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Women can never take part in social and political life while they are tied to housework and the bringing up of children. Kollontai insisted that the organisation of women around these problems was central to the revolutionary movement.
There were other problems that could not be left undiscussed. Because woman's contribution towards production led to her subordinate role within the family, where the emphasis was on reproduction, she was oppressed and used in personal relationships. Kollontai does not hesitate to discuss women's sexuality and to analyse the confusion in a changing society of attitudes to love and sex. She knew from her personal experience the difficulty of establishing oneself as a human being in one's own right and could write with sympathy and insight of the psychological problems that faced individuals. particularly women. "Perhaps man has never in any age experienced loneliness of the soul with such pain and persistence.
"In our desire to escape this loneliness we love; and in such circumstances our human feelings cripple and exploit. Man's whole psyche will have to be changed so that he becomes capable of love." We therefore find in Kollontai's writing much that speaks for us today. But we completely misunderstand her if we quote her in defence of middle-class self-pity and self-analysis.
Kollontai is important to us just because although she sees so clearly the oppression of women at an economic, social and psychological level, she always connects the position of women with a view of the society as a whole, and the changes of women's lives with changes in society.
Only when production is run on socialist lines will the economic base disappear upon which the different levels of the "woman question" have been built up. Thus Kollontai wrote and campaigned against those middle-class organisations who were failing to tackle the problem at its economic roots Since only the working class is in the position to effect this change, Kollontai saw her main task as agitation among and organisation of working women. This is still the main task today.
Alix Holt REVIEW: Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Woman-A. Kollontai. (Orbach & Chambers, 1972) A danger to be faced by the new wave of women involved in any aspect of women's liberation is that they are liable, in the search for the "role of women in history" to go overboard on the idea. Consequently they lose the critical analysis of past events and so develop false ideas. This is not to say that this search should not go on but in doing so we should be conscious of the criteria which it is essential we use. An example of the dangers involved can be better seen if we look at this book quite critically. With an introduction by the "emancipated woman" Germaine Greer and with such a provocative title, it is obvious that this book is meant for the women's "movement" in the States and in Britain. (It also strikes me that the title could be one that is meant to appeal to any sexist who has never heard of A. Kollontai and who is interested in finding some sort of titillation to their own sex drives!)
Alexandra Kollontal-born 1872-died 1952: Member of the Menshevik Party during the early 1900s: joined the Bolshevik Party around 1914/16: member of the first Bolshevik government in 1917: a leading member of the Workers Opposition 1921: resigned 1922: Soviet diplomat until 1945; lived in retirement in Soviet Union until her death in 1952.Today she is hardly known in the Soviet Union. Many of her speeches and pamphlets are to be found in the Party archives and libraries but little if anything of hers is published. A few of her speeches and pamphlets are being published in English, plus, for some strange reason, this, her official autobiography, written in 1926 and covering all of 45 pages (including all those passages which she herself removed before publication in Moscow in the mid-20s.
It may sound disparaging but I can find little reason for the publication of this enlarged pamphlet other than that 1972 is the centenary of her birth and it is an appropriate piece to publish with an introduction by Greer on the front and a postscript by Iring Fetscher. Included too is the essay The New Woman written in 1922.
But the autobiography is meant to be the key writing in this volume and it hardly merits attention. There are almost no political ideas contained in the book: no discussion of political developments or analyses of events. Anything which she in 1926 thought was controversial or critical was carefully self-censored out. It ends up being a text which gives a skeleton view of her own life up to 1926 and explains or analyses nothingKey events or developments in the politics of the Soviet Union in the period from 1899 when she joined the Russian Social Democratic Party are either ignored or veiled by meaningless sentences. She does not explain for what reason she left the Menshevik Party. She refuses to develop any reasons for resigning from the Commissariat of Social Welfare in 1918: "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." She says nothing about the part she played in the Workers Opposition.
Any criticism, however slight, that she made of the Bolshevik Party in the first draft of her autobiography was deleted by her own pen. For example, she deleted: "For our Soviet marriage law, separated from the Church to be sure, is not essentially more progressive than the same laws that after all exist in other progressive democratie countries." Why she removed this, one is unsure; probably in Stalinist
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Russia the fact that the Soviet laws were being compared unfavourably with other countries may have been the motivation. (It would have been better had it been because her classification of bourgeois democratic countries le. Scandinavia ete. as "progressive democratic" was an incorrect one). However, to understand Kollontai's autobiography one must look at her political development.
