Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai

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Alexandra Kollontai

Alexandra Michailovna Kollontai b. Domontowitsch ( Russian Александра Михайловна Коллонтай ., Scientific transliteration Alexandra Michajlovna Kollontaj ; born March 19 . Jul / 31 March  1872 greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 9. March 1952 in Moscow ) was a Russian revolutionary , diplomat and writer. She was the first female minister and ambassador in recent history. Kollontai implemented social reform ideas in her time as People's Commissar and was committed to increasing the importance of women in Russian society. She repeatedly criticized the leaders Lenin and Stalin , yet she remained the only member of the CPSU Central Committee of 1927 to survive the great purge initiated by Stalin .

Life

Youth and first marriage (1872–1898)

The daughter of a rich Russian general of Ukrainian origin and a Finnish mother received her extensive schooling - in line with her father's class - from private tutors. She graduated from high school in St. Petersburg . As a high school student, she had already joined the socialist movement

In 1893, against her parents' wishes, she married her cousin, the socially inferior engineering student Wladimir Kollontai.

Political engagement and exile (1898–1917)

Five years later she left her husband and son and became politically active. (“I wanted to be free” - she later commented on this step.) In 1898, at the age of 26, she matriculated at the University of Zurich for the subjects of social and economic sciences . Here, too, she was committed to the socialist movement. In her writings, she primarily addressed the situation of women and called for equality between the sexes from the start. Because she vehemently agitated against the government in her writings, she faced arrest and condemnation.

Kollontai went into exile in 1908, first to Germany , then France , later back to Germany and from 1914 to Scandinavia . Kollontai experienced the beginning of the First World War in Germany. At the beginning of the war she was interned as an enemy foreigner and was deported to Denmark and not to Russia because of the efforts of the German Reichstag representative Karl Liebknecht . But she soon had to leave Sweden because of her Marxist writings and went to Norway .

Kollontai (front row, right) 1921 at III. World Congress of the Comintern ; next to her in the middle of the picture is the German KPD delegate Clara Zetkin

She belonged to the Mensheviks until 1915 and then became a supporter of the Bolsheviks .

People's Commissar (1917-1918)

Kollontai returned to Russia in February 1917 from a lecture tour in the United States and joined Lenin. She stood up for the councils , agitated against the provisional government (among other things, she was the initiator of the Kronstadt mutiny during the July uprising ) and was a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet that same year . In July 1917 she was accused of treason by Alexander Kerensky , Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, and was subsequently arrested. Through Maxim Gorky's intervention , she was released on bail.

After the victory of the Bolsheviks , shortly after November 7, 1917, Lenin accepted her into the Council of People's Commissars and appointed her head of the People's Commissariat for Social Welfare. She was the first woman to belong to the revolutionary Russian cabinet , making her the first woman minister in the world.

Kollontai, a single mother and People's Commissar for Social Welfare, pushed through in the young Soviet Union that marriage law was relaxed and maternity protection improved. She fought for the right to abortion and proposed popular kitchens and collective child rearing.

Pawel Dybenko and Alexandra Kollontai, around 1920

While living on a Red Fleet cruiser in Kronstadt in 1917 during the Juliet Uprising, she met a sailor, Pawel Dybenko , with whom she left Kronstadt to marry in the Crimea. While Kollontai became a supporter of Stalin, her husband, although now an admiral, was shot as a Trotskyist in 1938 .

Political differences and functions within the party (1918–1923)

Alexandra Kollontai rejected the Brest-Litowsk peace treaty because, in her opinion, it contained excessive concessions to Germany. She therefore resigned in March 1918 from her position as People's Commissar for Social Affairs. She was then entrusted with tasks within the party. In 1920 she took over the chairmanship of the women's department at the Central Committee of the CPSU as the successor to Ines F. Armand .

With her criticism of the bureaucracy at the 10th party congress in March 1921, she came under fire from the anti-party opposition , which probably also encouraged her to take on functions abroad.

Ambassador (1923–1945)

In 1923 she became envoy of the Soviet Union in Norway. Kollontai was the first accredited diplomat worldwide. It was thanks to her that Norway not only recognized the Soviet Union, but also concluded a very important economic treaty in 1925. In November 1926 she moved to Mexico and a year later back to Oslo. From November 1930 Kollontai worked in Stockholm. When the Soviet Union was admitted to the League of Nations in 1935 , Kollontai was a member of the Soviet delegation in Geneva.

As she reports in her diaries, in a newspaper article in 1927 she criticized the "party opposition" led by Leon Trotsky and Leo Kamenev as "harmful". She was silent about the purges in the Soviet Union since 1937. Even when her former husband Pawl Dybenko was arrested and shot for alleged "Trotskyist attitudes", she did not comment (according to the available documents). However, according to her diaries, she campaigned internally for the release of arrested friends.

