Rev Left Radio - The Life and Legacy of Alexandra Kollontai

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

Kristen R. Ghodsee returns to the show, this time to discuss the life, work, and legacy of the famous Marxist Feminist Alexandra Kollontai. We discuss her life, her radicalization, her relationship with other famous revolutionaries, her role in the October Revolution, her enduring contributions to feminism, Marxism, and proletarian history, and much, much more.  Check out Kristen's work here: https://kristenghodsee.com/ Check out AK-47, Kristen's podcast dedicated to Kollontai here: https://kristenghodsee.com/podcast Here are all the previous episodes of RLR that Kristen has been a guest on: Red Hangover: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/red-hangover-legacies-of-20th-century-communism-w-dr-kristen-r-ghodsee International Women's Day: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/womens-day Women Behind the Iron Curtain: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/women-under-socialism ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I have a wonderful episode for you today. We have back on this show, Professor Kristen Gatsi, who's been on RevLeft numerous times for numerous fan-favored episodes. This time she's on to talk about the Marxist feminist Alexandra Collentai. This is a deep dive into her life and then in the second section into her philosophy. and contributions to feminism, to Marxism, to the struggle for liberation on all fronts. And you can tell when you listen to Kristen talk about Kalentai how deep of an influence she has had on Kristen, and Kristen just talks fluently and can talk for hours about Kalentai.

So I could not have asked for a better guest to cover the life and work of this amazing proletarian and feminist hero. So without further ado, we're just going to get right into the episode. I will say this, though, that since Kristen has been on so many times, in the show notes to this episode, I'll make sure to actually link all the times that Kristen has been on Rev Left. So if you like this episode, which I'm sure you will, and you haven't heard some of those previous interviews and discussions that we've had, they'll be in the show notes so you can go back and sort of check out all the times that Kristen has blessed Rev Left with her presence. And lastly, if you stick around to after the outro music,

you'll hear me read an article by Kristen on Collentai called The Most Famous Feminist you've never heard of, in which, among other things, she tells a fascinating story about how Collinthai helped German Jews escape the Nazis. So listen after the outro music for that wonderful article as well. But without further ado, let's get into this wonderful episode on the life and work of Alexander Collentai with my friend Kristen Gotzi. Enjoy. My name is Kristen Godzi.

I am a professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the graduate group in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm also the author of a number of books looking at women and state socialism, both before and after 1989, probably most famously, why women had better sex under socialism.

and other arguments for economic independence. And I'm also the host of a podcast on the life and works of Alexander Colentai called AK-47, because I read and discuss 47 discrete works of Alexander Colentai's on the podcast. Wonderful. Well, Kristen, you are a multiple-time return guest for Rev. I have a fan favorite and one of my favorite guests to have on. So it's always a pleasure and an honor to have you back on. And this topic with Alexander Collentai, her life, her work, her philosophy, couldn't have asked for a better guest to come on.

And as we'll probably say at the end of this discussion as well, definitely check out AK-47 if you're interested in more Collentai. I will link to that in the show notes as well. But yeah, this is a long overdue podcast. Collin-Tie is a thinker that I think sometimes gets overlooked on the left when we look back at our heroes. I mean, probably not in feminist spaces, but on the left broadly. So she's a figure that is really central to the Marxist feminist struggle, to Marxism and feminism separately and combined. And so I'm really excited to dive into her life and works. I think the best way to start, specifically maybe for people who might not know a lot about who she is, is just to sort of do an overview of who Collentai was, why she's an important historical figure. I mean, for the left specifically, but just in general. You could take that question, however, wherever you want. Yeah, sure. I mean, I just wanted to jump on something that you said and mentioned that she's also very much overlooked in Western feminist circles. I mean, I was just looking at various feminist theory readers, textbooks that are used to teach feminist theory at universities around the world. And she's often just completely erased, even though she's probably one of the most important figures when we're talking about kind of left feminism. And it's precisely because of her left feminism that she tends to be ignored in these historiotics. of the global women's movement.

So who was she? She was born in 1872 of the old Russian nobility. Her father was actually a general in the Tsar's army. And her mother was a daughter of a very wealthy Finnish businessman. And she had a pretty privileged upbringing because she, you know, she was expected to make a very good match. and she essentially becomes a revolutionary. She sort of overrides her parents' wishes, marries a poor cousin, stays married for a couple of years.

That doesn't work out. She has a son. And eventually she sort of self-radicalizes. Her husband is an engineer who takes her to a textile factory in Narva, where she sees absolutely appalling working conditions. Her husband, who's this engineer, is there to install a ventilator because workers, there are like 12,000 workers in this factory who work like 18-hour days, locked in, and they're breathing these fibers so that the workers last about three, four years before they die of tuberculosis. And she's just absolutely horrified by what she sees, and she starts reading socialist books. she says herself that she came to socialism through books because she sort of self-taught herself.

And what's really important about Colentai is from that moment that she visits that factory in Narva, she becomes a committed revolutionary for the rest of her life. And why she's so important, I think, as a historical figure is because, first of all, she's what I would call a left fluid person. She spends many years as a Menshevik, a social democrat. She really believes in the possibilities initially of reform or what in Russia is called revisionism and of just making the lives of the poor incrementally better

if it's possible within the existing framework of the system. After World War I, she becomes a Bolshevik, largely because she's very much opposed to the imperialist war. But then after the Bolshevik revolution, she sort of slides into what we would call anarcho-syndicalism, and she joins the workers' opposition. And then very late in life, after she sort of banished from the Soviet Union, she becomes more or less a stalwart supporter of Stalin in the Soviet Union, especially during the Second World War, largely because she hates Hitler and the fascists. So she was this very important revolutionary. she is appointed as the first commissar of social welfare in the Soviet Union right after the Bolshevik Revolution. She was very, very close with Lennon and Krupskaya, Lenin's wife and Inessa Armand

in sort of setting up the infrastructure for women's involvement in the revolution. After her joining of this thing called the Workers' Opposition, the sort of more anarcho-sindicalist part of the Bolshevik Party, she sent away. First, as a diplomat to Norway, later she is the Soviet ambassador to Mexico, and then she spends many years as the Soviet ambassador to Sweden. And she's in Stockholm during the Second World War. She's very important in brokering the peace between the Soviet Union and Finland after the Winter War, for which she is twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. And aside from all of her kind of political work and diplomatic work, she was an incredible theorist of women's emancipation through socialism, of using Marxism and understanding

the need to overthrow capitalism as an essential and fundamental part of women's emancipation. And in that, she was very much opposed to what she called the bourgeois feminists, what we would call probably the liberal feminists, the kind of hashtag girl boss feminists, leaning in to try to make women equally able to access the highest echelons of wealth and power rather than actually trying to create social justice and equality for all men and women within the context of a more socialistic society. So as a theorist, as a politician, as a revolutionary, as a a diplomat. She was an incredibly important figure in the 20th century for women's movements internationally, a huge inspiration to many people. But unfortunately, largely forgotten by both

feminists and socialists to this day. Yeah, absolutely. I do think there is some sort of a resurgence interest in her work very, very recently on the Marxist feminist left. I have many connections with Marxist feminists and Collentai continually gets brought up more and more. So I'm hoping that there is a sort of resurgence of interest in her. And hopefully we can help add to that as well. But now that we've got the big pieces on the table and we have an overview of her life, let's kind of drill down into some of the details. You mentioned that she was sort of an autodidact. She taught herself. Did she have any formal education? And when it came to her politics, did she have any really pronounced influences?

