Alexandra Kollontai: Socialist Feminism in Theory and Practice

ABSTRACT

Alexandra Kollontai is not much celebrated or even remembered, although she was the rare woman with important roles before, during, and after the October Revolution. She was on the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1917, the only woman member, and Commissar of Social Welfare in the first Soviet government. She ought to be of great interest, because: (1) Although a dissident in many ways, she survived the purges, and died of illness at the age of 80; (2) Her life was full of physical and political challenges, yet she fostered many important reforms for the rights of women, as well as constructive diplomatic solutions during World War II; (3) Her ideas about the family, love, and sex under communism were perhaps advanced for her time, but raised important questions (often trivialized by socialists) for a future socialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Kollontai
• feminism
• socialist family
• Bolsheviks
• October Revolution

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Joan Roelofs is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New Hampshire, USA. She is the translator of Victor Considerant’s Principles of Socialism (Maisonneuve Press, 2006), and author of Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (State University of New York Press, 2003) and Greening Cities (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). She has translated, with Shawn Wilbur, Charles Fourier’s World War of Small Pastries (Autonomedia, 2015). Roelofs is an anti-war and red-green activist, and an editor of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. Her website is www.joanroelofs.wordpress.com.

Notes

1 The plan is shown and described in Denis Romodin’s “House of the New Life” (2016).