1 Life and Works

Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovič (Kollontai was her first husband’s last name, maintained after their divorce) was born in St. Petersburg in 1872 to a family of the old Russian nobility. She was the first woman in history to be appointed minister (1917) and later ambassador (1924).

This future revolutionary’s keen awareness of her own privileged position led her to rebel against institutions and forms of injustice. The first manifestation of this rebellious spirit can be seen in her choice to marry for love (to a rather poor cousin and engineer, Vladimir L. Kollontai) in 1893 instead of following her family’s advice and accepting a marriage of convenience as her sister had done. This was the first “scandal” in a life that constantly oscillated between a wholesale rejection of established customs (especially patriarchal norms) and an obstinate search for a unifying sentimental bond: “Love with its many disappointments, with its tragedies and eternal demands for perfect happiness still played a very great role in my life” (Kollontai 1971, 7).

This fluctuation also reflected the transition an entire generation of revolutionary women underwent as they shifted away from traditional gender roles in pursuit of a new, autonomous identity.

During a 1896 visit to the textile factory of Krengolm, Kollontai had a first-hand view of the extremely difficult labour conditions of the industrial working class as well as the degree of class consciousness they had achieved. This experience constituted a decisive turning point in her education. She made the decision to relocate to Zurich to study economy, in 1898, and dedicate all her energy to the revolutionary cause. Separating from her family, not only her husband but also her beloved son born in 1894, later led to divorce. The following year, Kollontai became a militant member of the Russian Social Democratic Party.

In the following years, she cultivated an interest in Finland to the point of becoming Russia’s foremost expert on the matter, first in the Menshevik party and later in the Bolshevik party. Kollontai also carried out her tireless efforts to organize Russian women workers and ensure that they received political training, thus laying the foundations for a mass movement. At the same time, she was a prolific publicist and lecturer. Indeed, her political-social thinking is mainly presented in her articles and speeches rather than published volumes.

She joined the Bolshevik fraction in 1904 only to leave it just two years later over disagreements about the role of representative democracy. Her first attempt to establish an independent women’s organization within the Russian Social Democratic Party dates back to that time. Two years later her long exile began. This period as a persona non grata on Russian soil lasted until March 1917, during which time she stayed in several Western European countries as well as the United States. She established relationships with some of the most important leaders of the international labour movement, first and foremost the leaders of the SPD (which she joined in 1909), in particular Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, but also the reformist married couple Mr. and Mrs. Webb .

At the outbreak of the war, she redoubled her efforts to promote an antimilitarist position: she was one of the organizers of the Zimmerwald conference and her pamphlet Who Needs War? (1915) circulated widely. In June of the same year, she joined the Bolshevik party and began a lively correspondence with Lenin; once back in Russia and appointed (the first female) member of the Soviet executive committee, she was the first to support Lenin’s April Theses.

Arrested in July, while still in prison she was elected member of the committee of the Bolshevik party. When she was released in October, her top priority was to organize the first congress of women workers (eventually held in November 1918). In the aftermath of the revolution, she became the Minister (Commissioner) for Social Affairs, devoting herself to founding a state centre to care for mothers and newborns. It was this latter project that made her the target of malicious and unfounded accusation of wanting to “nationalize” women and children.

Not only was there a bitter, violent campaign against her, she also came under attack for opposing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty:

Now began a dark time of my life which I cannot treat of here since the events are still too fresh in my mind. But the day will also come when I will give an account of them.[…] There were differences of opinion in the Party. I resigned from my post as People’s Commissar on the ground of total disagreement with the current policy. Little by little I was also relieved of all my other tasks. […]The Revolution was in full swing. The struggle was becoming increasingly irreconcilable and bloodier, much of what was happening did not fit in with my outlook. (Kollontai 1971, 40)Footnote 1

Her opposition to the treaty led her to resign from the post of minister; however, alongside Inessa Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaya, she remained committed to founding a women’s organization within the party. This organization was finally created in 1919 (under the name of “Zhenotdel”) and in November 1920, at the death of Armand, Kollontai served as its leader, although only for a few months.