Yeah. So, okay, so obviously because she was of the upper classes, she was educated by private governesses at home. And so she was a polyglot. She spoke multiple languages. She was very, very well read. When she comes to socialism after her trip to this factory in Narva, one of the first books, that she reads, which really radicalizes her, is August Bebel's woman in socialism. She also reads Friedrich Engels, the origin of the family, private property, and the state.

And obviously, she reads a slew of Marxist texts, which are available in translation at Russia at the end of the 19th century. When she decides to leave her husband and her child, which she does, she goes and studies for three years at the university in Zurich, in Switzerland, because opportunities, obviously, for women in higher education in Russia were limited, but also she wanted to study Marxist economics. She actually wanted to go to where the center of some of these theories were being discussed. And at the time, it was Plekhanov, who was really kind of the leaving thinker of the party. And she, so she studies for three years in Zurich.

But again, I think her formal studies are not as important, and she says this herself as her own readings and interpretations of the books that she had available to her. In terms of her political influences, I think certain people play a really important role in her life. So as I mentioned, Plikhanov was obviously very important early on. She is and remains a Menshevik for quite a long period of time, largely because when she returns to Russia, She splits with her husband and she starts to become involved in agitating and organizing strikes among women workers, textile workers, laundresses, a wide variety of women in St. Petersburg. And she's part of the 1905 failed attempt at Revolution in Russia. And during her time in the underground, she is, even though she herself is more aligned with the

Menshevik party, there's not such a big division at this point in time in Russia, and she has many, many Bolshevik friends. So Alexander Bogdanov, for instance, really kind of a Bolshevik Renaissance man who was a doctor and a science fiction writer and a philosopher, I think, was a very important influence on her. And then in 1908, she is forced to flee Russia and lives in exile in Western Europe for nine years because the Tsarist police are after her for all of her revolutionary work. And at that period of time, she's living largely in Berlin. She travels all over Europe giving lectures. She's a very popular orator, a very prolific writer.

She's writing for all sorts of newspapers and doing translations because she speaks so many languages. But in Berlin, she becomes very close with Carl and Sophia Lipnacht, as well as Claire Zetkin. And she has close relations with people like Carl Kowdsky. These are all German members of the Social Democratic Party. And those are really kind of her people. She's also, by the way, in close contact with Rosa Luxembourg at this period of time. So these were kind of, this was the milieu in which she was moving. These were like the kind of luminaries of European German socialism at the time. And of course, ultimately, she breaks with them after the German Social Democratic Party votes war credits to the Kaiser at the beginning of World War I. And the only figures in the German Social Democratic Party who opposed this are obviously Zetkin, Luxembourg, as well as Leibnacht. And it is because of the Bolsheviks principled stand against World War I in 1914. And she also has an important love affair with a guy called Alexander Schlepnikov, who was a metal worker and a Bolshevik and later would become the first commissar of.

labor in the Soviet Union. And I think partially because of her belief in pacifism and against the war and also because of her relationship with Shlapnikov, she becomes a Bolshevik in 1914. And it's at that point that she really begins sort of reading all of these Bolshevik texts and working together with Lenin. And as I said, Krupskaya and Armand, who are sort of helping Lenin formulate these Bolshevik positions as the war continues. use. So she's a really fascinating character in that she did have a formal education, but she also just was, by all accounts, an absolutely voracious reader who was very much on top of the pulse of everything that was being published, all the debates that were going on in Europe, among the

various sort of sectarian factions of leftism as they existed at that time. yeah incredibly interesting and and the whole idea of even when provided the best of formal educations the need for self-education and for continuing education is incredibly essential for anyone you know in general that wants to develop their intellect but also people on the left and we see that today with people needing after going through the american education quote unquote system, needing to engage in self-education to continue their own intellectual development. I did not actually know, I mean, I guess I never thought about it, that she had some sort of relationship with Rosa Luxembourg. How deep was that particular relationship? Was it just

writing a few letters or did they meet in person? Oh, no, no. They met in person many, many times. They went to many conferences together in 1907 at the first international socialist women's conference in Stuttgart. They went together. Rosa Luxembourg was a very obviously important figure at the time in Germany. This was, you know, this is in the interwar. This is sorry, this is the pre-war period, right? So they moved in the very same circles. This is obviously before the First World War and the split in the formation of the Spartacus League. So Rosa Luxembourg, you know, would have been on the left, obviously, of those workers' movements of the Social Democratic, the German Social Democratic Party. But Colentai and Luxembourg, all of them were very close at that time.

And actually, even, you know, during this period of time in Berlin, there were, she also taught, Colentai taught, lectured at Maxim Gorky's school in Italy. She was in Paris when Lennon and Krupskaya and Armand were running their summer school outside of Paris. And when Lennon and Krupskaya were in Krakow for a while in Poland, they were in contact. Colentai and Krupska and Lennon were also in contact because they were trying to set up a kind of women's newspaper. So all of these early sort of socialist figures, the kind of icons that we think of, they were definitely in contact with each other before World War I, before the big splits, right, between the social democrat, between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, the social Democrats and the communists. Yeah. I absolutely love that. I would pay so much money to hang out with Luxembourg and Colin Tye. Yeah. Right. Right. I mean, can you imagine being a fly on the wall of that conversation? I mean, it must have been absolutely amazing. And, you know, I think they all really learned a lot from, you know,

other. I mean, again, later in her life, Colentai also met Emma Goldman when Emma Goldman was in Russia, was in the Soviet Union. And so all of these sort of figures, I mean, it was a pretty tight-knit world back then, right? And so they were all in dialogue with each other in one way or another. Yeah. Yeah. And even the disagreements between Collinthai and Goldman would have been fascinating to peek. Absolutely. Absolutely. So let's move on a little bit. You've mentioned some of her relationships to Bolsheviks, specifically in Bolshevism broadly and her switch over from Menshevism to Bolshevism. But I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about specifically her relationship to Lenin, maybe some of the agreements and disagreements, and then take us forward

