Jenny Flintoft reviews tionary movement.
but wife, or anything but (speculate, mistress?
German Democratic brilliant theorist? Who could say anything at all about her activist compatriot Klara Zetkin?
Kollontai, the only woman in Lenin's government? Her beauty, theory, not hers at all, that sex is like a glass of water.
Born into a world of ball-gowns antes, Kollontai became of the mos militant Bolsheviks, prolific wailer. and tireless worker amongst factory wolden Violently repudiating bourgeois Slic nevertheless fought fiercely women's pered constantly by the allu fredownright hostiDivisive In the harsh conditions revolutionary Kusha Kollontai's belief that real political change had to be accompanied by formation in personal and family relationships seemed a luxury, and her campaign for a separate party women's organisation dangerously divisive.
First the Bolsheviks 1904. she became Menshevik 1906. A convinced internaKollontai's newly That's what the average Inessa Armand as speculate) his Who cares that Rosa Luxemburg was the Party's most And what is remembered of Alexandra her love affairs and a tionalist, she rejoined the Bolsheviks after the Menfailed UDDUSC the 1914-18 war. She translated Lenin's War These and travell ed to Scandinavia and the USA, propagandising against the war.
Agitator In June 1917 she was working with Petrograd's laundry women, who toiled long hours for a pittance in appalling condiLiulis. During their strike she persuaded them to add the Bolshevik anti-war and anti-government slogans to their own demands.
At the 4 April Petrograd Soviet she was the onBolshevik delegate openly to endorse Lenin's famous April Theses.
Lenin heavily relied on her as an agitator • she spoke day, writing pamphlets in between After the October Revolution she took charge of the Commissariat In Constant contact with peasant women. AS equality Culcos was meaningless while women were oppressed in their daily lives.
Wanting to call explicitly for the death of the nuclear family, she desisted in deference The two faces of Kollontai Lenin. She did however criticise the bureaucracy's threat to the women's organisations.
Throughout 1919 and 1920 the growing Workers' Opposition also criticised the expanding bureaucracy. Sympathising with the Opposition's WOrKCIS control over production, , the ending of large-scale employment of bourgeois specialThis could Women's Own.
very convincingly. style from the sweeping own minds about Lists — Kollontai hesitated to commit herself for fear of jeopardising her work in the Zhenotde (the party women's department eventually set up September 1919).
She finally joined in February 1921 increasing numbers workers, weary of famine, fuel-shortages, epidemics, and atrocious housing were rallying to the Ophead completely and fell deeply in love.' have come straight out of Her characters too, are not developed Unly Natasna Is seen know nothing Senya's thoughts, and Anyuta hardly exists at all. Everything is presented too unequivocally - no chance of making up our position, which had a firm base in the unions.
Written for the tenth party Kollontai's Workers' Opposition pamphlet deplored the party's alienation from the masses.
Despite their pertinen criticisms the Workers Opposition was lambasted as petty and syndicalist by Lenin and nis supporiers altacks on the rather confus ULU gramme of the Opposition were marred by some personal innuendos and squaattempts to discredit Kollontai.
Furthermore Lenin took the historic and disastrous step of banning party factions.
Kollontai, now isolated in the party, was expelled from the Zhenotdel's directorship in 1922, and effectively condemned political inactivity Then Norway aș a member of the Russian trade delegation. This was the beginning diplomatic career which lasted until 1945.
Her eleven languages, her tact and sympathy, and the warmth, wit, originality and sincerity which had made her popular as an agitational speaker ensured her sucBut it was still exile. In Russia her were systematically misrepresented and she was sub jected to vicious personal douse Demoralised, saddened by the ending of her second marriage, and sick will alixicly • Ior • her son.
comrades, her party are told Anyuta unimaginative, yet kind and generous polical Trades, to feel one's work appreciated. that.
love!
more powerful.
her friends, devoted to her work of sonal relationships and loving and living those experienced by women today.
and the working people of the Soviet Union, Kollontai sought solace in writing fiction.
She was too disillusion. ed to fight now; it seemed futile. She hid her real feel. ings nening mechanical appeals for party unity 1930 she told he secretary Marcel Body: 've but mv principles in to a corner of my conscience and i carry out a well as I can the policies dictated to me. Comfort Throughout the 1930s filtered through Scandinavia of the torture. murder and suicide of Kollontai's old comrades.
Her chief comfort now was, as always, the loving support of women friends especially Zoya, a friend childhood, and Isa Palencia, Republican Spain's ambassador.
Personal relationships had always been important for Kollontai; at the funerof American socialist Jack Reed she said. 'We all call ourselves communists, but are we really! 'Don't we rather draw life's those who come to us, and when they're • longer of any use to us let them fall by the wayside, neglected and lorgollell! Our Cullillu nism and our comradeship are dead letters if we don't give ourselves to those who need us.
Kollontai died in 1952 the last of the old Bolsheviks (apart of her adult the Revolution. Not one word of official tribute appeared in the Soviet press.
A novel is not a political pamphlet. We conventional, but we never see these traits - no scenes hint the absorbing ideas in Natasha's head. But Kollontai does bring out something never talked about in revolutionary politics -the need to feel needed by one's comThe novel ends with Natasha leaving Senya forever. Departing, she reflects on Senya's destruction of her love for him. A simple, effective ending - but Kollontai is too much the pamphleteer to leave it at She ruins the whole effect with a final polemical sentence: 'So learn from this, all vou men who have made women sutte through your blindness, and know that if you injure a woman's heart you will kill her The whole novel is in fact too polemical and too explicit - it lacks the irony. and subtlety which would have made it far Yet it is moving and convincing, and it is Natasha (who is really Kollontai) that makes it so. Vulnerable, lonely in spite of easily swayed by sexual pas sion, she is also strong, independent and with Thirty-Two Pages (the second story in the trilogy) A Great Love portrays the same conflicts between perwork, between an independent life as Socialist Challenge 23 April 1981
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published novel and looks at her eventful life. WOMEN have played no part in the revolu-
person could well be forgiven for thinking. Who knows Nadezhda Krupskaya as anything Lenin's