The following year, she joined Workers’ Opposition, the group of trade unionists that grew up in 1920 around the figure of Alexander Šljapnikov; she spoke on behalf of the group in 1921 at the 10th Congress of the Communist Party. At that same congress, all the fractions were banned, including Workers’ Opposition. Kollontai became increasingly isolated; later, she was the only member of the group to survive the Stalinist persecutions, thanks in part to her prestigious diplomatic posts in Norway (where she became the first female ambassador in history, in 1924), Mexico and, between 1930 and 1945, Sweden. This was a golden period of exile for the Russian revolutionary in which she developed contacts with political and intellectual personalities from all over the world, winning them over with her competence (including diplomatic skills) and determination. At the same time, in 1926 her refusal to focus on USSR internal politics reflected the larger defeat of the most ambitious (or perhaps only) attempt in the history of the Communist movement to face the women issue head-on. Unique among Bolshevik leaders, in fact, Kollontai did not limit herself to asserting that women should be actively included in politics and economics, she also reflected on the kind of revolution that would be needed to break with a centuries-old tradition of servitude: a revolution in everyday life. These themes were completely foreign to the cult of the heroic mother that was gaining ground with Stalin’s rise, and in fact, Kollontai’s ideas and struggles were met with ridicule.Footnote 2

Scholars have long been fascinated by the reasons that drove Stalin to only exile Kollontai rather than having her executed, and even to award her a high honour (the Order of Lenin) in 1933. It is currently impossible to form one single answer to this question, given the scarcity and contradictory nature of available sources. Indeed, opinions diverge as to Kollontai’s degree of “opportunism”, on the one hand, and Stalin’s assessments, on the other hand. As for the first point, how should we read her choice to step back from the leftist Opposition and fractions in general—as well as from the creative spirit of the masses she had previously praised—in the name of the unity of the proletariat, as expressed on the pages of “Pravda” in 1927?

Was this a public act of submission to Stalin, to safeguard her life and privileges, or perhaps even more so, to protect her son and family who had remained in the Soviet Union? If instead Kollontai experienced diplomatic exile as a form of “passive resistance”, as Alix Holt hypothesizes, why a year after returning home (1945) did she express appreciation of Soviet socialist achievements for women when in reality they had been pushed back into the role of “angels of the hearth” once they were no longer useful to the war effort?

This last episode suggests that Kollontai was motivated to “settle” with Stalinist politics not only by her understandable and well-founded fears for her own and her son’s safety. It seems she was also incapable of admitting that such an ambitious project (socialism and the liberation of women), a project to which the revolutionary woman had dedicated her entire life to the detriment of her own private sphere, had in fact failed.

As for Stalin’s reasons, some hold that his chivalrous spirit prevailed, preventing him from having a woman executed; according to others, it was a matter of cost-benefit analysis (a death sentence for a figure with the international reputation of Kollontai would have aroused more hostility than agreement). And finally, a perhaps more daring reading suggests that the fundamental reason for his clemency lay in their common enmity for Trotsky.Footnote 3

Kollontai spent her final years in a country that had opted to forget about her. When she died on 9 March 1952, the Pravda did not even publish an obituary for her.

2 Marxism, Class Initiative and Gender Autonomy

Kollontai approached Marxism in the last years of the nineteenth century and the reading she developed of it was deterministic and salvific. She interpreted historical materialism as a scientific principle and class struggle as the natural law governing historical processes.

Kollontai’s analysis of capitalism focuses on the subordination of women rather than the exploitation of productive work. Consistent with her orthodox reading of Marxism, she identified the source of female oppression in private property; the readings of Marx and Engels as well as August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, published in 1883, which Kollontai read in 1895, and was deeply affected by it, played a fundamental role in the development of her analyses in this sense.

