By Claire Schachtely

Alexandra Kollontai’s Life and Work – from Valiant Attempts to Liberate Working-Class Women in Soviet Russia to her Radical Writings on Love and Sex – Echo Into the Present, with Important Implications for Socialist Feminists Today

Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) was a Russian revolutionary whose influence had a profound impact on workers – particularly women – in the early stages of the Soviet Union. She had a revolutionary understanding of proletarian feminism that she used to pass important legislation, as well as shift the socio-political culture to protect and empower working women. 

Her accomplishments were visionary, and in many cases are still relevant demands for women and gender minorities today. Following the revolution, she was appointed as the Bolshevik Party’s People’s Commissar of Social Welfare in the newly-founded Soviet Union, where she helped pass many laws that improved the living conditions of working families. Kollontai also wrote extensively about communist theories of love and sexuality. She believed that women must be emancipated economically in order to be liberated romantically and sexually. 

A Class Traitor 

Born into nobility in St. Petersburg, Kollontai had a comfortable childhood and a private education, but even as a young child she questioned the social order. She raised objections as to why she was offered schooling when it was denied to other children. 

In 1893, she married an engineer of modest means for love rather than financial pursuit, much to her rich parents’ disapproval. They had one child and lived a modest lifestyle. However, her devotion to her first husband wavered as she grew more committed to the revolution, and they later separated because she felt trapped in marriage and family life – a personal experience that would later be reflected in her writings on the family under capitalism.

A major catalyst for Kollontai’s radicalization occurred in 1896, when she accompanied her husband to one of the largest textile factories in Russia, where he was working on fixing the ventilation system. There she witnessed the horrifying working and living conditions of the female workers. 

The factory air was contaminated with harmful textile dust, leading to workers contracting lifelong respiratory illnesses. She also visited the rickety barracks the workers lived in. Some did not have windows for airflow or sunlight, there was no privacy, beds were crammed together, and children were forced to sleep on the floor. After several conversations with workers about their conditions, she wrote in Iz moey zhizni (From my Life), “I understood deeply to the bottom of my heart that we cannot continue to live as we have lived until now, when such terrible living conditions and inhuman order exist around us.” 

Over the next few years, she helped organize several female factory workers to strike their workplaces for better conditions. 

To better comprehend how these working conditions came to be, Kollontai turned to the writings of famous authors like Karl Marx, Frederick Engles, and August Bebel. In 1898, she began studying economics at the University of Zurich, teaching her findings to workers. 

She became immersed in political organizing and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1899, where she met Lenin. Later she joined forces with Clara Zetkin, with whom she worked closely to coordinate advancements at the International Socialist Women’s Conference and helped establish International Working Women’s Day as March 8th in 1911. 

The Role of the Family 

Kollontai viewed the longstanding institutions of marriage and family as a social structure that contributes to the oppression of women. Kollontai understood that romantic relationships are not separate from our class relations and are based in historical materialism. As she wrote in Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations, “Family and marriage are historical categories… [that develop] with the economic relations that exist at the given level of production”. 

The emancipation of women requires the end of capitalism, but it can’t just stop there – it also requires an active social transformation of society’s views on our interpersonal relations.

Kollontai wrote in The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman that “women’s liberation could take place only as the result of the victory of a new social order and a different economic system.” The emancipation of women requires the end of capitalism, but it can’t just stop there – it also requires an active social transformation of society’s views on our interpersonal relations, which she embodied in her day-to-day organizing for women’s empowerment. 

After the Russian Revolution, Kollontai was able to return to her homeland under the new workers’ government. She was elected the Commissar of Social Welfare and was the first – and only – female cabinet member in the world’s first socialist state. 

Once in power, she dramatically shifted familial relationships to be more equal and just towards women and children. Very quickly she was able to pass laws that made women the juridical equal to men. The laws allowed Soviet women to have total access to their wages without financial control from their fathers or husbands, maternity leave was protected, divorce and abortion legalized, and the idea of ‘illegitimate’ children was abolished. This was not a form of charity for a lucky few, or a gutted governmental service only available to those who could navigate a bureaucratic system, but real transformations of material conditions for an entire demographic.

Kristen Ghodsee points out in Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism, “Although gender wage disparities and labor segregation persisted, and although the communist never fully reformed domestic patriarchy, communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined.”

Kollontai pushed for the socialization of women’s domestic work through public dining halls, communal kitchens, laundry services and high-quality free childcare.

Kollontai later became head of the Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the Central Committee, where she pushed for the socialization of women’s domestic work through public dining halls, communal kitchens, laundry services and high-quality free childcare. Because the capitalist economy thrives on unpaid domestic labor, she believed moving these services into public ownership would stimulate the national economy and alleviate the burdens of women in the home, all while curbing some of the power dynamics of the family. 