into the role that she played in the October Revolution. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, this is a great, there's so much material here, so I'll try to be brief. But I think what a lot of people don't realize, right, is that Lenin was a very difficult man. And as, you know, he's, he's been so lionized. He's sort of become his own meme. But, but by all accounts, you know, if you read Krupskaya as my reminiscences of Lenin, you know, all of the accounts that we have of Lenin was that, especially in this, this pre-war period, he was very much kind of alienated from the mainstream of the European left. And, you know, he was seen as a bit of a troublemaker. And, and, um, he was a bit of a troublemaker, I suppose. But so what happens is that once Colentai, and I think this is the

value of, of self-education is that she comes to be, when she becomes a Bolshevik, she does it out of her own conviction. And initially, she has a big disagreement with Lenin. This is what prevents, you know, initially prevents their, you know, relationship from really solidifying. And the disagreement is this. Colentai is a pacifist. And she believes that all war is imperialist war and that there's, you know, that you're basically just throwing the sons of the proletariat out as cannon fodder. Lenin has a different view of the First World War. Lenin believes that now that the peasants and the workers are armed, because they're out there fighting on the front, that the working class,

of different armies should fraternize, form a coalition, and use the guns that they've been given and the ammunition that they've been given to overthrow their capitalists back home. And this is basically that the First World War should immediately turn into a civil war, which will bring about the revolution in Europe. And initially, Colentai is absolutely opposed to this idea

because she's opposed to violence and she's opposed to war. But slowly, Lenin, she comes to say, see Lenin's point of view. And once she realizes that Lenin is right, that there can, there has to be the possibility of national liberation, that there has to be the possibility of independence. You know, Lenin tells her, I mean, if you're against imperialism, how can you not allow people living in colonial countries, right, under the yoke of imperialism to rise up and overthrow their oppressors? They can't do that without violence.

And Colentai, when she finally agrees, she agrees and becomes sort of his deputy. When they return to Russia after the February Revolution in 1917, when the provisional government is in power, Alexander Colentai is one of the few Bolsheviks who actually openly supports Lenin's call for a civil war in Russia. The provisional government, as I'm sure you know, decides to stay in the war. There are huge desertions at the front. The Russians are sick of the war. Their economy is in ruins. There are food shortages. There are ammunition shortages. There are mutinies everywhere. But the provisional government under Kerensky decides to stay in the war. And the reason that the Bolsheviks start to gain support is because they're so opposed to the war. And it's during this

time, this really crucial period between February and October of 1917, that, by the way, Trotsky himself was also a former Menshevik. It's at this time that Trotsky and Kolentai, really the two of them and one or two other key Bolsheviks, sort of tighten a circle around Lenin. And they go out there to the factories, to the laundries, out in the streets. And they, through their orations and speeches start to just massively gain support for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. I mean, they're his like

frontline troops in terms of propaganda. Apparently, Colentai was an amazing public speaker as so was Trotsky, by the way. And they were able to really consolidate power. And so when there's this, you know, secret meeting of the top Bolsheviks, Colentai at that period of time is the only woman. And there's a decision, there's a vote. I believe there are, I believe there are 12 of them in the room, including obviously people like

Kamenev and Zinovian and Stalin and Trotsky, Lenin, you know, the others. And and there's a vote about whether or not to have an armed insurrection against the provisional government. You know, very famously Kamenev and Zinovianoviv vote no, but all of the others, you know, including col and tie votes, yes. And so she's right there in the very center of power. It's also important that during, you know, this period of time, she is really instrumental in mobilizing women to support the Bolsheviks. And the Bolsheviks really needed the support of women because so many men were away at the front

and, you know, women were working in the factories. And so the only way that this revolution, the October revolution was going to work was to make sure that they also had the support of especially proletarian women working in the cities. And Kohlentai was absolutely essential. And so she, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, sorry, the October Revolution, she is appointed. She's given a cabinet level, a ministerial position as the commissar of social welfare. And she just becomes one of the first Soviet government to kind of completely overturn Tsarist Russia. And she does that by enacting, you know, a couple of really wide-ranging laws that have, at least in the initial period, the full support of Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. And I think that's the perfect way to lead into this next question, which is, you know, after the revolution, as you've hinted towards, can you just talk about?

some her positions within the communist government, as well as as the years go on, sort of her opposition to certain elements, factions, and aspects of it, particularly her relationship and attitude towards Stalin and his policies and how that attitude sort of shifted back and forth over time. Yeah. So as I said, she is initially appointed as the Commissar of Social Welfare, but she resigns her position in 1918 in response to the appalling conditions of the Treaty of Breslahtovsk, right,

where the Lenin pulls Russia, Soviet Russia, out of the First World War. And from that moment on, she's a bit of a thorn in the side of Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. She supports them during the Civil War. She goes on a speaking tour in Ukraine, and she's, again, a very, very popular speaker. And so she's able to rouse a lot of support. for the Red Army during the Civil War. But once the Civil War is over, there are a couple of big issues. One is that she's absolutely opposed to Lenin's new economic policy, which was a limited reintroduction of markets to get the Soviet economy up and running after the devastation

of the First World War and the Second War. And two, and this is, as I mentioned earlier, where she sort of becomes more of a anarcho-sindicalist. In fact, Goldman later in her in her book, my further disillusionment with Russia really talks about Colentai's principled stance on behalf of the workers. So as Lenin tries to consolidate, actually Lenin and Trotsky at this point, try to consolidate more and more central power, they are disenfranchising the trade unions. And the workers themselves, who had supported the Bolshevik Revolution, are really angry about this. And so Colentai and this guy, Shlapnikov, who she used to have a relationship with, she no longer does, but they remain very close political allies. They form this thing called the Workers' Opposition, and I believe the 20th Party Congress, I can't remember which Party Congress is, one of the Party Congresses, she presents a pamphlet where she basically outlines the stance of the workers' opposition.

And the fact that, look, the revolution said that they were going to increase, it was going to increase power to the workers. And what Lenin and Trotsky are trying to do is disenfranchise the workers by centralizing all political power over the economy to, you know, the Bolsheviks. Really quickly, what were, what was the logic of Lenin and Trotsky at that time for that move? Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, look, the economy was a disaster. The economy was a shambles. And, you know, I think we have to be realistic and understand that while there were some workers' councils that were very responsible in terms of increasing production in the immediate aftermath of the war, there were also workers' councils which, like, voted themselves raises and then voted themselves, like, two months off of vacation. Yeah.

