Alexandra Kollontai: biography of this Russian politician and thinker

With the October Revolution there were many social changes that occurred in Russia. The country went from a tsarist regime to a communist one, founding the Soviet Union and recognizing various rights for the working people.

But as often happens in much of the world, if women want their rights to be recognized, they have to make a name for themselves in the society, fight for them and, if they are lucky, overthrow the patriarchal system from within, something Alexandra Kollontai almost did. get.

Today we will discover the life of this feminist pioneer, a key figure in the recognition of women's rights. women in the Soviet Union and that she had the honor of being the first ambassador of a modern nation, through of a biography of Alexandra Kollontai.

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Brief biography of Alexandra Kollontai

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai is one of the most important figures in Marxism, and her political and intellectual influence is present in many left-wing and feminist movements. Here we will review her trajectory.

early years

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai, born Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich, was born on March 31, 1872 in Saint Petersburg., when Russia was still a tsarist empire.

Her family was aristocratic, of Ukrainian origin that emerged in the 13th century. Her father was Mikhail Domontovich, a general in the tsar's service, and her mother was Alexandra Androvna. Masalina-Mravinskaia, coming from a family of Finnish peasants of extensive wealth thanks to the wood industry.

Thanks to the financial resources available to her family, young Alexandra had access to private teachers who educated her throughout the year. Come summer, she spent her days reading on the farm her family owned in Karelia, a region of Finland under Russian rule. So, From a very young age, Alexandra Kollontai was immersed in the life of land tenants and farm workers.

Alexandra was always very close to her father who instilled in her an interest in history and politics from a liberal perspective. On the other hand, she did not have such a good relationship with her mother, and on more than one occasion they had conflicts, especially when the young woman showed interest in continuing her studies. Alexandra's mother considered it inappropriate for a woman to spend her life studying or leading an intellectual life.

At the age of 19, Alexandra meets who was to be her husband, her cousin Vladimir Ludvigovich Kollontai. Despite the fact that the young people fell in love, her mother was opposed to the marriage, since Vladimir was a young engineering student of modest origin. Likewise, they managed to marry and, after giving birth to her first child Mikhail, Alexandra Kollontai she began to feel great disappointment in her married life, as she saw it as a trap that he did not let her develop her intellectual activity, especially being able to write.

A free and socialist woman

Although she continued to love her husband and her son, in 1896 Alexandra she decided to join the socialist party and went to study in Zurich, Switzerland, leaving her family behind her. The Swiss city was a real opportunity for Kollontai, since it had become the center she was the nerve center of the students interested in socialism and, while there, she decided to study economics policy.

At this time, she became familiar with the ideas of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, as well as the thought of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Around this time she wrote her first paper, in which she examined the influence of the environment on children's development. and, her first book investigated the living and working conditions of the Finnish proletariat in relation to industry. The book was published in 1903 in Saint Petersburg, where it drew attention among the most revolutionary sectors.

In 1899 she joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party., something that would start her busy life as a revolutionary woman and a key figure in Russian society of her time. This would lead her to participate in the revolutionary events of 1905 after having seen the massacre of workers in front of the Winter Palace.

During World War I, Kollontai spoke out against it. The reason for this was that she saw that the conflict was just another large-scale action marked by imperialist motivations that served the ruling class. In this sense, she participated in the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915 and, after several events that occurred in Imperial Russia, she would participate in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

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Under the shadow of Lenin

Alexandra Kollontai joined the Bolshevik movement in 1914, known to be the most radical faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, being established by Lenin himself. From 1915 Kollontai served as Lenin's assistant, being a great honor for a woman who wanted gender equality to be achieved. A few months before arriving in October 1917, Kollontai became the first woman elected as a member of the Central Committee of the Party.

After the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks having gained power, Alexandra Kollontai was appointed People's Commissar for Social Welfare. She was also elected to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, the new name for Saint Petersburg. Kollontai actively supported Lenin in his vision of the soviets as organisms for the exercise of power and keys to leaving bourgeois society behind.

After all this, Alexandra Kollontai plunged into the leadership of the Organization of Soviet Women in 1920, known as the Zhenotdel. This fundamental milestone in her career as a feminist reference was due to the fact that Lenin promoted the appointment of her, turning her into a woman with a high capacity to initiate social changes from inside.

Alexandra Kollontai defined her social and feminist politics away from the family structure. According to the Marxist ideas that she followed, the bourgeois family was the center of oppressive and immoral social structures. characteristic of capitalism, with which it was necessary to change this institution or directly tear it down to achieve greater freedom citizen. She and many socialists thought that the idea of ​​the patriarchal family should be overthrown, making the care of children and the home the task of all of society.

