"Watch out, you've never met a woman like her before!" Zinoviev's cry of admiration and alarm was echoed by others during Alexandra Kollontai's lifetime, 1872-1952. The story which begins with the aristocratic girl goes on to the revolutionary, the fighter for women's freedom, the Menshevik, Bolshevik, and oppositionist, and the social novelist; and ends with the highly respected and long serving Soviet ambassador in Stockholm. Cathy Porter tells it all methodically and very fully.
The ironies are many. Having been behind Lenin in 1917 Kollontai soon came out against the too-great power of Lenin's government. A little later she watched with anguish while her husband Dybenko helped to put down the Kronstadt sailors' rising against that same dictatorial power. Later still, in 1937, Dybenko joined as a judge in sentencing Marshal Tukhachevsky to death and then was himself shot in the same Stalinist terror. Kollantai endured hunger, devastating illnesses, stormy love affairs, political derision, and the passion for work and controversy that came from her always renewed zeal for life.
"Free love" is the phrase always associated with her. It provided the obvious title for the first English translation of the novel by her which Cathy Porter was later to translate under the title Love of Worker Bees. Her frequent writings on sexual freedom exasperated the strait-laced Lenin. Yet in point of fact what she advocated was something more complex and more pretentious than "free love".
It all arose out of her campaign for women's freedom. She looked far beyond votes for women. She wished to liberate women from the heavy manual work usual in Russia and the daily drudgery in the kitchen. Very well: first abolish capitalist exploitation, then mechanize much of the hand work, go on to set up communal laundries, canteens, and nurseries. At this point her imagination got the better of her. While all this would help, women would still be tied to the family. But if still more communal services were provided in the brave, new world then the "nuclear family" would and should disappear.
Westerners at the time howled that she was proposing the nationalization of women. Her own view of the future was both fanciful and prim. Cathy Porter writes, "One could only assess a person's conduct as correct if it was in harmony with the interests of the group. . . That is why, Alexandra (Kollontai) wrote, however great two people's love for each other might be, 'the ties binding them to the collective will always take precedence, will be firmer, more complex and more organized'." It is hard to imagine anything more off-putting, but perhaps Kollontai is only seeing that any society needs some conventions if it is to hold together.
Another of Kollontai's big fights which keeps some relevance for today was in her splendid and forlorn support of the Workers' Opposition group in 1921. She and others, seeing Soviet dictatorship in the making, wanted the sham trade unions to be given real strength and a large share in industrial management.
In her biography Cathy Porter draws heavily on Russian sources and presents her evidence in due and proper form without over-emphasis - sometimes with under-emphasis. The book's chief value is that, written by a woman about a woman who was concerned with women, it brings out the women's part in the 1917 revolution and the sequel. At the end something is left elusive. That is the secret, the true personality, the appeal, of the headstrong woman so often scolded by Lenin and so long spared by Stalin.