you know and paid vacation by the way right and so so in order to and and especially you know the civil war being what it was with all of the opposition that the soviet state was facing from these western capitalist countries Lenin absolutely felt that the that the economy had to had to be jump started by some kind of centrally planned control and and very importantly it also meant bringing back some of the bourgeois experts, the engineers and the foreman and some of the people who had had been kicked out during the early years of the revolution. Well, it turns out that a lot of the workers in these factories didn't actually know how to fix a machine if it broke down or didn't know to actually how to organize production or get the supply chains going. So there were like a ton of practical economic issues that given the threats at the time, both Lenin and Trotsky felt required decentralization of economic control. Now, that was very much

a betrayal of the slogan, all power to the Soviets, right? I mean, this was supposed to be a worker state and the workers were supposed to be in control. But Lenin, you know, had this theory of the Vanguard Party, and he wanted, you know, this tightly disciplined group at the top to be organizing things. And so I think it's really important here that the Shlapnikov and Kolentai represent what's called the left opposition or the labor opposition or the workers' opposition. It's been called various things by various people. And so it was actually a kind of further left tendency within the Bolshevik party in order to kind of live up to the ideals of the revolution and and both lennon and trotsky were merciless in their opposition to colentai and schlaapnikov they

silenced schlaapnikov by making him a member of the central committee of the communist party and they basically ousted colentai and they did it in a really nasty way by um sort of insinuating that the only reason that she'd gotten involved in this struggle was because she was sleeping with Slapnikov again, which just wasn't true. But Lenin and Trotsky were really, I mean, as we know, they were, they were very, there was a lot of faction, factionalism. There was a lot of fears of sectarianism. The, you know, the left would organize itself into a circular firing squad, as the left often does. And so they believed that this sort of strict kind of discipline was necessary for the time being. And Kolentai just believed, as did by the way, Emma Goldman, believe that once you set up

that level of centralization and that level of bureaucracy, that it would never go away. And they turned, they both turned out to be right, because as Stalin takes over, he, he further centralizes. There's just no possibility of going back to any kind of workers' council syndicalist model. So, so she's sort of pushed out of power and, and basically get sent abroad to, you know, these diplomatic positions. And I think she's very upset by that. She's, you know, she's one of the few old Bolsheviks who actually survives Stalin's purges in the 30s. By the time of her death, she's the only one left.

And I think that she may, you know, she does eventually, I think, accommodate herself to Stalin. And she does not in any way oppose him, not public. and not privately. So that was a sincere sort of acquiescence? I don't, you know, I mean, I've, I have spent a lot of time thinking about that because I think she was, she was afraid for her son and her grandson. She knew that Stalin was, was absolutely ruthless. So part of it, I think, was fear, I mean, quite understandably so, both Shlapnikov and another husband of her as a guy called Pavl Dubenko were killed during the purges. I think the second reason that she sort of stomached Stalin was, as I mentioned earlier, she hated fascism. And she saw the rise of fascism

in Europe as a real threat. And she may have hoped that Stalin would be able to repel. protect the Soviet Union and repel the fascist threat, which he does eventually. And, but, you know, sometimes when I read, especially her later writings, I think she was just tired. I mean, you know, in 18, she was born in 1872. So in 1920, she's like 50, right? Around just 48, almost 50. So, you know, she's not a youngan when the revolution happens. And by the time she's in this diplomatic position and she starts to really see what's happening with Stalin and what he's doing, first of all, she's not in the country.

And second of all, I think, yeah, I think to a certain extent she just is trying to protect the Soviet Union at all costs as much as he can. They weren't close, Stalin and Kolentai. they knew each other from early revolutionary circles. He was sort of a nobody, right, in the early part of the struggles before and after the revolution. It's only, you know, he slowly starts to consolidate power as Lenin weakens. And he, there's a wonderful piece about Colantai and Stalin.

He was very patronizing and sexist towards her. But another way of saying that is that he was also. very chivalrous, because he also, by the way, keeps Krupskaya alive, Lenin's widow. And so he was ruthless with the old Bolsheviks who were men, but it seems that he may have had a bit of a soft spot for Kolentai, or he just thought that she wasn't important enough to kill, she wasn't really a threat. I'm not really sure. I mean, it's a great, it's sort of one of those counterfactual questions that would be really fun to, like, write a novel about, you know? to try to figure out what was going on there.

But there is no doubt in no doubt whatsoever that by the 30s, especially the late 30s, even despite the purges. And she was gutted by the purges. There are some wonderful passages in a biography written by a woman named Isabel Palencia, who was from Republican Spain. They were both in, sorry, in Stockholm at the same time. colentai's suffering during the page the purges was absolutely immense but she never ever spoke one word against Stalin yeah that's i mean that is we could spend a whole episode just diving into the the counterfactuals and the

wise and the house there is this this sense and that's what makes Stalin such a complicated figure there's this ruthlessness this this paranoia this sort of absurdity really to him as a as a person but there's also So this relentless, ruthlessness when aimed at the Nazi machine that clearly paid off. And, you know, her sort of needing to, or her sort of prioritizing perhaps the survival of the Soviet Union and the fight against fascism over her outward critiques of Stalin is interesting. And then, of course, there's this concern about other people in her life and whether they could get hurt by her stepping out and speaking out against Stalin. Stalin, etc. It's just, it is incredibly complicated and endlessly fascinating for me to think through

those things. And I think it's really important on the left that we take these complexities and these nuances seriously and really study the history and think through these problems, because I don't think the left is helped either by just a complete sort of indoctrinated Stalin was as bad as Hitler approach, nor an over-romanticization of Stalin, which you sometimes see on the left, Yeah, that's a real problem. That's a real problem, I think, as well. Because, I mean, even Col and Ty, right, I mean, she in her private diaries, you know, which we know about because the secret police were reading them, right? She was very critical, right, of the purges, the just sort of wholesale massacre of all of these old Bolsheviks that had supported the revolution.

And it's interesting because obviously she thought they were innocent, but she also was profoundly worried that if the Nazis attacked, right? If there was a war, Stalin wouldn't have the kind of people around him that he would need in order to win the war against Germany. And he killed all of these people with revolutionary and military experience, many of them who had fought in the war. civil war. And so, you know, it was just, he was sort of decapitating the anti-fascist resistance. So I think she was critical of him, you know, from that perspective. Now, again, I also think it's important that she was abroad for most of the time. And many people did not realize everything that was happening in Russia. But, you know, her doctor was purged. Many of her colleagues were purged. So she knew enough. Yeah. And I, you know, I do think had she said something, probably A, nobody would have

listened to her, partially because she had been, you know, somewhat discredited at that period of time because of her more sort of radical views on not only the workers' opposition, but on sexuality, which we can talk about in a second. But yeah, it's also very likely that Stalin would have killed her son and grandson. And that, I think, kept her. her mouth pretty sealed shut. Yeah. There's the principled sort of conflict between like Lennon and Trotsky and and Collentai and different factions, sort of the burden of successful revolution is,

okay, where do we go next? We're being attacked from all sides. You know, I understand those are legitimate debates and criticisms to have, and they're absolutely unavoidable. But I think it should be completely sort of taken for granted on the left that the purges are absolutely grotesque, disgusting, not the proper or principled way to handle intra-party or intra-left debates and conflict. So, yeah, I just don't think that should be controversial.

