Alexandra Kollontai

Based on Wikipedia: Alexandra Kollontai

The Diplomat Who Survived Stalin

In 1943, a seventy-one-year-old Russian woman received a promotion that no woman had ever received before. Alexandra Kollontai became the world's first female ambassador—a full diplomatic representative with all the ceremonial weight and political power that title implies. She had already been the world's first female cabinet minister, twenty-six years earlier. But what makes her story remarkable isn't the firsts. It's that she achieved them while openly criticizing the Communist Party from within, survived Stalin's purges that killed nearly everyone who had ever disagreed with the regime, and died peacefully in her bed in Moscow in 1952.

How did she manage that?

An Aristocrat's Rebellion

Alexandra Domontovich was born in 1872 into exactly the kind of family you'd expect to produce loyal servants of the Russian Empire. Her father was a cavalry general who had fought in the Russo-Turkish War and served as military consul in Bulgaria. His family traced its lineage back to a thirteenth-century prince. Her mother came from humbler origins—her grandfather had been a Finnish peasant who made a fortune selling wood—but by the time Alexandra was born, the family moved comfortably in St. Petersburg's elite circles.

Yet there were cracks in this respectable façade.

Her father harbored liberal views. He favored a constitutional monarchy like Britain's. He wrote a study of the Russo-Turkish War that the tsarist censors confiscated, presumably because it didn't display enough Russian nationalist enthusiasm. And her mother had divorced her first husband—a scandalous act in nineteenth-century Russia—to marry the man she actually loved.

This family history of choosing love over convention would shape everything Alexandra believed about relationships, marriage, and a woman's right to her own life.

The Education They Tried to Prevent

Young "Shura," as her family called her, was brilliant and restless. She mastered languages with ease—French with her mother, English with her nanny, Finnish with the peasants at the family's country estate, German through formal study. She devoured history and politics, sharing her father's analytical bent.

She wanted to go to university.

Her mother said no. Women didn't need higher education, she argued. Besides, universities were hotbeds of dangerous radical ideas. Better for Alexandra to get her teaching certificate and then do what respectable young women did: find a husband.

Around 1890, Alexandra met Vladimir Kollontai, her cousin, a poor engineering student at a military institute. She was about nineteen. Her mother was appalled. The young man had no money! Alexandra replied that she would work as a teacher to help support them. Her mother's response was withering:

You work! You, who can't even make up your own bed to look neat and tidy! You, who never picked up a needle! You, who go marching through the house like a princess and never help the servants with their work!

Her parents sent her on a tour of Western Europe, hoping she'd forget Vladimir. She didn't. They married in 1893, and she had a son, Mikhail, in 1894.

Marriage didn't satisfy her.

Discovering Revolution

While caring for her infant son, Kollontai began reading—radical populist literature, Marxist theory. She started volunteering at a library that offered Sunday literacy classes to factory workers, sneaking socialist ideas into the lessons. Through this work she met Elena Stasova, an activist in St. Petersburg's underground Marxist movement. Stasova began using Kollontai as a courier, having her deliver packages of illegal writings to strangers upon exchange of a password.

Years later, Kollontai would write about her marriage: "We separated although we were in love because I felt trapped."

In 1898, she left her four-year-old son with her parents and traveled to Zürich to study economics. She visited England and met Sidney and Beatrice Webb, giants of British socialism. When she returned to Russia in 1899, she met a man who would later be known to the world as Lenin.

She was twenty-seven years old and had found her cause.

The Split That Defined Russian Socialism

Kollontai joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1899. To understand what happened next, you need to understand how Russian revolutionary politics worked.

In 1903, the party split into two factions. The Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov, believed in building a broad-based workers' movement and working within existing political structures where possible. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, favored a smaller, more disciplined revolutionary vanguard that would seize power directly.

The names themselves are revealing. "Bolshevik" means "majority" and "Menshevik" means "minority"—but this referred to a single vote at a single congress, and the Mensheviks actually had more members for most of the party's early history. Lenin was brilliant at branding.

Kollontai initially refused to choose sides, offering her services to both factions. In 1906, she joined the Mensheviks, despite being generally left-wing herself. Her reason? She disapproved of the Bolsheviks' hostile attitude toward the Duma, Russia's newly created parliament. She believed in working within institutions, at least somewhat.

This decision would change.

