Alexandra Kollontai

Alexandra Mikhailovna – or "Shura" as she was called growing up – was close to her father, with whom she shared an analytical bent and an interest in history and politics. Her relationship with her mother, for whom she was named, was more complex. She later recalled:

She was an actress and writer, known for Red Love (1982) and Revolutionens kvinnor (2006). She was married to Pavel Dybenko and Vladimir Ludvigovich Kollontai.

The resurgence of radicalism in the 1960s and the growth of the feminist movement in the 1970s spurred a new interest in the life and writings of Alexandra Kollontai all around the world. A spate of books and pamphlets by and about Kollontai were subsequently published, including full-length biographies by historians Cathy Porter, Beatrice Farnsworth, and Barbara Evans Clements. 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, probably inspired by Kollontai, had been played by Greta Garbo in the movie Ninotchka (1939).

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (Russian: Алекса́ндра Миха́йловна Коллонта́й , née Domontovich, Домонто́вич; 31 March [O.S. 19 March] 1872 – 9 March 1952) was a Russian revolutionary, politician, diplomat and Marxist theoretician. Serving as the People's Commissar for Welfare in Vladimir Lenin's government in 1917–1918, she was a highly prominent woman within the Bolshevik party and the first woman in history to become an official member of a governing cabinet.

The degree of her adherence to the prevailing ideas of the Stalinist regime, whether it was spontaneous or not, may be gauged from the opening of an article she wrote in 1946 for a Russian magazine. It bore the title The Soviet Woman — a Full and Equal Citizen of Her Country, and praised the Soviet Union's advances of women's rights, while simultaneously emphasizing a view of the role of women in society at odds with her previous writings on women's liberation.

Being sent abroad in a sort of de facto exile for over twenty years, Kollontai gave up "her fight for reform and for women, retreating into relative obscurity" and bowing to the new political climate. She discarded her feminist concerns and "offered no objection to the patriarchal legislation of 1926 and the constitution of 1936, which deprived Soviet women of many of the gains they had achieved after the February and October Revolutions". The following words she allegedly pronounced in a private conversation with her friend Marcel Body [fr] in 1929 give a suggestion of her attitude towards advancing Stalinism: "Everything's changed so much. What can I do about this? One cannot go against the 'apparatus'. For my part, I have put my principles aside in a corner of my conscience and I pursue as best I can the policies they dictate to me".

Initially, she was sent as an attaché to the Soviet commercial mission in Norway, becoming the world's third woman serving in diplomacy in modern times, after the First Republic of Armenia Honorary Consul to Japan Diana Apcar and the First Hungarian Republic representative to Switzerland Rosika Schwimmer. In early 1924, Kollontai was first promoted to Chargé d'affaires and from August to Minister Plenipotentiary. As such, she later served in Mexico (1926–27), again in Norway (1927–30) and eventually in Sweden (1930–45), where she was finally promoted to Ambassador in 1943. When Kollontai was in Stockholm, the Winter War between Russia and Finland broke out; it has been said that it was largely due to her influence that Sweden remained neutral. After the war, she received Vyacheslav Molotov's praises. During late April 1943, Kollontai may have been involved in abortive peace negotiations with Hans Thomsen, her German counterpart in Stockholm. She was also a member of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations. Kollontai retired in 1945.

Kollontai's final political action as an oppositionist within the Communist Party was her co-signing of the so-called "letter of the 22", whereby several former members of the Workers' Opposition and other party members of working class origins appealed to the Communist International against the undemocratic internal practices in use within the Russian party. When 'Kollontai attempted to speak before the Comintern Executive on 26 February 1922 on behalf of the views expressed in the appeal,' Trotsky and Zinoviev had her name removed from the list of orators and insisted that she should not take the floor. When she 'proved recalcitrant, Trotsky forbade her to speak and issued a decree, in the name of the CC, ordering all members of the Russian delegation to "obey the directives of the party".' Predictably, the appeal of the 22 was unsuccessful. At the Eleventh Party Congress (March–April 1922), Kollontai, Shlyapnikov and Medvedev were charged with having insisted on factional work and a three-man commission, Stalin, Zinoviev and Dzerzhinsky, recommended the "unrepentant" three be purged from the party. In her defensive speech before the Congress, Kollontai emphasized her loyalty to the party and her devotion to giving the leading role in the party and outside it to the working class, she proclaimed her full observance of the previous year's decree on party unity, and concluded: 'If there is no place for this in our party, then exclude me. But even outside the ranks of our party, I will live, work and fight for the Communist party.' Eventually, a resolution was passed allowing the three to remain in the party unless they committed further violations of its discipline.

In political life, Kollontai increasingly became an internal critic of the Communist Party and at the end of 1920 she sided with the Workers' Opposition, a left-wing faction of the party that had its roots in the trade union milieu and was led by Shlyapnikov and by Sergei Medvedev. On 25 January 1921, "Pravda" published a pamphlet by Kollontai, bearing the title The Workers' Opposition, which advocated unionized workers' control over economic activity management and blamed bourgeois and bureaucratic influences over Soviet institutions and the party itself. According to John Simkin, on 27 February 1921 trade unionists supporting the Workers' Opposition published a proclamation calling for 'freedom of speech, press and assembly for all who labour', and for the 'liberation of all arrested Socialists and non-partisan workers.'