Born in 1872 of middle-class parentage, she grew up when the Marxist parties were gaining increasing important. By 1899 she had joined the Social Democratic Party after having studied in Zurich for a short time. She participated in the revolutionary upsurge of 1905, and it is apparent that by this time she had developed a strong. indeed an overriding. Interest in the "woman question".
She had started to work with women workers, organising them and agitating amongst them. She was then a member of the Menshevik Party (although her reasons for joining the Menshevik Party are very sketchy in her autobiography) where she "was even branded as a 'syndicalist" by my Party comrades." Until 1908, when she was forced to emigrate due to police pressures on her, she spent most of her time working with the organisations of workers. Then she moved to Germany, While she was abroad she worked with Russian emigrees e.g. with Lunacharsky, Gorky, Bogdanov, Trotsky and Chicherin: agitating, writing articles and organising By 1915 she had developed a revolutionary defeatist position on the war and while working in Germany with Liebknecht and Luxemburg, she was moving rapidly towards the Bolshevik Party"
In March 1917 she returned to Russia and was used by the Bolsheviks as one of their first political agitators-others being Trotsky and Lunacharsky.
After the Revolution she was made Commissar of Social Welfare and gradually developed differences with the Bolshevik leadership, which had crystallised out by 1921 when she and Shiyapnikov led the Workers Opposition. By this date she was arguing that the management of the national economy should be a function of the all-Russian Congress of Producers organised in industrial unions, which should elect a central body to run the whole of the national economy. She was opposed to the Party control of the trade unions and denounced Lenin and Trotsky as militarisers of labour and promoters of inequality.
The Workers Opposition wanted to fight the increasing bureaucratisation of the Workers State and were demanding that the Bolsheviks trust the fate of the Soviet Union to the "working class which had raised it to power". The demands put forward included immediate satisfaction of workers' needs, equal wages and rewards for all, for supply without payment of food, clothing and lodging to all workers, and free medical attention, travel and education. Obviously these were Utopian demands in the Soviet Union in 1921 which could do nothing but divide and divert the Party. Lenin and Trotsky both argued that this was a deviation towards Syndicalism and Anarchism, and that such demands could only be met in an economy of plenty, Le. under full communism. 1921 Russia was not that! By 1922 she had left the Workers Opposition and in fact had withdrawn from the political debate. It was then that she opted out of revolutionary polities, accepting instead a diplomatic post in Norway, and in effect staying away from Russia until 1945.
For the whole of this time she remained silent. She never made any public statements about the Bonapartism of Stalin, the erosion of the fragile gains made by the women of Russia after 1917, or even the wholesale slaughter of all her old comrades of the Bolshevik Party. Not one word. She had turned her back on all her revolutionary experience and ideas.
And it cannot be claimed for her that she was ignorant of what was occurring in Russia. She had enough contact with the Russian leadership, even though she was in Scandinavia. She could read innumerable foreign languages, and the foreign press were reporting developments in the Soviet Union, She knew: and chose not to speak out. It is salutary to read her last deleted sentences from her autobiography: "No matter what further lasks I shall be carrying out, it is perfectly clear to me that the complete liberation of the working woman and the creation of a new sexual morality will always remain the highest aim of my activity, and of my life." —A sentence deleted because of the desire for self-preservation and the self-knowledge that by 1926 her words were only words.
Obviously Kollontai played an important part in developing ideas about morality and organising women both before and after the revolution, and her writing on the position of women is still important. But she was unable to grasp the fundamental importance of the ideas of the Bolsheviks, particularly in the crisis period of 1919 onwards, She retained many of her Illusions of what would be possible after the revolution and was unable to fit them to the grim realitles of a country facing extreme economie difficulties. When she did fight for her ideas and was defeated, she gave up everything and was unable to continue fighting the developing bureaucratisation of the state. This surely is one of the most important lessons to be learnt from Kollontai's example.
She gave up fighting for her ideas not only about workers the Soviet women gained from 1917 to 1920, she allowed to be weaned away without a murmur. The adulation of such a revolutionary must not be permitted! This "official" autobiography is the nail in her coffin and is interesting only for that.
Jane Porter Ist All-Russian Congress of Working Women and Peasant Women 1918 PKn
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democracy but also for those ideas for which we remember her-on the position of women. Most of the advances which