However, while embracing a linear vision of the relationship between the revolution and the empowerment of women, she insisted on the need to establish autonomous women’s organizations: she never ceased to express her admiration for Clara Zetkin even though she moved beyond Zetkin’s “quantitative” approach to the problem of women’s inclusion in the revolutionary process and, after 1917, did not agree with her view on the role of the Bolshevik party.

As Kollontai gradually gained experience, first as an agitator and later as a prominent figure in the Bolshevik government, the tension between her trust that socialism was able to achieve equal gender opportunities and her awareness that the economic-social revolution was not sufficient to ensure this outcome became increasingly acute. After abandoning Soviet domestic politics to focus on her diplomatic posts, Kollontai insisted more and more on the need for a cultural and “emotional” revolution. This stance rendered her even more eccentric in relation to the dominant currents in the international workers’ movement of the time.

Another element that tempered, if not actually challenged, theoretical rigidity and drew her closer to Rosa Luxemburg (the two revolutionaries met for the first time in Finland, in 1906) was her confidence in the intrinsic positivity of mass action, together with her distrust of institutions. The utopian component was more accentuated in Kollontai’s thinking as compared to Luxemburg’s, both on the anthropological level (faith in the natural inclination of the proletariat to collectivism) and on the institutional level: while Luxemburg was aware that the virus of bureaucratization can also take root in trade unions, Kollontai saw a strenuous defence of the independence and centrality of the trade union—before and after the revolution—as the most solid bulwark of autonomous proletarian creativity.

She was very close to Lenin in the years before the revolution and the months immediately following it—in her autobiography, she writes that they shared ideology and intent. And yet it is impossible to derive a univocal conception of the party from her publications, which were often fragmentary even in terms of form (conferences, articles for daily newspapers, etc.). It is nevertheless significant that as early as 1906, in disagreeing with the Mensheviks who denied that Russia might ever hold a revolution based on Marxist orthodoxy, she wrote a pamphlet invoking a republic based on local self-government by both factory and agricultural workers, and female workers. At the time, such a perspective probably appeared more anarchist than Marxist.

3 The Difficult Transition to Socialism

The year 1920 marked the end of two situations that up to that point had conditioned internal debates over how to transform the mode of production: the civil war, with the victory of the Red Army, and the fideistic expectation that the revolutionary hotbeds scattered throughout Europe might fan the flames of a global revolution. At the same time, the new state was suffering from a worsening political-economic crisis, a condition that soon (1921) led to the Kronstadt revolt and, later, to the adoption of the new economic policy.

The debate on the relationship between trade unions, the party and the state in the new society was thus reopened. At the 1919 Pan-Russian Congress dedicated to trade unions, Lenin was still able to calmly outline the thesis that they must ineluctably be nationalized; the following year, however, it became increasingly evident that there was a yawning institutional and ideological gap between the new state bodies that the party created and occupied and the trade union demand for autonomy. Trotsky was the most intransigent representative of the group pressing to merge unions into the state (a position that helps us understand his enmity with Kollontai) and later Bukharin supported this position as well. Trotsky rejected the idea of trade union organizations playing an independent role because his experience as commander of the Red Army had led him to believe that production itself needed to be militarized. There was clearly no room for union autonomy in his state dirigisme.

The opposite position was defended by Šljapnikov, who was Minister of Labour in the government until December 1918 before becoming chairman of the metalworkers’ union, and the group of trade unionists gathered around him. In the run-up to the 10th Congress (1921), Kollontai committed to using her brilliant and passionate style to write the booklet outlining the group’s theses as Šljapnikov had formulated them. Moreover, her engagement with the new group can be seen as the natural continuation of the critical view she had expressed regarding SPD bureaucratization even before the war. Kollontai explained that what united the members of Workers’ Opposition was in fact the awareness that millions of workers faced unsustainable living and working conditions, but also the will to hold the line of class politics. During the three years of constructing the Soviet state, in fact, the working class had watched its importance in political life decline, realizing with concern that a new social class was forming made up of high-ranking soviet and party officials (the latter of whom, unsurprisingly, very rarely supported Workers’ Opposition). Kollontai admitted:

