Alexandra Kollontai served as Minister Plenipotentiary for Social Welfare in the Bolshevik government in 1917 (Getty)

Alexandra Kollontai, Russian, born in 1872, is one of the most prominent women who fought for workers' rights, women's freedom, and the rights and wages of working women.

She is the first woman to hold the position of minister in modern history, and she was an ambassador and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice.

She is a thinker, theorist, and orator who was able to influence crowds with her eloquence and the power of her rhetoric.

She died of a stroke in 1952.

Birth and upbringing

Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born on March 31, 1872 in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Her father was an officer and intellectual from the nobility in Ukraine. He rose to become a military consul and was sent to Bulgaria.

Kollontai's father wrote books on history, including his liberal political views, and wrote about the wars of the Russians and the Turks. However, the authorities considered his writings to belittle the image of Russian soldiers in front of their counterparts, so an order was issued banning their publication.

Kollontai received a rigorous home education from a number of nannies, mastered a number of languages, demonstrated a clear interest in history and demonstrated an edge over her peers.

Study and scientific training

Her aristocratic society was concerned with preparing her to play an important role in society, but Kollontai loved her cousin, a student at the Higher Institute of Engineering, Vladimir Ludvigovich Kollontai, and married him against the will of her mother, who strongly rejected him because of his poverty, but she insisted and married him at the age of 19 in 1890 and took his name until another. Her life.

At the beginning of her marriage, Kollontai accompanied her husband, an engineer at a textile factory in Narva, to install a ventilator for the factory. She saw his difficult working conditions, which lasted 18 hours, and watched people die of tuberculosis, and then she devoted herself to reading socialist books.

After she had her son, Michael, she left him with her husband, when he was three years old, and traveled to study political economy at the Swiss University of Zurich in 1896.

Alexandra Kollontai in Stockholm in August 1930 (Associated Press)

Political and practical experience

Kollontai joined the Russian Socialist Party in 1896, which provided her with an opportunity to study in Switzerland, where she devoted herself to studying the ideas of socialist theorist Karl Marx and Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. In her first book, she examined the living conditions of the Finnish proletariat in relation to industry. The book was published in 1903.

However, her star became clear as a revolutionary woman and an influential orator after World War I, and she announced that she had become a Bolshevik who opposed imperialism.

Jobs and responsibilities

Since 1915, Kollontai worked as an assistant to Lenin, and in October 1917 she became the first woman to be elected a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. She considered capitalism the first enemy and the main reason for the oppression of women.

Kollontai hated war, and even said that wars throw the children of the proletariat into cannon fodder, and here was her main disagreement with Lenin, who considered that arming workers and peasants had a noble goal, which was to overthrow capitalism, and he co-opted it under the pretext of the higher interest, and she became his deputy, and she was one of the few Bolsheviks who supported him in his call. Civil war in Russia.

After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, she was appointed the first Minister Plenipotentiary for Social Welfare, which made her view women and the family with the eyes of a theorist and thinker, and she published her book “Society and Motherhood.”

Her work as Minister Plenipotentiary played a major role in reviewing Russian family law, and she helped organize it, abolished the law on patriarchal authority over women, and wrote a legal text that abolishes the idea of ​​considering women as part of men’s property, and equates women with men.

Lenin asked her to write an inflammatory book, to be translated and distributed internationally. The booklet succeeded after it was published and translated into several languages, which gave Kollontai international recognition. She was sent an official invitation from the American Socialist Party, and she toured throughout Europe.

However, Kollontai resigned from the ministry in 1918 in response to the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and opposed economic policies, turning into an anarcho-syndicalist.

Her disagreements with the ruling party continued until she left the government in 1922, but unlike most of her revolutionary comrades, she survived Joseph Stalin's purges because of her standing in the international community.

Kollontai was then appointed ambassador to the Soviet government in Mexico, Norway, and Sweden.

She headed the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations, and at the end of her life she worked as an advisor to the US State Department.

Kollontai, the first Soviet ambassador to Norway (Getty)

Writings and achievements

Kollontai called for women's financial independence, and saw that household tasks hindered them from their role, so they called for the establishment of nurseries and public laundries that eased the domestic burdens on women.

It expanded parental leave for workers, and liberalized marriage from the church, thus helping to approve divorce.

Then came her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize twice, due to her mediation to stop the war between Finland and the Soviet Union.

She was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1933, the Izhik Order in 1944, the Order of St. Olav, and the Order of the Red Banner of the Workers' Party.

At the end of her life, she devoted herself to writing her memoirs, writing books and articles, and had several dissertations. Among her publications were:

  • "Emancipation of working women."

  • "The social basis of the women's issue."

  • "The New Woman."

  • The novel "The Love of the Beekeeper."

  • Thesis on "Communist ethics in the field of relationships and marriage."

  • Thesis on "Marxist analysis of love and sex."

Death

Kollontai spent the end of her life collecting and writing her autobiography and coordinating her memoirs until she suffered a stroke, and she died on March 9, 1952, at the age of 79.

Source: websites