She was involved in the peace negotiations with Finland in 1939/40, which led to the peace of Moscow , whereupon she was awarded the title of ambassador by Stalin in 1943. Kollontai was ambassador to Sweden until 1945.

Last years (1945–1952)

Kollontai withdrew from all offices at the end of World War II and retired to Moscow, but remained there until her death on March 9, 1952, an important advisor to the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

Her grave is in the Moscow Cemetery of the New Virgin Convent .

Political attitudes

Alexandra Kollontai was a committed feminist and socialist all her life . As early as 1905 she had campaigned for autonomous women's departments within the Communist Party. However, it distinguished itself sharply from the bourgeois feminist movement because it defended the thesis that equality between women and men could be achieved only under socialism.

Kollontai, a single mother and People's Commissar for Social Welfare, pushed through in the young Soviet Union that marriage law was relaxed and maternity protection improved. She fought for the right to abortion and proposed popular kitchens and collective child rearing.

She propagated so-called communal houses and free love (and sexuality). She tried to realize these ideals at a time when it was still a matter of securing the revolution against the White Guards and the intervention armies . As a result, she met with criticism from Lenin , who described her sexual-political views as the glass-water theory .

"It is not the sexual relations that determine the moral reputation of women, but their value in working life, in socially useful work"

In art and film

In 1969, her role as the world's first female diplomat was filmed in the Soviet Union under the title Ambassador of the Soviet Union (original title: Russian Посол Советского Союза , "Posol Sowjetskogo Sojusa"). The film was seen by 38.9 million Soviet viewers within one year and was also seen on television, among others. a. in the GDR.

Honors

The asteroid (2467) Kollontai was named after her.

Works

Kollontai 1918 (for comrade and friend Louise Bryant )
  • Autobiography of a sexually emancipated communist . Guhl, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-88220-015-4
  • I've lived many lives ... Autobiographical records . Dietz, Berlin (GDR) 1987, ISBN 3-7609-0523-4 (slightly shortened compared to the Russian editions, with 50 illustrations)
  • My life in diplomacy. Records from 1922 to 1945 . Dietz, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-320-02043-9
  • The new morality and the working class . Verlag Frauenpolitik, Münster 1977, ISBN 3-88175-025-8
  • The situation of women in social development. 14 lectures . New Critique Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. 1977, ISBN 3-8015-0140-X
  • Wassilissa Malygina. Stories about "ways of love" in early Soviet Russia. Women between marriage and revolution . Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt / M. 1974, ISBN 3-87877-067-7 (repr. Of the Berlin 1925 edition)
  • Ways of love. Three stories . Der Morgenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-371-00357-4 (repr. Of the Berlin 1925 edition)
  • The long way. Stories, essays, comments . New Critique Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. 1979, ISBN 3-8015-0160-4
  • Autobiography (1926), in: Elga Kern (Ed.): Leading Women in Europe , Munich 1999 [1928], pp. 122-139

literature

Web links

Commons : Alexandra Kollontai  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Leonhard: The revolution dismisses its children . 15th paperback edition, Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. 1976, p. 44.
  2. ↑ Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 86 , PDF file , P. 4
  3. ↑ Barbara Evans Clements: Bolshevik Feminist , Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1979, p. 14
  4. ↑ Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 87 , PDF file , P. 5
  5. ↑ Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 90 , PDF file , P. 8
  6. ↑ a b c Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 91 , PDF file, p. 9
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g Joachim Schwelien: Obituary for Alexandra Kollontai Die Zeit , March 20, 1952
  8. ↑ a b Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 92 , PDF File, p. 11
  9. ↑ Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 99 , PDF file , P. 17
  10. ↑ a b Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 92 , PDF File, p. 10
  11. ↑ Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 118 , PDF file , P. 36
  12. ↑ Antje Leetz: "Amazone" of the revolution - from the life of Alexandra Kollontai. Radiofeature, SFB / ORB / SR / NDR 2003 (retransmitted by WDR3 2019, online, from August 3, 2019 )
  13. ↑ Antje Leetz: "Amazone" of the Revolution - From the life of Alexandra Kollontai (2003)
  14. ↑ Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 95 , PDF file , P. 13
  15. ↑ Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000, p. 102/103 , PDF File, p. 20
  16. ↑ Helmut Steiner: Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872–1952) on Theory and Practice of Socialism - Revised and expanded version of a lecture given to the Leibniz Society's class for social sciences and humanities on December 21, 2000 p. 123 , PDF file , P. 41
personal data
SURNAME Kollontai, Alexandra Mikhailovna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Коллонтай, Александра Михайловна (Russian); Kollontaj, Alexandra Michajlovna (scientific transliteration); Domontowitsch, Alexandra Michailowna (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian revolutionary, diplomat and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH March 9, 1952
Place of death Moscow