We had forgotten that the proletariat can make serious mistakes and slip into the mud of opportunism not only during its struggle for power, but also during the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Kollontai 1973, 72)

Before proposing an alternative platform, Kollontai examined the factors causing the party’s crisis: alongside objective difficulties (backwardness and economic crisis; international hostility), there was also the problem of the prevalence of the rural element in society and the influence exerted by other lower-middle class strata. Another issue was that the great bourgeoisie had survived and was infiltrating the party (she referred to experts and technicians), pushing the country’s economic course towards capitalism. Kollontai focused on this last aspect in particular, analysing transformations in the army alongside those in the economy. The new state’s tasks did not include transforming the army in terms of class, because the armed forces were destined to disappear with the advent of communism; in order to win the war, there was no choice but to accept the authority of the old military officers. However, Kollontai admonished, this same process must not be reproduced in the economic sphere:

To debar the workers from the organization of industry, to deprive them, that is, their individual organizations, of the opportunity to develop their powers in creating new forms of production in industry through their unions, to deny this expression of the class organization of the proletariat, while placing full reliance on the “skill” of specialists trained and taught to carry on production under a quite different system of production – is to jump off the rails of scientific Marxist thought. (Kollontai 1961, 8)

Aside from her dogmatic tone, Kollontai’s posing of this (rhetorical) question addresses a crucial problem: Can the construction of a communist economy be entrusted to the heirs of the middle class, who will manage it on the basis of a vision and practice they drew from capitalism? The key point here has to do with the degree of continuity between successive production modes and the nature of the role played by “technicians” (see also Philips Pryce 1921).

According to Kollontai, the bureaucratization plaguing the party stemmed from the growing influence exercised by elements external and hostile to communism. The elephantiasis of the apparatus was not the only harmful symptom of this involution; the main issue was the tendency to negate democratic processes: in the eyes of Workers’ Opposition, the fact that the Bolshevik leadership viewed bureaucracy as an antidote to the (unpredictable) initiative of the masses represented the greatest threat to the fate of both the party and the proletarian state.

In the face of this erosion of the Bolshevik political organization, Workers’ Opposition viewed the trade unions as a tool for economic, political and moral regeneration. Kollontai reminded readers that the antagonism between trade unions and the state was rooted in the fact that there are divergent answers to the question of who should build the communist economy, and how so. The author provided an account, albeit inevitably partisan, of the different positions on this issue, an overview that is quite valuable for understanding why the debate within the Communist Party in those crucial years was so heated. Despite their apparent variety, these positions can all be seen to derive from one of the two following approaches: that of Workers’ Opposition and that of all the others (Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev, above all). As Šljapnikov summarized in a December 1920 report, the choice is between bottom-up development, i.e. driven by workers through their class organizations (the Pan-Russian Trade Union Congress), and top-down development, implemented through state bureaucracy (in this case, the Supreme Economic Council, created in December 1917). The power in this latter actor was concentrated in the hands of senior party officials who seemed to have inherited the stigmata of bourgeois individualism. Kollontai clarified that Workers’ Opposition identified the unions with their practical knowledge of production as the only organisms capable of solving the problems associated with establishing a communist economy; bureaucratic and socially heterogeneous bodies would not have been able to do so. Kollontai also referenced the soviet “machine”, describing it as “separated from direct vital industrial activity and […] mixed in its composition” (Kollontai 1961, 4). Created with the main intention of fostering autonomous action on the part of the masses, the Soviets ended up paralysing such action. In a party whose leaders did not trust the economic management capacity of the working class on the grounds that it supposedly lacks the necessary knowledge, however, everyone defended the Soviets.

Kollontai’s distrust of the Bolshevik leadership also emerged from an analysis of the way their class composition had changed with respect to 1917: she was well aware of this phenomenon, and yet the conclusions she reached were in sharp contrast to those of Lenin and the other leaders. Many exponents of the working-class vanguard died in the civil war, and the survivors took office in the various sections of the party and state. Given the obligation to work, people not originally from the working class entered the ranks of the industrial proletariat.