Exile and Love Affairs

In 1905, Kollontai witnessed Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg—the massacre where tsarist soldiers opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in front of the Winter Palace, killing hundreds. In 1908, she published an article calling on Finland to rise up against Russian imperial oppression. This was too much. She fled to Germany to avoid arrest.

Her years in Western European exile were productive. She met the leading socialist intellectuals of the age: Karl Kautsky, the pope of Marxist orthodoxy; Clara Zetkin, the pioneer of socialist feminism; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who would later lead Germany's failed communist revolution and be murdered for it.

She also fell in love.

In 1911, she ended a long-term relationship with Peter Maslov, an agrarian scientist and fellow Menshevik, and began an affair with Alexander Shliapnikov. They made an unlikely couple. She was a Menshevik intellectual from the nobility, forty-four years old. He was a self-taught metalworker from provincial Russia, a Bolshevik, thirteen years her junior.

Their romance ended in 1916, but it evolved into something perhaps more durable: a political partnership and genuine friendship that would last decades.

Against the War

When the First World War erupted in 1914, it shattered the international socialist movement. The German Social Democrats, the largest and most respected socialist party in the world, voted to support their government's war effort. So did socialists in France, Britain, and elsewhere. The principle of international working-class solidarity collapsed overnight as workers marched off to kill each other in the trenches.

Kollontai was appalled.

She left Germany and went to Denmark. The Danish socialists supported the war too. She tried Sweden. The Swedish government imprisoned her for her antiwar activities. Finally, in Norway, she found a socialist community willing to listen.

In June 1915, she formally broke with the Mensheviks and joined the Bolsheviks—"those who most consistently fought social-patriotism," as she put it. The war had pushed her left.

She traveled twice to the United States to speak against the war and to see her son Mikhail, now a grown man. In 1916, she helped arrange for him to avoid conscription by getting work in American factories filling Russian military orders—an ironic way to keep him out of the war she opposed.

Revolution

In February 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. A provisional government took power, promising democracy and continuation of the war. Kollontai rushed back from Norway.

When Lenin arrived in Petrograd in April, he shocked even many Bolsheviks with his "April Theses"—a radical program calling for no support of the provisional government, immediate peace, and transfer of all power to the soviets, the workers' councils that had sprung up across Russia. Most Bolshevik leaders hesitated.

Kollontai didn't. She was the only major leader of the Petrograd Bolsheviks who immediately voiced full support for Lenin's proposals.

For the rest of 1917, she worked constantly—speaking, writing leaflets, contributing to the Bolshevik women's paper Rabotnitsa (which means "Woman Worker"). In July, she was arrested along with other Bolshevik leaders after an uprising against the provisional government. By September, she was free again and serving on the party's Central Committee.

In October, she voted for armed uprising.

On October 26, 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets elected her People's Commissar for Social Welfare. She was forty-five years old and had just become the first woman cabinet minister in history.

Around this time, she married again—a twenty-eight-year-old revolutionary sailor named Pavel Dybenko. She was seventeen years his senior. She kept the surname from her first marriage.

The Women's Department

Kollontai's tenure as welfare commissar was brief. She resigned in early 1918, opposing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the humiliating peace agreement with Germany that Lenin insisted was necessary to save the revolution. She was part of a faction called the Left Communists who believed Russia should continue fighting a "revolutionary war" rather than accept Germany's harsh terms.

Lenin won that argument. The treaty was signed. Kollontai moved on to other work.

In 1919, she became a leading figure in founding the Zhenotdel—the Women's Department of the Communist Party's Central Committee. This was not a symbolic gesture. The Zhenotdel had real resources and real power. It worked to improve women's lives across the Soviet Union, fighting illiteracy, educating women about new laws on marriage and divorce, and helping women enter the workforce.

The revolution had dramatically changed women's legal status. The new Soviet government legalized divorce, gave women equal rights in marriage, legalized abortion, and began building childcare facilities to free women from domestic labor. Kollontai was a driving force behind these changes and a tireless advocate for going further.

She wrote extensively on sexuality, arguing that the nuclear family was a bourgeois institution that would wither away under communism. She advocated for what she called "free love"—not promiscuity, but the freedom to form relationships based on genuine affection rather than economic necessity or social convention. In a communist society, she believed, the state would take over childcare and domestic work, freeing women to participate fully in public life and to love whom they chose.