Although the question of responsibilities of domestic life is a gender issue, it is also a class issue. Upper-class families could (and still can today) afford to not perform domestic tasks, and instead exploit the working class to raise their children and clean their houses. 

Unfortunately, socialized domestic work did not have time to become universal before being quashed by the bureaucratic counter-revolution. Though the brand-new and very impoverished position of the Soviet Union did not fully implement these public services, the level of progress was still admirable, especially considering the deeply religious and patriarchal nature of society during the prudish Victorian era of the time. 

Kollontai was critical of the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union and some of its early economic policies, leading her to join the workers’ opposition and demand more democracy within the Bolshevik Party. This contributed to Stalin discrediting her work and reversing most of her policies when he came into power in 1924. Under Stalin, abortion was outlawed, there were restrictions on divorce, and a traditional nuclear family was imposed. Soviet women once again found themselves taking on the double burden of domestic work and employment. Kollontai left Russia for Norway in 1924 where she became the world’s first female ambassador. She died naturally in 1952. 

Modern-Day Bourgeois vs. Socialist Feminism 

Kollontai was a fierce fighter. She was up against not just her male colleagues and proletarian men (many of whom were influenced by the dominant sexist ideas of the time), but also bourgeois women who did not want to see the economic hierarchies they benefited from change. Kollontai staunchly opposed a women’s movement that focused solely on voting or property rights for the upper-class while ignoring the unique needs of working women. 

Exclusionary pitfalls, as experienced by Kollontai, have the power to bring down a movement. Unfortunately the problems with the first and second waves of feminism – which primarily contended with topics like suffrage, the right to work, and anti-discrimination, which, although very important, leave out the distinctive needs of working-class women and minorities – can still apply to today’s feminism. 

There seems to be an impulse to fix the patriarchy by putting female faces in high places. But equality of those on top will not trickle down to liberate those on the bottom.

A common theme of the modern-day women’s movement focuses on the advancement of women in positions of corporate and political power. This form of bourgeois identity politics mainly serves individualized ‘girl bosses’, but leaves out and exploits working women. This creates a myth of equality, with some women in positions of power while the majority struggle to make ends meet. There seems to be an impulse to fix the patriarchy by putting female faces in high places, and although sexism does affect all women, it is incorrect to assume that the benefits experienced by those on top will trickle down to liberate those on the bottom. 

A socialist feminist movement today would do well to learn from the feminist developments of the Soviet Union. It’s important to study the women who fought for and enjoyed rapid gains brought about by the collectivization of society. Although not universal, women of the time experienced economic independence through radical expansion of social safety nets and a shift in social consciousness of the role of working women, tactics we can apply to today. 

While we fight for changes that help the entire working class, it is essential to consider the needs of particularly oppressed groups within it.

As we begin an election year, lessons from Kollontai are all the more vital. We need socialist candidates who will fight for legislative reforms that protect working women and gender minorities, while understanding that the gains women have made in the past 100 years are very vulnerable to being rolled backwards. Additionally, Kollontai’s legacy of reforms proves that even while we fight for changes that help the entire working class, it is essential to consider the needs of particularly oppressed groups within it. There is no winning socialist program that doesn’t consider the unique needs of women, trans people, or people of color.

Revolutionary Love 

Kollontai had a revolutionary commitmentment to radically re-configuring bourgeois notions of sexuality and love. Bourgeois morality influences the cultural norms of heteronormative and nuclear family relationships, and it often does so in order to direct the concentration of capital to remain with the wealthy. Therefore Kollontai understood that sexual relations under capitalism are also economic and property relations. 

Under a new economic and social system, the interests and needs of the proletariat will be met and we will be able to date and marry without any financial, familial, or property considerations. 

But romantic relations aside, a new society based on principles of comradeship, empathy, and solidarity will allow for all types of love to flourish. As Kollontai puts it in Make Way for Winged Eros:

The proletarian ideology…attempts to educate and encourage every member of the working class to be capable of responding to the distress and needs of other members of the class, of a sensitive understanding of others and a penetrating consciousness of the individual’s relationship to the collective. All these “warm emotions” – sensitivity, compassion, sympathy and responsiveness – derive from one source: they are aspects of love, not in the narrow, sexual sense but in the broad meaning of the word. Love is an emotion that unites and is consequently … an organizing character.

Kollontai’s concept of comradely love is not only something to be embraced as we struggle for a new world together, but also points towards the human potential for empathy and connection outside of the restricting forces of exploitation and accumulation inherent under capitalism.

Art: Instagram @other_boi