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, Vladimir
Antonov-Ovseenko,
Vera Zasulich, Irakli
Tsereteli, Moisei Uritsky, Noi
Zhordania and Fedor Dan supported Julius
Martov.
Kollantai
found it difficult to make up her mind which group she should join.
As she recalled later: "I had friends in both camps, I was closer
in spirit to Bolshevism, with its uncompromising belief in revolution,
but the personal charm of Plekhanov restrained me from condemnation
of Menshevism." Kollantai eventually decided not to join either
group and offered her services to both factions.
After witnessing
Bloody Sunday Kollantai began to concentrate
her efforts in establishing a trade union movement in Russia. She
was particularly active in helping to organize female workers and
arranged special meetings and clubs for them.
Kollantai
became increasing concerned about the dictatorial attitudes of Vladimir
Lenin and the Bolsheviks and in
1906 she joined the Mensheviks. Two
years later she was forced to flee Russia after a pamphlet Finland
and Socialism was published. Her call for an armed insurrection
upset the Russian authorities and to avoid arrest she went to live
in Germany. Over the next few years she
wrote a series of books including The Class
Struggle, The Social Foundations
of the Female Question, Society and Motherhood and
The Working Class and the New Morality.
In the
first few months of the First World War Kollantai
was arrested in Germany and deported to Sweden.
Her anti-war writings upset the Swedish government and she was forced
to move to Norway. In 1915 she was invited
by the American Socialist Party to
give a lecture tour of the United States.
In 1915
Kollantai joined the Bolsheviks and
returned to Russia to take part in the October
Revolution. Although she did not enjoy a good relationship with
Vladimir Lenin, he appointed her as Commissar
for Social Welfare. Kollantai, Inessa Armand,
Sophia Smidovich and Nadezhda
Krupskaya were the only women to play a prominent role in the
male-dominated Bolshevik administration.
Kollantai
remain a staunch feminist and with Inessa
Armand and Sophia Smidovich helped
form the Central Commission for Agitation and Propaganda Among
Working Women (Zhenotdel).
In government
Kollantai became increasing critical of the Communist
Party and joined with her friend, Alexander
Shlyapnikov
(Commissar for Labour) to
form a faction that became known as the Workers'
Opposition.
In 1921
Kollantai published a pamphlet The
Workers' Opposition, where she called for members of the party
to be allowed to discuss policy issues and for more political freedom
for trade
unionists.
She also advocated that before the government attempts to "rid
Soviet institutions of the bureaucracy that lurks within them, the
Party must first rid itself of its own bureaucracy."
This attack
on the Bolsheviks meant the end of
Kollantai's political career in Russia. At the Tenth Party Congress
in 1922, Vladimir Lenin proposed a resolution
that would ban all factions within the party. He argued that factions
within the party were "harmful" and encouraged rebellions
such as the Kronstadt Rising. The Party
Congress agreed with Lenin and the Workers'
Opposition was dissolved.
When Joseph
Stalin gained power he sent Kollantai abroad as a diplomat. This
included periods in Norway (1923-25), Mexico (1925-27), Norway (1927-30)
and Sweden (1930-45).
Kollantai
retired in 1945 and lived in Moscow until her death on 9th March,
1952. She was the only major critic of the Soviet government that
Joseph Stalin did not exterminate.
(1) The
Granat Encyclopaedia of the Russian Revolution was published by
the Soviet government in 1924. The encyclopaedia included a collection
of autobiographies and biographies of over two hundred people involved
in the Russian Revolution. Alexandra Kollontai was
one of those invited to write her autobiography.
On the
advice of my professor and armed with introductions from him, I set
off for England in 1899 to study the English labour movement, which
was supposed to convince me of the truth was on the side of the opportunists,
and not the "leftists". I had an introduction to Sidney
and Beatrice Webb themselves, but after our first conversations I
realized that we were not talking the same language, and I set out
to see the labour movement for myself without their guidance. What
I saw convinced me that they were wrong. I realized the acute social
contradictions existing in England and the impotence of the reformists
to cure them by trade union tactics or by the famous "settlements"
such as Toynbee Hall, the co-operatives and clubs, etc.
On my return
from abroad in 1903, I joined neither of the Party groupings, offering
to be used as an agitator by both factions. Bloody Sunday, 1905, found
me in the street. I was going with the demonstrators to the Winter
Palace, and the picture of the massacre of unarmed, working folk is
for ever imprinted on my memory. The unusual bright January sunshine,
trusting, expectant faces, the fateful signal from the troops drawn
up round the palace, pools of blood on the white snow, the whips,
the whooping of the gendarmes, the dead, the injured, children shot.
(2)
Alexandra Kollontai, statement issued
on the establishment of the Central Office for Maternity and Infant
Welfare (January, 1918)
Two million babies, tiny lights just kindled on this earth,
died in Russia every year because of the ignorance of the oppressed
people, because of the bigotry and indifference of the class state.
Two million mothers wet the Russian soil with their bitter tears each
year as, with their calloused hands, they piled earth on the innocent
victims of an ugly state system. Human thought has at last come out
into the open vistas of the radiant epoch where the working class
can build, with its own hands, forms of child care that will not deprive
a child of its mother or a mother of her child.
(2)
Alexandra Kollontai, The Workers'
Opposition (1921)
The workers ask - who are we? Are we really the prop of
the class dictatorship, or are we just an obedient flock that serves
as a support for those who, having severed all ties with the masses,
carry out their own policy and build up industry without any regard
to our opinions and creative abilities under the reliable cover of
the party label.
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