I mean, yeah, you know, I sometimes, you know, there's this phenomenon of the tanky, right? And, you know, and there is a kind of nostalgia, especially in Russia today for Stalin, which I think is really interesting. I mean, largely the role that he played in the Second World War. but but it is you know there i don't think that for a second right um that the way Stalin the paranoia of Stalin in the 30s is excusable um you know there's just that has to be you know just absolutely made clear that you know that these things actually happened it wasn't anti-soviet propaganda or something like that made up by the west which sometimes you kind of hear and then the other thing is and i think this is really

important is that Stalin also reversed quite significantly in 1936, almost all of the work that Kolentai had done to liberate women. And she was, you know, she also did not say anything about that. And that, to her, was also very close to her heart. Yeah. Yeah. Incredibly messy history to wade through. And I mean, this is a side note, not that it's that relevant, but the term tanky now has made its way into mainstream liberal discourse so it's like I kind of blame like certain elements of the left that turn tanky into this like sort of vague insult towards anybody that's unlike the Marxist or Leninist left and now you see like just like blue check mark liberal journalists using the phrase which is sort of dizzying right that's what happens

you know these words circulate and they lose their original meanings yeah well this is to end this biography section and we can move on to the sort of ideology contribution section just sort of briefly how did how did colontize's life sort of come to come to an end yeah so you know she she negotiated this peace very significant piece between finland and the soviet union after the winter war and she she always suffered from heart problems she had a very serious heart attack in 1919 and and then she had many heart problems in 1945 especially during during the war the stresses and everything of the war so she goes back to the Soviet Union after the second world war and she is you know decorated wildly celebrated as this you know she's like I said one of the last old

Bolsheviks standing somebody who was actually there and important for the the original revolution. And she's made a consultant for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is given a very hefty pension. But her health deteriorates rather quickly. She has a stroke. She's paralyzed in half of her body. And she dies just a month, about a month before her 80th birthday in 1952. And she spends really the last years of her life kind of organizing her papers and writing her memoirs. And again, you know, not not really speaking out against Stalin and not really participating in the rebuilding of the Soviet economy. I mean, by this point, she's in her late 70s, so she's rather frail. Yeah, yeah.

All right. Well, let's move on to the next section. And, you know, as we've, as we know and we've discussed, Alexander Collentai was a pioneering figure, not only in Marxist feminism specifically, but in feminism broadly conceived. Can you talk a bit more about her specific contribution? to the feminist cause and maybe how her Marxism just always shaped her feminism. Yeah. So, again, this is, you know, I could teach a semester-long course on this. I think the key thing here is that, obviously, following in the footsteps of people like Engels and Babel,

but also earlier socialist feminists like Flora Tristan in France or Claire Zetkin in Germany, Colentai really saw capitalism as the root of women's appraisal. But it wasn't just the economic relations of capitalism in the workplace. It was also the economic relations of capitalism in the home. And she is, you know, one of the first really outspoken women, a socialist woman to really, she literally heckled feminists at their conferences. She would go in the audience and like shout while they were giving their speeches because she felt, as did Claire at Zetkin, that women of the upper. classes could not represent the interest of working women, right? We've talked about this on the show before, so I won't rehearse that argument here, but that there was a way in which women really needed to form strong coalitions with men, working class women and working class men, in order to

overthrow capitalism. And only then would both men and women truly be able to be free and liberated in an economy where their needs, they had more power and control over the surplus value extracted from them, and then that surplus value could be redistributed to meet and raise living standards. So where her contribution, I think, is really key, is the socialization of domestic work. So she is really on the front line, not only as a theorist in various essays that she wrote prior to the revolution, most notably the social basis of the woman's question, she also wrote a very long book called Society and Motherhood, where she just looked at the experience of how different European countries were providing social supports for women.

And what she does, as in her capacity as the commissar of social welfare, she says, okay, in order to break the economic dependence of women and the family, women need to go out into the labor force and earn their own incomes. They need to be economically independent of their husbands and fathers. But they can't do that because of the way the family is organized and all of the cooking and cleaning and sewing and mending and the childcare that is done unpaid in the home. So Colentai launches a massive program with the support of the Bolsheviks initially for the socialization of domestic work. And I think this is so important.

It's one of the reasons we actually, if any of you listeners out there have a kindergarten or, you know, a preschool or a nursery where you drop your kids off, you know, in many ways you have Alexander Colentai to thank for this. Because she really took some of these ideas and put them into practice in the sense that it's public provision of child care. public cafeterias, public laundries, public or cooperative mending facilities, because mending was a really big deal for women at the time. So the socialization of domestic work was a kind of a key

component of women's emancipation, and that could only be done if you had a worker's state that was willing to redistribute surplus values in order to pay for the socialization of that labor. So then the other thing that I think, and so, you know, she has lots of really important ideas. I think that one's really key. And then the other one that I'll just briefly mentioned, because it's sort of one that I think the reason that she has enjoyed a kind of resurgence lately is precisely because of her sex positive essay, make way for winged eros, a letter to working youth, which was published in 1923. And a lot of people are kind of reading and rereading and thinking and talking about this essay. And I think what's really interesting about the essay is that she does

a Marxist analysis of love and sex. She's a historical materialist and she sort of applies the tools of historical materialism of dialectical materialism to the family, to romance, to our concept of friendship and companionship. And she basically said, that the model that existed in Soviet Russia at the time and Tsarist Russia, which by the way is the model more or less that we still have today, of the kind of heterosexual bourgeois monogamous family as the kind of basic family unit in society, that that is a specific way of organizing romantic relations that upholds capitalism. And she basically talks about earlier versions of love and fidelity in the ancient era and in the era of feudalism, which upheld those economic

systems. And then she goes on to imagine a future socialist society where there will be this thing that she calls comradly love. Jody Dean has just written a wonderful book, you know, Comrade, which also kind of delves into this idea of comradly love. And the ideas are really actually, you know, beautiful and simple one. The idea is that if you live in a society which is completely depleting you of all of your affective resources, you're exhausted and alienated from your labor and from yourself, finding a romantic relationship, finding a partner becomes so important because it's the one thing that sort of humanizes the world for you, right? Somebody who treats you as special, somebody who treats you as important. And so in a capitalist society, the couple,

that sort of romantic link between a man and a woman, and she was obviously speaking very specifically about heterosexual relationships at the time, although, you know, the Soviets did liberalize same-sex relationships very early on after the October Revolution. But she was specifically talking about the relationship between men and women. She said that, because people's emotions, because the world is so precarious, that the relationship between the man and a woman becomes one of property, becomes an egoistic relationship, and you want to own the other person, you want to possess the other person. You don't want anyone to have anything of their times or attentions or energies. And that this causes jealousy and it causes discord and ultimately unhappiness. And that in a future socialist society, when everybody's needs are, you know, more or less met, when you have some social security and stability in your life and you live in a society where everybody is concerned not only about their own individual needs, but also the needs of the collective, of the common good, that people will have much more expansive relationships. They'll have, you know, what she calls this comradly love for many people, these lateral relationships with neighbors and friends and colleagues and perhaps family members, right?