Kollontai was outspoken against bureaucratic influences over the Communist Party and its undemocratic internal practices. To that end, she sided with the left-wing Workers' Opposition in 1920, but was eventually defeated and sidelined, narrowly avoiding her own expulsion from the party altogether. From 1922 on, she was appointed to various diplomatic posts abroad, serving in Norway, Mexico and Sweden. In 1943, she was promoted to the title of ambassador to Sweden. Kollontai retired from diplomatic service in 1945 and died in Moscow in 1952.

In 1919, Kollontai founded the Zhenotdel, which worked to improve the status of women in the Soviet Union. She was a champion of women's liberation and an advocate of free love, and later came to be recognized as a key figure in Marxist feminism.

Following the 1917 February Revolution which ousted the Tsar, Kollontai returned to Russia. She supported Lenin's radical proposals and, as a member of the party's Central Committee, voted for the policy of armed uprising which led to the October Revolution and the fall of Alexander Kerensky's Provisional Government. She was appointed People's Commissar for Social Welfare in the first Soviet government, but soon resigned due to her opposition to the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk in the ranks of the Left Communists. She was the only woman other than Maria Spiridonova to play a prominent role during the Russian Revolution.

With the onset of World War I in 1914, Kollontai left Germany due to the German social democrats' support of the war. Kollontai was strongly opposed to the war and very outspoken against it, and in June 1915 she broke with the Mensheviks and officially joined the Bolsheviks, "those who most consistently fought social-patriotism". After leaving Germany, Kollontai traveled to Denmark, only to discover that the Danish social democrats also supported the war. The next place where Kollontai tried to speak and write against the war was Sweden, but the Swedish government imprisoned her for her activities. After her release, Kollontai traveled to Norway, where she at last found a socialist community that was receptive to her ideas. Kollontai stayed primarily in Norway until 1917, traveling twice to United States to speak about war and politics and to renew her relationship with her son Mikhail, for whom she had arranged in 1916 to avoid conscription by going to the United States to work on Russian orders from U.S. factories. In 1917, Kollontai left Norway to return to Russia upon receiving news of Tsar's abdication and the onset of the Russian Revolution.

In 1911, while abruptly breaking off her long-term relationship with her faction comrade Petr Pavlovich Maslov [ru] (1867–1946), an agrarian scientist, she started a love affair with another fellow exile, Alexander Gavrilovich Shliapnikov. The couple appeared quite oddly assorted: she was a Menshevik intellectual, of noble origins, thirteen years older than him; he was a self-taught metalworker from provincial Russia and a Bolshevik leading exponent of some prominence. Their romantic relationship came to an end in July 1916, but evolved thereafter into a long-lasting friendship as they wound up sharing many of the same general political views. They were still in contact during early 1930s when Kollontai lived abroad in a sort of diplomatic exile, and Shliapnikov was going to be executed during the Soviet purges.

She went into exile, to Germany, in 1908 after publishing "Finland and Socialism", which called on the Finnish people to rise up against oppression within the Russian Empire. She traveled across western Europe and became acquainted with Karl Kautsky, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, among others.

She became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1899 at the age of 27. In 1905, Kollontai was a witness to the popular uprising known as Bloody Sunday at Saint Petersburg in front of the Winter Palace. At the time of the split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party between the Mensheviks under Julius Martov and the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin in 1903, Kollontai did not side with either faction at first, and "offered her services to both factions". In 1906, however, disapproving of "the hostile position taken by the Bolsheviks towards the Duma" and despite her being generally a left-winger, she decided to join the Mensheviks.

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 Professor Heinrich Herkner. She then paid a visit to England, where she met members of the British socialist movement, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb. She returned to Russia in 1899, at which time she met Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, better known today as Vladimir Lenin.

Her parents forbade the relationship and sent Alexandra on a tour of Western Europe in the hope that she would forget Vladimir, but the pair remained committed to one another despite it all and married in 1893. Alexandra became pregnant soon after her marriage and bore a son, Mikhail, in 1894. She devoted her time to reading radical populist and Marxist political literature and writing fiction.

The daughter of an Imperial Russian Army general, Kollontai embraced radical politics in the 1890s and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1899. During the RSDLP ideological split, she sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks. Exiled from Russia in 1908, Kollontai toured Western Europe and the United States and advocated against participation in the First World War. In 1915, she broke with the Mensheviks and became a member of the Bolsheviks.

Alexandra Kollontai was born on March 31, 1872 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire as Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich.

In 1890 or 1891, Alexandra, aged around 19, met her cousin and future husband, Vladimir Ludvigovich Kollontai (9 July 1867 – July/August 1917), an engineering student of modest means enrolled at a military institute. Alexandra's mother objected bitterly to the potential union since the young man was so poor, to which her daughter replied that she would work as a teacher to help make ends meet. Her mother bitterly scoffed at the notion: