Alexandra
Domontovich, the daughter of a Russian general, was born
in the Ukraine in 1872. The family moved to St. Petersburg but Alexandra
was not allowed to go to school as her parents were worried that
she would meet "undesirable elements."
A
family friend, Victor Ostrogorsky,
the literary historian, gave her private lessons, and told her she
had literary talent and suggested she became a writer.
In
1893 Alexandra married the engineer Vladimir
Kollontai. In her autobiography Alexandra admitted that
she "married early, partly as a protest against the will of
my parents". Alexandra had a son but left her husband after
three years of marriage.
Kollontai
worked for a number of educational charities. This involved her
visiting people living in extreme poverty. It was at that this time
she began studying Marxism. This included
reading radical journals such as Nachalo
and Novoye Slovo.
During the
1896 strike of textile-workers in St. Petersburg, Kollontai organized
collections for the strikers. She also began writing articles for
political journals about the plight of industrial workers in Russia.
In August,
1896, Kollontai left Russia and became a student of labour history
at the University of Zurich. She read widely and was greatly impressed
by the writings of George Plekhanov,
Rosa
Luxemburg
and Karl
Kautsky. Kollontai also visited London
where she met the labour historians, Sidney
Webb and Beatrice Webb.
However, she was now a committed Marxist
and she rejected their Fabian reformist
views.
On her return
to Russia she began to take a keen interest in the Finnish struggle
for independence (Kollontai's mother was from Finland). She helped
workers in Finland organize themselves into trade unions and wrote
articles about the struggle between the Finnish people and the Russian
autocracy. Her book, The State of the Working
Class in Finland was published in 1903.
Kollontai was a member of the Social Democratic
Labour Party. At its Second Congress in London
in 1903, there was a dispute between two of its leaders, Vladimir
Lenin and Julius Martov. Lenin argued
for a small party of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe
of non-party sympathizers and supporters. Martov disagreed believing
it was better to have a large party of activists. Martov won the
vote 28-23 but Lenin was unwilling to accept the result and formed
a faction known as the Bolsheviks.
Those who remained loyal to Martov became known as Mensheviks.
Gregory Zinoviev, Anatoli
Lunacharsky, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail
Lashevich, Nadezhda Krupskaya,
Mikhail Frunze, Alexei
Rykov, Yakov Sverdlov, Lev
Kamenev, Maxim Litvinov, Vladimir
Antonov, Felix Dzerzhinsky,
Gregory Ordzhonikidze and Alexander
Bogdanov joined the Bolsheviks.
Whereas George Plekhanov, Pavel
Axelrod, Leon Trotsky, Lev
Deich,
