Skip to main content
Kollontai: hero of Soviet women
As a revolutionary, politician, diplomat and leading theoretician of Russian Marxism, she remains one of the towering greats of the 1917 generation, leading the charge on the emancipation of women, writes JENNY FARRELL
Alexandra Kollontai

ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI, born 150 years ago on March 31 1872, was an outstanding figure in the Russian communist movement.

Kollontai’s active political work began with workers’ evening classes, through which she became part of the Political Red Cross, an organisation supporting political prisoners.

She participated in leafleting and fundraising campaigns in support of a mass strike in the textile industry, an experience that consolidated her certainty of the need for proletarian revolution. In 1899 she joined the illegal Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).

Morning Star call for advertising
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
CDF
Opinion / 3 September 2024
3 September 2024
As Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th anniversary is celebrated in Berlin and New York, JENNY FARRELL urges viewers of the German Romantic painter to understand its true historical context, and beware its co-option by the far-right
Friedrich
Opinion / 19 August 2024
19 August 2024
As Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th anniversary is celebrated in Berlin and New York, JENNY FARRELL urges viewers of the German Romantic painter to understand its true historical context, and beware his co-option by the far right
Baldwin
Opinion / 30 July 2024
30 July 2024
JENNY FARRELL traces the critical role that the CPUSA played in the education of Harlem’s greatest man of letters
books
Book Review / 29 May 2023
29 May 2023
JENNY FARRELL introduces an extraordinary book that maintains the cultural practise of the GDR by writing about ordinary working lives