So we'll all be embedded in these much richer social networks. We'll have our material needs met. We'll have our emotional needs met by multiple people. And so the romantic relationship between a man and a woman, again, It could be between any two people will be less freighted, first with material cares and considerations and worries. And secondly, with this kind of egotistical possessiveness, right? Because people will feel that they are validated and supported in a broader social network of people. And so for Colentai, the goal of socialism is not only to, you know,

have state ownership of the means of production or workers' control of the industries, you know, all of the kind of very economic, public things that socialists always talk about. It was also about building a new idea of love, a new idea of comradeship that would support the sort of collective endeavor of the socialist society that those two things had to go hand in hand. And I think that that is really an incredible contribution that she made to our understanding of the way that socialism and capitalism impacts our personal lives, which, as we've talked about on the show before, has been a really important inspiration to me and my work. Yeah. Absolutely amazing. I love her so much and such important contributions that many

of us might take for granted today, but to trace these lines back to Collentai, I think is really, really important. And I know on our sister podcast, Red Menace, we're going to be doing some deep dives into her work. And I think we're still discussing which work to tackle first. But if you want some more deep dives into specific works by Collentai, definitely pay attention to Red Menace because we're definitely going to do work on that front. You know, I always think it's important to point out some legitimate criticisms of the figures that we cover. So, in your opinion, what are some criticisms of Collentai that you think are fair? And maybe you can also toss out a couple that you think are often lobbed her way that are more or less unfair.

Yeah. So the fair ones are definitely her acquiescence to Stalin. I mean, there's just no way you can deny that, right? I mean, she did not, she did not take a principled stand against him at any point, even when he was shooting her, you know, ex-husband and former comrades. So again, I think there are lots of interesting, lots of interesting discussions about why that was. The other thing is that in some of her writings, and again, this is a product of the time, she had some eugenicist tendencies, right? She talks sometimes about like the hygiene of the race so that people with for instance

certain kinds of disabilities should not reproduce. I think, you know, that's kind of a unpleasant reality of her work and it's definitely there. You can find evidence of that. As I said, that was a pretty common

at that particular period of time in Europe as a whole. There were a lot of people sort of talking about, you know, Darwin's theories and thinking about things like natural selection and trying to, quote, unquote, improve the human race, you know, build the new socialist man. And, you know, we see very clearly where that led into Second World War.

So that's a fair criticism. The third thing that I would say was that even though she herself sort of abandoned her young son when he was only like three years old or whatever. And she was, you know, she saw him fairly often. and she worried about him a lot, a lot. But motherhood was really not the most important thing in her life. But she is really very pro-natalist, I would say. She really focuses on motherhood.

And she thinks that motherhood for women is sort of a duty to the socialist state. Women have a responsibility to bring new socialist citizens into the world. And I find that a little bit problematic, especially since she herself, You know, she had this one child when she was young, but she didn't really sort of practice what she preached, so to speak, on that. And that, I think, is a really fair criticism of Colin Tai's work. She talks about reimagining the family, like, and she is instrumental in the legalization in 1920 when the of abortion. Soviet Union is the first country in the world to legalize abortion on demand during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. And so she understands very well the relationship between women's ability to control their fertility and their economic independence. And yet at the same time, she really spends a lot of time in her writings admonishing women to have children.

And so there's a little bit of a contradiction there. Like she's okay with the socialization of the family. She wants the state to actually play a big role in alleviating women's cares in this regard. but she's not really keen to allow women the choice of whether or not they have families. And I think that's a bit of a, that's a bit of a criticism that is a fair criticism of Colentai. There are a lot of unfair ones. There's a misunderstanding that comes from a conversation that was recorded by Clara Zepkin with Lenin. And that is that somehow Colentai's version,

of free love equals kind of promiscuity, the so-called glass of water theory, which is that sex is like hunger and thirst, and so you should be no more important to you than just drinking a glass of water if you're thirsty. And in fact, that's not at all what she says. If you read, if you read, make way for winged arrows, she's very clearly making a distinction between what she calls wingless eros, E-R-O-S, and winged eros. And the wingless eros is promise, is, you know, just sort of what we would call

kind of random hookups, right? Kind of sexual relations that don't have any kind of emotional attachment to them. And she says, okay, well, during the revolution, when everybody's really busy and things are kind of crazy, it's sort of understandable that people would do that. But once we start to build socialism and we have this more robust collective

and we're creating the conditions for the development of comradly love, then the relationship between two people will be this winged eros, which will be really sort of beautiful and based on mutual interests and attraction and affection. And that's really the goal.

So in some ways, she's kind of a romantic, right? She's sort of like the original hippie. she has this sort of weird you know kind of eclectic at the time especially idea of love that is not just about random hookups right it's it's not just friends with benefits it's this sort of almost kind of mystifying view of finding your soulmate or a series of soulmates over the course of your life with whom you share interests and affinities and that that will be the the highest form of socialist life. And so to kind of paint her as a simple free love radical misses the nuance in her views. Now, she was not in any way critical of winged eros. You know, she was fine with the hookup culture. And in fact, she's largely responsible for the creation of these quote unquote civil marriages, right? You know, she makes it much easier for people to get married and divorce in the Soviet Union.

And she understands that people are going to have serial monogamy. She herself, you know, had a number of, of relationships. And she was not at all opposed to what we might consider today things like polyamory. She explicitly states that you might have multiple people that you're in love with or you have these comradly relationships with. But she definitely saw just sort of, you know, what we think of as sort of random hookups as kind of a lesser form of love. and to kind of, and Lenin, unfortunately, I think, is the origin of the stereotype that that's what she represents. Yeah, really, really interesting, really principal takes, really clarifying as well, because the water does get muddy around some of these, some of these elements of her thought and stuff.

And, you know, sort of zooming in towards the end of our conversation, a couple more questions. And one I really want to ask is just, you know, given that Colin Tai such an influence on you, and you've done so much study and research into her life, What aspects of maybe her personality or her life or her work do you think maybe are overlooked or that you found particularly interesting that might not get as much attention as perhaps it deserves or just something that is just quirky and weird about her? So it's, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's quirky and weird, although I think it's fascinating and it's definitely overlooked.