In the light of these demographic and anthropological class changes, the fact that the majority of the party insisted on the need to educate the masses (in 1921 expressed in the Theses of the Group of Ten, which bore Lenin’s, Zinovyev, Kamenev’s and Stalin’s names) can be interpreted as an urgent attempt to ensure that communists enjoyed the greatest possible influence in society at large and in factories in particular. While the Ten did allow the unions to remain independent (albeit in a way brimming with ambiguity) in order to perform their function as a “school of communism”, Trotsky instead reiterated need for them to be reabsorbed within the state.

What they had in common was the refusal to grant the unions managerial power over production. While the limit of Šljapnikov and Kollontai’s thinking was that they had an insufficient understanding of the general context (both internal and external), the Ten, as well as Trotsky, proved unable to respond to the challenging issues raised by Workers’ Opposition: the erosion of democracy and the material and political decline of the proletariat.

4 Class and Self-Government

Through Kollontai’s pen, the group of trade unionists opposed this idea of the proletariat’s alleged economic “illiteracy” by arguing that not even the rising bourgeoisie had any technical advantage over its predecessors; however, “creativeness and the search for new forms of production, for new incentives to labour, in order to increase productivity, may be generated only in the bosom of this natural class collective” (Kollontai 1961, 33) and cannot be dictated from above by decree. The task of the party, if anything, is to “create the conditions” for a different mode of production.

While these are the cornerstones of the Workers’ Opposition vision, it should be noted that they were translated into a precise political-institutional platform in the 1921 booklet.

Despite having architected the revolution, Kollontai and her associates saw the vanguard of the party as losing sight of its points of reference—historical materialism and class politics—to flounder in the quicksand of bureaucracy. It was clear to them that the first step in overturning this degeneration lay in combating party bureaucracy.

It is worth emphasizing that the group called for democratic principles to be respected not only in normal times, “but also for times of internal and external tension. This is the first and basic condition for the Party’s regeneration, for its return to the principles of the programme […]” (Kollontai 1961, 40).Footnote 4

In line with its inspiring principles, Workers’ Opposition proposed a series of measures aimed at clearly distinguishing between party and state and ensuring that the former not be “contaminated” by elements extraneous to the proletariat, thereby restoring democracy both within the party and in society as a whole. These were partly “reclamation” measures (expelling all individuals who were not part of the proletariat from the state administration and the party)Footnote 5 and partly antidotes to the overlapping of party and state, a condition they deemed lethal: while the former was created to pursue the interests of the proletariat, the latter aimed at integrating inter-class interests (in addition to the working class, these included peasants, those remaining from the previous society and the newly born bureaucratic caste). Kollontai and her group thus felt it was essential that all the party offices—from local to national—be brought back to their class function, prohibiting two-thirds of officials from taking on multiple (party and state) positions. It should be noted that these thinkers not only did not see holding simultaneous positions in both the party and the union as dangerous, they identified such transversal position-holding as a means of immunizing the party against the pro-capitalist drift.

Nevertheless, the Workers’ Opposition platform also expressed a higher ambition, one that converged with the agenda of the Group for Democratic Centralism (which included Smirnov, Sapronov and Osinskij). This latter was the only other faction that dared to challenge the authority of the leadership at the time, and in fact, the two groups presented their proposals together at the 9th Congress. The ambition in this case was to re-establish democratic principles in the core of the new state, principles such as freedom of opinion and criticism, transparency in decision-making and the rank-and-file taking priority over management in analysing Soviet policy problems. Part of this plan was a proposal to reinstate elections for choosing officials, thus breaking the chokehold of the appointment-based system. Indeed, this system was judged to be unhealthy for the party and the new state because it undermined equality by removing “appointees” from under collective control.

