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Emancipation Through Communism: The Ideology of A. M. Kollontai

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Barbara Evans Clements
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Extract

Traditionally in surveys of Soviet history, if Alexandra Kollontai is mentioned she is presented briefly as the advocate of the “glass of water theory of sex,” a woman who practiced free love as freely as she preached it. The lecturer then moves on to more serious concerns, having ignored the history of a tormented, perceptive woman intimately involved in the early Soviet experiment in female emancipation. Kollontai advocated far more than free love, and the role she played was far greater than that of mistress to Alexander Shliapnikov. From 1917 until her departure from the Soviet Union in 1923 she held positions of major importance in the young government and in the Bolshevik party. Kollontai worked first as an agitator in 1917, then took the post of commissar of state welfare from November 1917 to March 1918, when she resigned in protest against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In 1921 she joined the Workers' Opposition, adding to Shliapnikov's proposals for trade-union reform her own call for party and government democratization and giving articulate voice to those demands in an often-cited pamphlet, The Workers' Opposition. Throughout the revolutionary years she was recognized as a major authority on the problems of women and child care. Since Kollontai did play an important role in the early period of Soviet history, her personality and ideology warrant study. That study in turn reveals a woman who perceived the problems of womanhood with clarity and who wrote about and sought a liberation beyond the comprehension of many of her contemporaries.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 1973 , pp. 323 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1973

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References

1. In fact, this author has yet to read that specific phrase in Kollontai's writings. The nearest instance is a passage written in 1921 (quoted below) in which she said sex should be “natural … like the satisfying of hunger and thirst.” The one contemporary who specifically referred to the “drink of water theory” was Lenin, in his famous interview with Klara Zetkin in 1919. See K lara, Zetkin, Lenin on the Woman Question (New York, 1934), p. 1934 Google Scholar. Possibly he drew the phrase from the popularized, vulgarized version of Kollontai's thought then circulating in Russia as a justification for promiscuity. For a discussion of sexual behavior in the Civil War years see Geiger, H. Kent, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 73–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Alexandra, Kollontai, Autobiographie einer sexuell emanzipierten Kommunistin, ed. Fetscher, Iring (Munich, 1970), p. 16 Google Scholar. Editor Fetscher italicized all words changed by Kollontai on the galleys of the Autobiographie. To avoid confusion, his italics will not be indicated here. His edition has been translated into English as The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman, ed. with an afterword by Iring Fetscher, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York, 1971).

3. Kollontai, , Novaia moral’ i rabochii klass (Moscow, 1918), p. 21.Google Scholar

4. The theme of the female need for dependence on the male recurs frequently in her work. See, for example, the attack on this “atavistic” tendency in Novaia moral', p. 13. Her fictional heroines always battled such a need; see A Great Love, trans. Lily Lore (New York, 1929).

5. For the importance of affiliational need in the traditional female personality see Judith, Bardwick, The Psychology of Women (New York, 1970), pp. 157–58.Google Scholar

6. The contents of the following paragraph and the term “idea-element” were suggested by Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” pp. 47-76, and Philip Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” pp. 206-61, both in Apter, David E., ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York, 1964).Google Scholar

7. Kollontai, , Zhizn’ Finliandskikh rabochikh (St. Petersburg, 1903), pp. 106, 277Google Scholar; Kollontai, , … K voprosu o klassovoi bor'be (St. Petersburg, 1905), p. 17.Google Scholar

8. K voprosu o klassovoi bor'be, p. 7; Kollontai, , Kto takie sotsial'-demokraty i chego oni khotiat (Minsk, n.d.), p. 10.Google Scholar

9. Zhizn’ Finliandskikh rabochikh, p. 124.

10. K voprosu o klassovoi bor'be, pp. 12-13.

11. Kollontai, , Po rabochei Evrope (St. Petersburg, 1912), p. 16.Google Scholar

12. Kollontai, “Kollontai, Aleksandra Mikhailovna,” Deiateli SSSR i Oktidbr'skoi revolintuii : Entsiklopedicheskii slovar', supplement Granat Entsiklopediia, vol. 41, pts. 1-3 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1925-29), p. 201.

13. Marx's comments on the subject are found throughout his works. See Jean Freville, La femme et le communisme : Anthologie des grandes textes du Marxisme (Paris, 1960). Engels's major work on the subject is, of course, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and Bebel's is Woman Under Socialism.