So, and it has to do with her personal life in some ways. So, Colin Tai was married very young. She was like 21 when she married her first husband, obviously Vladimir Colanty, from whom she takes her name. And then she had a series of lovers, sort of a serial monogamy sort of situation over the course of her life, two of whom were significantly younger than she was. The first was 13 years, her junior, Schlappnikov, I mentioned him, and then she later marries a guy called Pavel de Benka, who's 16 years younger than she is. And the thing that I find really fascinating about Kolentai is there's often a lot of discussion of her, well, okay, let's face it. She actually published her autobiography in 1926, and she titled it the autobiography of a sexually emancipated communist woman, right? So she was very proud of her sort of conquest in that realm.

However, one of the things that is very overlooked about her is that when she was six years old, she spent a year with her father in Bulgaria. Her father, General Demontovic, was sent to Bulgaria to help the Bulgarians write a liberal constitution after their freedom from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. And she makes a friend called Zoya Shadurskaya, and Zoya and Colentai pretty much spend the rest of their lives kind of together until Zoya's death in 1939. And Colentai herself says that apart from her son, Zoya is the most dear person in her life. And Zoya moves in with Alexander Colentai right after the birth of her son in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century. When Colentai goes into exile, Zoya follows Colentai. They often live together in various cities around Europe. Zoya lives with Colentai in the immediate aftermath before and after the Russian Revolution,

especially when Emma Goldman goes to visit Colentai. She's living in the Hotel National in Moscow with Zoya and her son. And then when Colentai becomes a diplomat in Sweden, Zoya is a frequent visitor of hers. And so Colentai basically had a very passionate friendship with this Bulgarian woman, who, by the way, Zoya never married. She was a self-supporting journalist, which made it really easy for her to kind of pick up her life and follow Colentai wherever Colentai happened to be going. And Zoya and Colentai were obviously, you know, very, very, very close.

Everything that you read in the biographies, everything that you read from other people about them was that they had a kind of really special connection to each other. And I think that that's really interesting because much is made of Colanty's love affairs. But in fact, in the background, I think what may have made these love affairs all possible, one way or another, all the heartbreaks that she went through and survived was the fact that she basically was kind of in a long term, really long term relationship with somebody that she knew when she was six, right? And that, I think, is a part of Colentai's life that often does not get discussed, you know, partially because we don't really know a lot about Shadurskaya. She was not as prolific a writer as Colentai, and she was never a really prominent figure in any way. She was a journalist who basically sort of supported herself by writing for various newspapers. But the fact that she was such an important part of Colentai's life, and she always seemed to be there for Colentai's life. when Colentai needed her most, I think, you know, opens up the possibility that Colentai was really living what this sort of comradly love that she talked about, right? She was actually building that in her own personal life. Yeah, beautiful. I had no idea about that at all. So that is incredibly fascinating. So overall, as a way to maybe end this conversation, and I always like this question

because it's an important sort of way to wrap up these discussions, what are some of the the main lessons or inspirations that the contemporary left, Marxist, feminist, or otherwise can take from the life and work of Alexander Collentai. So I think that, so there are a couple of things. And I want to read you, if I can find it a quote. Because, I mean, again, like I have an entire, you know, two years worth of a podcast about her at this point. So it's like everything about her life is really fascinating.

I mean, what do you want? but you're asking the wrong person but the one but the one thing that I will say um that I think is really important is this idea of doing the work that we need to support each other emotionally within the movement so there is this incredible speech that she gives um I'm trying to to find the exact um yeah here it is so emma Goldman, so John Reed was an American journalist in the Soviet Union for the revolution. He's very famously the guy who wrote the book, 10 days that shook the world. And in 1920, Emma Goldman was in Russia, obviously. And in 1921st, Inessa Armand died quite suddenly of cholera. And then two

months later, John Reed died. And Emma Goldman, whose initial impression, of Colentai was that she was kind of a grand dam and not really a real revolutionary, you know, she was an aristocrat after all, and she was always very well-dressed and everything like that. Goldman was really moved by Colentai's speech over John Reed's grave. And she reports the speech, she gives an excerpt of the speech in her book. She says, this is Colentai, who is reflecting not only now on the death of John Reed, but also on the death of Armand. call ourselves communists. But are we really that? Do we not draw the life essence from those who come to us? And when they are no longer of use, we let them fall by the wayside, neglected, and forgotten.

Our communism and our comradeship are dead letters. If we do not give out of ourselves to those who need us, let us beware of such communism. It slays the best in our ranks. And I just think that that really captures something about how important it is for us to not only think about getting our politics right. And, you know, especially on the left, I think we have all of these debates about the right political way or the right, you know, theoretical framework or the right practical strategy to achieve our goals. How do we build coalitions? How do we, you know, reach out to people that we might not otherwise cooperate with? How do we deal with hierarchies of race and gender and sexuality? But underlying all of those questions is the sort of basic emotional need to take care of each other.

And this is why I really loved Jody Dean's book, this idea of comradeship. And I think a little bit we've lost that sense of how important it is to be comrades to each other. And I think Colentai's life, you know, again, it's very complicated and there are many criticisms that you could address to her writings and her thinking. And it is, you know, hard to necessarily update somebody who was writing over a century ago to the, you know, 20 to 2021 and the post-pandemic world that we're about to hopefully be living in. But I do think that the one essential concept is this, the importance of emotional support for, you know, each other in what is, as we will all recognize, a really difficult struggle it was back then, and it remains so to this day. Capitalism is very pernicious. It's emotionally draining and exhausting to constantly be outraged against the injustices that we see around us in the world

and to constantly be thinking and working towards somehow rectifying those injustices. And so Colentai really admonishes us to care for each other. And I think that's a really important message. Absolutely gorgeous, heart-rending quote and beautifully said on your part as well. And it's a perpetual problem. Us on the left, I mean, you know, we are operating in horrific times. And as you said, there's so much heartbreak every single day. But a gentle, loving reminder to be gentle with ourselves and with one another,

I think is always going to be relevant and is especially relevant in these times. And I'll have to have me and Jody, I've been talking about her coming back on the show. I'll have to have her on to do a whole episode on her book, Comrades. But yeah, beautifully said. Kristen, it is always a pleasure to have you on. Every time you come on, I deepen my understanding of history and the world. And you're always welcome on Rev. Left. Before I let you go, can you please let maybe listeners know where they can learn more about

