – and the difficulty that they had in fitting into St Petersburg society would do much to form her later views on the family.

After marrying a poor student, Vladimir Kollontai, she had a child and devoted her time to reading Marxist theory. She was involved with the Social Democratic Labour Party and was present at the Bloody Sunday massacre of workers by Russian troops in 1905. Her politics hardened and eventually forced her into exile in 1908, initially to Germany, where she befriended Rosa Luxemburg. Like Rosa, she was vociferously against the First World War and left Germany when it began, first to Sweden and later to Norway. When the Russian Revolution began in February 1917, she rushed back to Russia.

On her return, she immediately became a part of the Bolshevik party and was appointed as the People’s Commissar for Welfare in the new regime. She strived to change the conditions of women via new legislation regarding marriage and the home, as well as expanding education and literacy. Later, she was appointed Ambassador to Norway, only the second ever female ambassador, and wrote her main theoretical treatises.

Her theory of free love was markedly different from that which we might now recognise today: her free love meant that sex should not be monopolised within a marital relationship, which she saw as always being unequal due to the inherent societal patriarchy. Once sexuality could be removed from capital – that is to say, from the economic weight of the man – then sex could be reduced to something that was not encumbered by the idea of being in a relationship with one specific person. Casual sex, because of the imbalance between men and women, would always lead to any child being left for the woman to deal with, whereas free love meant that, eventually, socialism would wither the family away and all children would be raised collectively, by society and the state. As she put it: “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.”

Kollontai lived until 1952 and, at the time of her death, was the only original Bolshevik remaining to have survived Stalin’s purges – aside from Stalin himself. Her legacy was often overlooked, but was taken up after her death by many feminists and is now celebrated within the movement.