14. Kollontai, , … Trud zhenshchiny v evoliutsii khoziaistva (lektsii chitannye v Universitete imeni la. M. Sverdlova) (Moscow, 1923), p. 31.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 59.

16. Kollontai, “Tezisy o kommunisticheskoi morali v oblasti brachnikh otnoshenii, “ Kommunistka, no. 12-13 (May-June 1921), pp. 28-3417.

17. Kollontai, , … Rabotnitsa-mat' (Petrograd, 1917), p. 21.Google Scholar

18. Novaia moral', p. 9. The reference is to the first article in the book, “Novaia zhenshchina,” reprinted here. It originally appeared in 1913.

19. Red Love (New York, 1927), p. 283.

20. Marcel, Body, “Alexandra Kollontai,” Preuves (Paris), no. 14 (April 1952), p. 19.Google Scholar

21. Kto takie sotsial'-demokraty, p. 14. This pamphlet is undated. Another edition bears the date 1918, but it is a reprint of the original article which appeared in Rabochii ezhegodnik, 1 (1906) : 74-87.

22. Isaac, Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (New York, 1954), pp. 148–50.Google Scholar

23. Robert V., Daniels, “The State and Revolution : A Case Study in the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology,” American Slavic and East European Review, 12, no. 1 (February 1953) : 22–43 Google Scholar; Ulam, Adam B., The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965), p. 1965 Google Scholar. For a recent analysis see Rodney, Barfield, “Lenin’s Utopianistn : State and Revolution,” Slavic Review, 30, no. 1 (March 1971) : 45–56 Google Scholar. Even Barfield notes that the essay is not representative of Lenin's “political philosophy” but of his “fundamental philosophy of man” (p. 56). For Kollontai the two aspects of her world view could not be divorced, since the “philosophy of man” dictated the “political philosophy” without any intervening distrust of human spontaneity.

24. Kollontai, … Otryvki iz dnevnika 1914 g. (Leningrad, 1923), p. 78. Since it appeared in 1923, the passage may also be an oblique criticism of the Soviet bureaucracy, against which Kollontai protested openly in 1921.

25. The contents of the foregoing are based on Rabotnitsa-mat', pp. 22-30, but essentially the same program may be found in Kollontai, , … Obshchestvo i materinstvo (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 18–20Google Scholar, 167, and in Kto takie sotsial'-demokraty, p. 14.

26. Kollontai, “Pis'ma k trudiasheiia molodezhi; pis'mo 3; o ‘drakone’ i ‘beloi ptitse, '” Molodaia gvardiia, 1923, no. 2, p. 163.

27. Kto takie sotsial'-demokraty, p. 6.

28. Kollontai, , “Excerpts from the Works of A. M. Kollontay,” in Schlesinger, Rudolf, ed., Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia : The Family in the U.S.S.R. (London, 1949), p. 52.Google Scholar

29. Georgii, Petrov, “Posol‧ revoliutsii (A. M. Kollontai),” in Zhenshchiny russkoi revoliutsii : Ocherki (Moscow, 1968), p. 197.Google Scholar

30. Rabotnitsa-mat', p. 20; Isabel de Palencia, Alexandra Kollontai, Ambassadress from Russia (New York, 1947), p. 142; Kollontai, , Communism and the Family (London, [1918]), p. 22.Google Scholar

31. Kto takie sotsial'-demokraty, p. 6. Kendall E. Bailes notes that Kollontai seemed unconcerned about problems of “material production” after the abolition of private property. See Kendall E. Bailes, “Alexandra Kollontai et la nouvelle morale,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 4 (October-December 1965) : 477.

32. Kollontai, , La juventud communista y la moral sexual (Madrid, [1933]), p. 20.Google Scholar

33. August, Bebel, Woman Under Socialism, trans. Leon, Daniel De (New York, 1904), pp. 79, 86Google Scholar.

34. Kollontai, , … Prostitutsiia i mery bor'by s nei (Moscow, 1921), p. 22 Google Scholar; La juventud, pp. 28, 32.

35. David E. Apter, “Ideology and Discontent,” in Apter, Ideology and Discontent, p. 19; J. F., Wolpert, “Myth of Revolution,” Ethics, 58 (1948) : 249.Google Scholar