Colin Tai and importantly where they can find you and your work online? Yeah. So there are three, actually four excellent biographies of her in English. There are many others in other languages. But the four that are in English, the first one is Isabella de Palencia, which I mentioned. I think it's out of print, but it's easily found in used book spaces. Barbara Ann Clements has a book called Bolshevik Feminist. Kathy Porter's book has just been reissued. I just think it's called Alexander Colentai, a biography. And then there's another one, Beatrice Farnsworth, wrote that one. I can't, I think it's also just called Alexander Colentai. But those are available, easily found online. All of Colentai's writings in English are available on Marxist.org. Well, not all of them, but a good, because there are a lot of them. But the ones that have been translated and for which we have permissions to post. They're all available on Marxist.org. Very recently, Sternberg Press came out with something called Red Love, a reader,

which is a collection put together by an artist, I think in Sweden, reflecting on Colentai's life and her importance around questions of love and sexuality. And of course, you know, if people are interested, there's my podcast, which I've been doing now for a little bit over two years. It's kind of episodic. I get to it when I get to it, among all of my other obligations. But that's AK-47. You can find that on, you know, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or you can go directly to the webpage, which is just AK-47.buzzsprout, B-U-Z-S-P-R-O-U-T-com, buzzsprout.com. and all of the episodes are posted there. And, yeah, I mean, recently, I think there's been quite a lot of really interesting, you know,

rediscovery of Colentai and her work. And I think, you know, people should, the thing that I do on my podcast, which is I actually read the originals, and then I try to give them some contemporary context and discuss the kind of theoretical implications of them, I really think Colentai's work is pretty accessible. And if you don't want to listen to it in podcast form, you can definitely go to those originals that are available on Marxist.org and get a sense and a sample of the kinds of things that she was writing about. Yeah, perfect. And I'll link to that in the show notes to make that as easy as possible for people to find. And I can't recommend AK-47 enough. It's a wonderful podcast and a deep dive into everything, Colin Tai. Thank you again, Kristen. It's always a pleasure. Let's do it again sometime. Definitely. Thanks so much for having me back. I always love doing this. Here is an article by Kristen Godsey on Collentai entitled The Most Famous Feminist you've

never heard of. A century ago, our newspapers couldn't stop writing about the Russian, Alexander Collentai. A woman so dangerous, the United States government deemed her a national security risk. In 1918, current opinion called her the heroine of the Bolsheviki upheaval in Petrograd and announced to its incredulous readers that, quote, she holds a cabinet portfolio, dresses like a Parisian, and does not believe in marriage. In 1924, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that, quote, Communist Valkyrie is a match for any man in diplomacy. A year later, the New York Times accused her of arranging fake marriages to promote red propaganda in Norway.

In 1927, the Washington Post revealed that the new Soviet diplomatic envoy to Mexico, quote, who has had six husbands, had been refused. landing in the United States. Her worldwide reputation as the Red Rose of the Revolution or the Jean de Arc of the proletariat unsettled the Americans, who feared her mere presence might incite public disorder. Although she once crisscrossed the globe advocating for women's rights, most Americans know nothing of her life or work today. In the stories written and recycled each year for Women's History Month, Colentai never makes the pantheon of activist goddesses worthy of agulation. Because she was a socialist, Collentai gets written out of the her stories

of global feminism. Alexander Milkenova Damatovich was born in St. Petersburg in 1872, the daughter of an aristocratic Russian general. As a child, Alexandra learned to abhor the transactional nature of marriage after watching an elder sister marry a rich man 50 years her senior, defiant of her mother's expectations that she should also make a good marriage, Alexandra wed a poor cousin, Collentai, at 21. She gave birth to a son, but motherhood could not suppress her growing passion for politics. Although there was already a Russian women's movement, Alexandra Collentai believed that the bourgeois feminists could never free working-class women from oppression.

She argued that the fight for women's emancipation would only succeed if working women allied with economically disadvantaged men to overthrow the Tsar. In the early 1900s, she agitated among female textile workers in St. Petersburg, leading reading groups, writing and smuggling radical pamphlets, and raising funds to protect striking women and their families. Hunted by the secret police, Collentai spent years in and out of prison as an exile in Western Europe. She even came to the United States in 1915, visiting 81 cities and delivering over a hundred

lectures speaking on socialism, women's rights, and passivism in four different languages. In 1917, she returned to Russia and Lenin appointed her the Commissar of Social Welfare in the First Soviet Cabinet. Collinthai oversaw dramatic revisions in Russian family law and helped organize the rapid socialization of women's domestic work through a vast network of public children's homes, laundries, cafeterias, and mending cooperatives. The new family code overturned centuries of patriarchal and ecclesiastical authority over women's lives, scrapping all legislation that once reduced women to the property of their fathers or husbands. The new Soviet constitution recognized men and women as equals for the first time in Russian history.

Although Kolentai entered diplomatic service abroad after 1924, and Stalin eventually reversed most of Kolentai's work, she did manage to survive the violent purges of the 1930s. She served as the ambassador to Sweden throughout the Second World War and was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 and 1947 for brokering the Finnish Soviet ceasefire. After World War II, East European nations hoping to mobilize women into the labor force implemented updated versions of Colanty's early Soviet reforms.

Through global networks of socialist solidarity, policies to, to liberalize divorce, expand parental leaves, build kindergartens, and socialized domestic work spread across the globe to countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Ethiopia. Colin Tai's emphasis on the public provision of services for women and children infused the key international United Nations treaty on women's rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which has been ratified by 187 countries, but not the United States. Even so, American women benefited indirectly from Colentai's long history of activism

because Cold War superpower rivalries forced the U.S. government to pay attention to women's rights. In many ways, we live in the world that Colentai helped create 100 years ago. But when I think of Collinthai and her legacy today, I also remember the tale of how she saved a colleague's parents from the Nazis. It was 1940, and the Germans had just overrun Norway. Having already escaped one from a concentration camp, a man named Hans Serf turned up, desperate, in the Soviet embassy in Stockholm. As German Jews trying to get out of Europe, Hans and his wife needed Soviet transit visas. After an initial inquiry, the clerk told Hans visas required six weeks of background investigations, but at any

time, the Germans might invade and ship them off to Auschwitz. At that exact moment, Hans recounts, quote, The door opened and a beautiful bosom-y lady, all in black, stormed in a hurry. Momentarily, I realized that this must be Madame Collentai, the Russian ambassador to Sweden. Now Hans, I said to myself, where is your Russian? I stepped before the lady. Listen, Comrade Collinthai. I am a comrade too, and I have to get out. Now. Colentai looked him up and down and decided she liked him. She turned to her clerk and ordered him to grant the visa. Hans hastily explained that he also needed one for his

wife. Give me two. Collentai commanded and disappeared. As a woman in a rare position of power, Colentai used her authority to ensure that Hans and Kate Serf escaped. If it weren't for Madame Collentai, I would never have been born. My colleague, Stephen Serf, a professor in the German department, wrote to me one day, Madame Collinthai is a hero in our family. Our collective feminist history is littered with tales of extraordinary women who fought tirelessly for equality, peace, and justice, and we must expand this history to better include the many activists and leaders like Collentai who lived and struggled to promote the ideals of socialism. But this year, as the lead-up to perhaps the most important presidential election of our lives renders the political climate ever more polarized, contentious, and cruel, it's worth remembering that small acts of extraordinary kindness

can leave as lasting an impact as a lifetime dedicated to a larger cause.