Alexandra Kollontai, 1922 | Коллонтай Александра Михайловна, заведующая женотделом ЦК РКП(б)
Москва 1922 сентябрь
“Down with the world of property and the power of capital! Away with inequality, lack of rights and the oppression of women – the legacy of the bourgeois world! Forward to the international unity of working women and male workers.”— Alexandra Kollontai
Alexandra Kollontai
Алекса́ндра Коллонта́й
1872-1952
After the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 Kollontai’s political career began. She became People’s Commissar for Social Welfare. She was the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration and was best known for founding the Zhenotdel or “Women’s Department” in 1919 . This organization worked to improve the conditions of women’s lives in the Soviet Union, fighting illiteracy and educating women about the new marriage, education, and working laws put in place by the Revolution. As a foremost champion of women’s equality like the other Marxists of her time, she opposed the ideology of liberal feminism, which she saw as bourgeois; though later feminists have claimed her legacy.
In 1923, she was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Norway, becoming the world’s first female ambassador in modern times. She later served as Ambassador to Mexico (1926–27) and Sweden (1930–1945). When she 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.
Kollontai raised eyebrows with her unflinching advocacy of free love. However, this does not mean that she advocated casual sexual encounters; indeed, she believed that due to the inequality between men and women that persisted under socialism, such encounters would lead to women being exploited, and being left to raise children alone. Instead she believed that socialism could not be achieved without a radical change in attitudes to sexuality, so that it might be freed from the oppressive norms that she saw as a continuation of bourgeois ideas about property. Kollontai believed that, like the state, the family unit would wither away once the second stage of communism became a reality. She viewed marriage and traditional families as legacies of the oppressive, property-rights-based, egoist past. Under Communism, both men and women would work for, and be supported by, society, not their families.
“The woman’s world is divided, just as is the world of men, into two camps: the interests and aspirations of one group bring it close to the bourgeois class, while the other group has close connections to the proletariat, and its claims for liberation encompass a full solution to the woman question. Thus, although both camps follow the general slogan of the ‘liberation of women,’ their aims and interests are different. Each of the groups unconsciously takes its starting point from the interests and aspirations of its own class, which gives a specific class coloring to the targets and tasks it sets for itself … however apparently radical the demands of the feminists, one must not lose sight of the fact that the feminists cannot, on account of their class position, fight for that fundamental transformation of society, without which the liberation of women cannot be complete.”— Alexandra Kollontai, “The Social Basis of the Woman Question” (1909), quoted in Women and Socialism by Sharon Smith (2015)