These ideas were controversial even among Bolsheviks. Lenin reportedly disapproved of her writings on sexuality, though he supported women's legal equality.

The Workers' Opposition

By 1920, the Soviet state was becoming something Kollontai hadn't fought for.

A brutal civil war had centralized power. The Communist Party increasingly controlled everything—the economy, the military, the press, the soviets themselves. Factory managers, many of them former bourgeois specialists, held power over workers. Bureaucracy proliferated. The party suppressed dissent, including from other socialist parties.

Kollontai joined the Workers' Opposition, a faction led by her old friend (and former lover) Alexander Shliapnikov. The group's core demand was simple: workers, through their trade unions, should control the factories and the economy. The revolution had been made in their name. They should actually run things.

In early 1921, Kollontai published a pamphlet titled "The Workers' Opposition." It was meant only for delegates to the upcoming party congress, but it became her most famous work. She attacked bureaucratization, denounced petty-bourgeois influences on the party, and argued that only the industrial working class, through concrete economic experience, could build communism.

Her language was harsher than Shliapnikov's official faction platform. Lenin was furious.

At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, the Workers' Opposition was crushed. The congress passed a resolution banning factions within the party—anyone who organized opposition to the leadership could be expelled. Kollontai and Shliapnikov narrowly avoided expulsion themselves.

This was the moment the Communist Party became a dictatorship internally as well as externally. And Kollontai had been on the losing side.

Exile by Promotion

What do you do with a famous revolutionary who has publicly criticized the party but is too prominent to simply arrest? In 1922, the party found an answer: you send her abroad as a diplomat.

Kollontai was appointed to the Soviet trade delegation in Norway. Later she served in Mexico and Sweden. In 1943, at the age of seventy-one, she was promoted to ambassador to Sweden—the first woman to hold that rank in modern diplomatic history.

This was exile disguised as honor. She was far from Moscow, unable to participate in domestic politics, her criticisms safely contained. But she was also alive.

Consider what happened to others.

Alexander Shliapnikov, her friend and former lover, was expelled from the party in 1933 and executed during the Great Purge in 1937. Sergei Medvedev, the other leader of the Workers' Opposition, was also executed. Nikolai Bukharin, who had been a top party leader and Lenin's favorite, was executed in 1938. Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, both members of Lenin's inner circle, were executed in 1936. Leon Trotsky, Lenin's closest collaborator in making the revolution, was murdered by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940.

Almost everyone who had ever openly disagreed with Stalin died.

Kollontai lived.

How Did She Survive?

Several factors probably saved her.

First, she was abroad during the worst of the purges. Out of sight, out of mind—or at least, harder to build a show trial around.

Second, she was useful. She was an effective diplomat. During World War II, she played a crucial role in negotiating with Finland, helping to end the Finnish-Soviet war in 1940 and keeping Finland from fully allying with Nazi Germany.

Third, she stopped criticizing the regime. After 1922, there are no public records of her opposing party policy. She accepted her diplomatic exile and did her job.

Was this cowardice? Wisdom? Exhaustion? We can't know what she thought in private. We only know that she survived when survival was rare.

She retired from diplomatic service in 1945 and died in Moscow in 1952, at the age of seventy-nine. Stalin died a year later.

What She Left Behind

The Zhenotdel was closed in 1930. Stalin's regime retreated from many early Soviet policies on women—abortion was criminalized again in 1936, divorce became harder to obtain, and the traditional family was rehabilitated as a socialist institution. Kollontai's writings on sexuality were quietly shelved.

Yet her legacy persisted.

In the West, second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s rediscovered her work. Her arguments about the economic basis of women's oppression, the need for socialized childcare, and the possibility of relationships based on equality rather than dependency influenced feminist theory for decades.

She remains a complicated figure. She was a genuine revolutionary who helped build a system that became a dictatorship. She was a feminist who made her peace with Stalinism. She was a critic of bureaucracy who became a bureaucrat. She was a champion of workers' control who watched workers lose all power.

But she was also something else: proof that in the chaos of revolution, extraordinary things become possible. A general's daughter became a Marxist theorist. A woman who wasn't allowed to attend university became the first female cabinet minister. Someone who openly challenged Lenin survived to become the first female ambassador.

History, she might have said, moves in unexpected directions. So do people.