The measures listed so far were meant to stop the trend of bureaucratization that was distorting the original line of the Bolshevik party. Workers’ Opposition went even further, however, if the aim was to establish proletarian self-government once and for all, the relative importance of the party and unions had to be reversed, gradually transferring economic direction from the bureaucracy (either party or state) to a body elected directly by the workers. In so doing, the group sought to overcome the oppositional relationship between the Supreme Council of the Economy (a bureaucratic body) and the Pan-Russian Congress of Trade Unions. The Congress was to be guaranteed a position of dominance by granting it veto power over all economic and administrative appointments; vice versa, the candidates proposed by the trade unions would not answer to the party and could not be removed from their positions by it.

Moreover, self-government was to be exercised not centrally but at the level of individual production units, preparing the workers (or rather their representatives) in each of these units for the task of economic leadership. Fully aware of the accusations that had been levelled at her group, Kollontai concluded the booklet by stating that the Workers’ Opposition proposal was not the expression of trade unionist tendencies but rather the embodiment of the party’s own real agenda and reasserting her trust in both the party and Lenin himself.

Workers’ Opposition was mainly opposed to the militarization of the economy, and living labour itself, that Trotsky had initiated. Nonetheless, the group ended up clashing with Lenin himself: in the face of the Kronstadt revolt and peasant uprisings during the 10th Congress, it became increasingly important for the party to suppress forms of disunity.

When Kollontai spoke on behalf of the dissident group, the leadership had already opted to ban fractions, and her decision to take a stand almost caused her to be expelled, not to mention making her the target of crude sexist attacks.

Despite heavy pressure, a few months later (at the end of June) Kollontai courageously decided to speak on behalf of Opposition at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International to criticize the NEP; on that occasion, Lenin left the task of denigrating her and her supporters to Bukharin and Trotsky.

By then, the group was being compared to the Kronstadt rebels and all of its leading exponents were first politically erased (Lenin already did so during the 10th Congress) and then, under Stalin, physically eliminated as well. Their programme (at the time and in subsequent reconstructions) was accused of being vague and anarcho-syndicalistic and suffering from a poor understanding of reality.

Of course many of the elements in the booklet Kollontai wrote remained incomplete: How should production be concretely managed, and by whom? More than the proletariat as an indistinct mass, Workers’ Opposition appears to have imagined this role performed by workers’ representatives—the unions, at both factory and national levels (also involving the trade associations, up to and including the Pan-Russian Congress).

If so, how might representatives be prevented from taking the road towards bureaucratization, becoming caught up in the same authoritarian drift that the group had condemned in the party?

And how should conflicts within the proletariat and trade unions be managed?

It was likewise unclear, moreover, how Workers’ Opposition intended to regulate relations between trade unions and the party: they clearly sought to ensure the pre-eminence of the former, but what role did they envision for the latter beyond generic supervision? And how to channel the party’s relationship with the state?

This tangle of unresolved theoretical and political-institutional knots arose once again, in a wholly different historical and geographical context (Sweden in the seventies), on the occasion of Rudolf Meidner’s proposal to establish wage-earner funds.Footnote 6

The most striking aspect of Kollontai’s participation in Workers’ Opposition, however, is the way her “feminist” activism (although the revolutionary did not like the term feminism, as at the time it referred to emancipationist struggles by bourgeois women) is so completely separated from her adherence to the trade union platform. The text she wrote does not even mention the problem of ensuring equal participation and representation for women in the new trade union-led economic and social system.

Kollontai’s silence, out of synch with her tireless commitment to women’s self-organization throughout the revolutionary process, can be interpreted as a tactical step backwards in the face of the trade union leaders’ lack of awareness on these issues. The point worth underlining here, however, is that this step backwards points to the difficulty in bringing together feminism and Marxism. Another sign of such difficulty is the fact that Kollontai’s work has been received quite schizophrenically, studied as either Marxist or feminist and only rarely as Marxist feminist. As Cinzia Arruzza reminds us, the two traditions have struggled to develop a shared language and coordinate their efforts in a shared project of anti-capitalist struggle, with both more often falling back on identity-based positions.