Tom Condit
Alexandra Kollontai
Alexandra Kollontai was a major figure in the Russian socialist movement from
the turn of the century through the revolution and civil war. During periods of
exile she was also active as a speaker and writer in Germany, Belgium, France,
Britain, Scandinavia and the United States. Born into a wealthy family of
Ukrainian, Russian and Finnish background, Kollontai was raised in both Russia
and Finland, and acquired an early fluency in languages which not only served
the revolutionary movement well, but later led to a career in the Soviet
diplomatic service. She played a major role in forcing the Russian socialist
movement to organize special work among women and in organizing mass movements
of working-class women and peasants, and was the author of much of the social
legislation of the early Soviet republic.
Kollontai began political work in 1894, when she was a new mother, by teaching
evening classes for workers in St. Petersburg. Through that activity she was
drawn into both public and clandestine work with the Political Red Cross, an
organization set up to help political prisoners. In 1895, she read August
Bebel's Woman and Socialism, which had a major influence on her future ideas and
activity.
In 1896, Kollontai saw the open face of capitalist industry for the first time
when she visited a large textile factory where her engineer husband was
installing a ventilation system. Later that year, she became active in
leafletting and fundraising in support of the mass textile strike which rocked
the Petersburg area. For the rest of her political career, Kollontai retained
her connections with the women textile workers of St. Petersburg. The 1896
strikes established the primacy of working-class revolution in Kollontai's mind.
By 1898, Kollontai was fully committed to Marxism, and left her husband and
child to study in Zurich under the Marxist economist Heinrich Herkner. By the
time she arrived, Herkner had become a "revisionist" and Kollontai spent much of
her time at the university contesting his views. Upon her return to Russia, she
wrote a polemic against Edouard Bernstein which was suppressed by the censors.
In 1899, she began her underground work for the Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party (RSDLP).
In 1900, Kollontai's first articles on Finland appeared. For the next 20 years,
she was generally recognized as the RSDLP's foremost expert on the "Finnish
question", writing two books and numerous articles, as well as serving as
advisor to RSDLP members in the Tsarist Duma and liaison with Finnish
revolutionaries. In 1908, she was forced into exile when a warrant for her
arrest was issued for advocating the right of Finland to armed revolt against
the Tsarist empire; in 1918, she resigned as Commissar of Social Welfare in the
Soviet government as a result of her opposition to the delivery of Finland to
the white terror under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Kollontai, like many Russian socialists, was neutral in the Bolshevik-Menshevik
split of 1903. In 1904, she joined the Bolshevik faction and conducted classes
on Marxism for it. In 1905, she joined with Leon Trotsky in pressing for a more
positive attitude toward the newly-emerged Soviets and in pressing for unity of
the party factions. She became treasurer of the St. Petersburg Social Democratic
Committee. In 1906, she left the Bolsheviks over the question of boycotting
elections to the Duma, an undemocratically-elected parliament of limited power
in which she felt it was nevertheless possible for left deputies to raise
demands and expose the government's machinations.
From 1905 through 1908, Kollontai led the campaign which has most clearly
established her place in history -- to organize the women workers of Russia to
fight for their own interests, against employers, against bourgeois feminism,
and where necessary (as it frequently was) against the conservatism and male
chauvinism of the socialist organizations. Through interventions at meetings of
the liberal Women's Union, strikes and protests, the foundations were laid for a
mass movement.
At the end of 1908, after three months spent evading arrest, Kollontai was
finally forced to flee into exile. From then until 1917, she remained outside
Russia, although many of her works were published there. She worked as a
fulltime agitator for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and travelled in
England, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and Switzerland in the period before World War
I. In early 1911, she taught at a socialist school organized by Maxim Gorky in
Italy.
In 1914 she organized in Germany and Austria against the coming war, and was
arrested and imprisoned after it broke out. Released, she moved to Scandinavia
and established contact with V. I. Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland. She was
a primary organizer of the Zimmerwald Conference against the war in 1915, and
her pamphlet "Who Needs War?," directed to front-line soldiers, was translated
into several languages.
In 1915, she undertook a four and one-half month speaking tour of the United
States to build support for the left-Zimmerwald position on the war (and to try
to find a U.S. publisher for her English translation of Lenin's pamphlet
"Socialism and War"). She attended a memorial rally for Joe Hill in Seattle and
spoke from the same platform as Eugene Debs in Chicago. In all, she spoke at 123
meetings in four languages.
When the February revolution of 1917 broke out, Kollontai was in Norway. She
delayed her return to Russia only long enough to receive Lenin's "Letters from
Afar" so she could carry them to the Russian organization. From the moment of
her arrival, she joined Alexander Shlyapnikov and V. M. Molotov in the fight for
a clear policy of no support to the provisional government, against the
opposition of Kamenev and Stalin. She was elected a member of the executive
committee of the Petrograd Soviet (to which she had been elected as a delegate
from an army unit). At a tumultuous meeting of social democrats on April 4, she
was the only speaker other than Lenin to support the demand for "All Power to
the Soviets."
For the rest of 1917, Kollontai was a constant agitator for revolution in Russia
as a speaker, leaflet writer and worker on the Bolshevik women's paper
Rabotnitsa. In June she was a Russian delegate to the 9th Congress of the
Finnish Social Democratic Party and reported back to the First All-Russian
Congress of Soviets on the national question and Finland. During this period she
joined other women activists in pressing the Bolsheviks and the trade unions for
more attention to organizing women workers, and helped lead a citywide laundry
workers strike in Petrograd.
In October 1917, Kollontai participated in the decision to launch an armed
uprising against the government and in the revolt itself. At the Second
All-Russian Congress of Soviets, she was elected Commissar of Social Welfare in
the new Soviet government. In 1918 she lead a delegation to Sweden, England and
France to raise support for the new government. Upon her return, she argued
against ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and resigned from the
government, feeling that the unity of the Commissariat would be jeopardized by
having a member in opposition on such a crucial question. For the rest of 1918,
she was active as an agitator and organizer, and played a key role in organizing
the First All-Russian Congress of Working and Peasant Women (November 1918).
Throughout 1919, although ill with heart and kidney disease and suffering from
typhus, Kollontai kept a grueling schedule of meetings, speeches and writing.
She served as a delegate to the First Congress of the Communist International,
President of the Political Department of the Crimean Republic, Commissar of
Propaganda and Agitation for the Ukraine, and an activist in the newly-formed
Women's Section of the Communist Party (the zhenskii otdel, or "Zhenotdel" for
short), which she, Inessa Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaya had played major roles
in founding.
Kollontai's illness continued through much of 1920, but by November she had
become head of the Zhenotdel following the death of Inessa Armand, and at
December 8th All-Russian Congress of Soviets she was elected a member of the
Executive Committee. At that congress, she joined the "Workers' Opposition," an
opposition tendency in the Bolshevik Party opposed to what they saw as the
increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet state. The Workers' Opposition, which
had majority support in the Metalworkers' Union and the Ukrainian Communist
Party, was banned along with all other factions at the 10th party congress in
March 1921, but its members continued to be active as leaders of both the
Bolshevik Party and the Soviets. Kollontai was re-elected to the All-Russian
executive committee of the Soviet in December. In 1922, she was one of the
signers of the "Letter of the 22" to the Communist International protesting the
banning of factions in Russia.
In 1922, Kollontai was appointed as advisor to the Soviet legation in Norway.
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