This is why Kollontai, with the support of Lenin, she planned a network of institutions that would act as nurseries, nurseries, restaurants and public laundries, services that would free women from the care of children and the home that had traditionally been assigned to them. In this almost utopian ideal, it was intended to make society act like a great family in which all its citizens were protected.

Taking advantage of her power within the Zhenodtel, Alexandra Kollontai promulgated several feminist laws. She made marriage a civil and egalitarian institution between spouses, facilitated access to divorce for both parties, and She managed to get state protection to mothers and children, in addition to making maternity care free in the hospitals.

Kollontai was changing her society, in which female had been subservient to male, from her own institutions, making it legally binding. The Revolution had managed to lay the foundations for real equality between men and women, but it was Alexandra Kollontai who was making it real through legal means. Taking advantage of her influence, he tried to raise awareness about women's sexual liberation in two works, not without controversy: the new woman and love in communist society.

disputes with the party

But despite the fact that Kollontai managed to mobilize a lot from her own institutions, she made several mistakes. The first was depending too much on the figure of Lenin. Losing her support and being removed from the Zhenotdel, all of Kollontai's political influence collapsed like a house of cards. As much as Kollontai found it hard to admit, the main character of her time was a man and she needed him to carry out her revolutionary reforms.

The reason why Lenin stopped supporting her was her defense of female sexual freedom. Kollontai he wanted women to move away from the traditional home life and achieve sexual freedom, without limiting themselves to having children as the main vital milestone. The problem with this was that however revolutionary the newly created Soviet Union was, its ideas were too radical, even for other socialist women, who had very traditionalist ideas. rooted.

Her other mistake was to think that she would be able to replace the idea of ​​the traditional family with that of a socialist state that would take care of domestic roles, no matter how much Lenin had supported her. Post-revolutionary Russia was still recovering from civil war, facing famine, death and desolation, causing citizens to take refuge in their families in order to continue forward. The family was an institution that, although traditional and patriarchal, was the most resistant and secure of all.

The first female ambassador

Kollontai's views were becoming troublesome within the party, especially to Joseph Stalin., whom she explicitly criticized. Many of her socialist colleagues accused her of sectarianism and she was even threatened with expulsion from the party. This is why in 1922 Alexandra Kollontai had already lost practically all her political force within Russia and Lenin relegated her to diplomatic functions.

Becoming an ambassador was not a disgrace, quite the contrary: she had become the world's first female ambassador. She represented the Soviet Union in Sweden, Norway and Mexico and was also part of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations, an institution similar to the modern UN.

Last years

Taking advantage of her diplomatic task, Alexandra Kollontai she traveled more than 20 years through Europe and the United States, defending and extending her feminist socialist thesis. But while she was convincingly defending her revolutionary ideas abroad, the Soviet Union was changing again, this time against her. Iósif Stalin was taking advantage of her absence to tear down several of the laws approved by Kollontai, making everything achieved by revolutionary feminism vanish.

In 1945, after World War II had ended, she returned to the Soviet Union. A year later she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She spent her last years in Moscow, writing her memoirs and serving as an adviser to the Russian Foreign Ministry.. Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai died on March 9, 1952 in Moscow, being 79 years old.

Bibliographic references:

• Kollontai, A. (2015) Autobiography of a sexually emancipated woman and other texts about love, Horas y Horas, Madrid. ISBN 978-84-96004-62-7
• Kollontai, A. (2018) Fourteen conferences at the Sverdlov University of Leningrad, Cienflores, Madrid. ISBN 978-987-45535-1-5
• Kollontai, A. (2008) The love of the worker bees, Alba, Barcelona. ISBN 978-84-8428-419-2
• Kollontai, A. (2017) Love and the new woman, Cienflores, Madrid. ISBN 978-987-4039-08-8
• Kollontai, A. (2017) Socialist Feminism and Revolution, Federico Engels Foundation, Madrid, 2017. ISBN 978-84-16285-27-3
• Kollontai, A. (2008) The Bolshevik in love, Txalaparta, Tafalla. ISBN 978-84-8136-509-2
• Kollontai, A. (2011) Sexual relations and class struggle, En Lucha, n/a, 2011. ISBN 9789588926667
• Kollontai, A. (2016) Women and class struggle, Viejo Topo, Barcelona. ISBN 978-84-16288-78-6