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Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollantai
The first full-scale biography of this magnetic figure to appear in the United States follows the life of Kollontai from her birth in St. Petersburg in 1872 to her death in Moscow eighty years later.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1979
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April 25, 2025
Clements's biography of Aleksandra Kollontai does a really good job at synthesis and explication, especially when it comes to contextualizing Kollontai’s life and work in relation to Marxist theory, the Russian Revolution, and the history of socialist feminism – no small task, because that’s a very complicated intersection. Clement explores her early relationships with Alexander Shliapnikov, Inessa Armand, and Clara Zetkin. She also spends a lot of time on Kollontai’s battles with Lenin and Trotsky over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and later on her role in the Worker’s Opposition in the early 1920s, which was for all intents and purposes the nail in the coffin, the thing that destroyed any possibility of Kollontai climbing the ladder inside the Bolshevik party.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book is its title. Kollontai was a latecomer to Bolshevism and never identified herself as a feminist: to do so would have meant losing the support of the party, which viewed feminism as a petit bourgeois concern and believed that gender equality would result only from dedication to socialist revolution and a transformation of class relationships. And while this may be true from an orthodox Marxist standpoint, it was also a way for the male leadership in the party to marginalize female participation and access to power. While earlier Soviet Russia did do incredible things for women, including enacting property rights and abortion laws that were among the most progressive on the planet, it’s important to remember that not a single female revolutionary in Russia ever rose to the heights of Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin, not to mention Zinoviev, Kamenev, or Bukharin. In a way, this is Clements’s central argument – that Bolshevik bureaucratization and the underlying sexism in party ranks was a vestige of Russia’s autocratic past and something that the early Soviet Union had trouble breaking free from, despite the fact that this was the revolution’s main intent.
Kollontai spent the rest of her life abroad as a diplomat, which was probably fortunate for her because she could hear Stalin sharpening his blade all the way back in Moscow. She lived in fear as she watched Kamenev, Zinoviev, and even her former lover Shliapnikov meet their fates during the purges of the 1930s, and when called back to Russia, she openly published pro-Stalin articles in Soviets papers in order to save her neck. But that is by no means an indictment of her or her accomplishments. She tilted at every windmill in sight, and I dig that.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book is its title. Kollontai was a latecomer to Bolshevism and never identified herself as a feminist: to do so would have meant losing the support of the party, which viewed feminism as a petit bourgeois concern and believed that gender equality would result only from dedication to socialist revolution and a transformation of class relationships. And while this may be true from an orthodox Marxist standpoint, it was also a way for the male leadership in the party to marginalize female participation and access to power. While earlier Soviet Russia did do incredible things for women, including enacting property rights and abortion laws that were among the most progressive on the planet, it’s important to remember that not a single female revolutionary in Russia ever rose to the heights of Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin, not to mention Zinoviev, Kamenev, or Bukharin. In a way, this is Clements’s central argument – that Bolshevik bureaucratization and the underlying sexism in party ranks was a vestige of Russia’s autocratic past and something that the early Soviet Union had trouble breaking free from, despite the fact that this was the revolution’s main intent.
Kollontai spent the rest of her life abroad as a diplomat, which was probably fortunate for her because she could hear Stalin sharpening his blade all the way back in Moscow. She lived in fear as she watched Kamenev, Zinoviev, and even her former lover Shliapnikov meet their fates during the purges of the 1930s, and when called back to Russia, she openly published pro-Stalin articles in Soviets papers in order to save her neck. But that is by no means an indictment of her or her accomplishments. She tilted at every windmill in sight, and I dig that.
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