A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
Kristen R. Ghodsee reads and discusses 47 selections from the works of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a socialist women's activist who had radical ideas about the intersections of socialism and women's emancipation. Born into aristocratic privilege, the Ukrainian-Finnish Kollontai was initially a member of the Mensheviks before she joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks and became an important revolutionary figure during the 1917 Russian Revolution. Kollontai was a socialist theorist of women’s emancipation and a strident proponent of sexual relations freed from all economic considerations. After the October Revolution, Kollontai became the Commissar of Social Welfare and helped to found the Zhenotdel (the women's section of the Party). She oversaw a wide variety of legal reforms and public policies to help liberate working women and to create the basis of a new socialist sexual morality. But Russians were not ready for her vision of emancipation, and she was sent away to Norway to serve as the first Russian female ambassador (and only the third female ambassador in the world).In this podcast, Kristen R. Ghodsee – a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books 2018) – selects excerpts from the essays, speeches, and fiction of Alexandra Kollontai and puts them in context. Each episode provides an introduction to the abridged reading with some relevant background on Kollontai and the historical moment in which she was writing.
A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
18 - A.K. 47 - Decree on Child Welfare
In this episode, Kristen Ghodsee reads the “Decree on Social Welfare” from January 31, 1918, written by Alexandra Kollontai when she was the Commissar for Social Welfare in the first Bolshevik government. There are quite a few external sources mentioned in this episode and they are detailed below.
Biographies of Kollontai in English (please note the alternative spellings of her name, which are an artifact of different traditions of the transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet into Latin letters.)
- Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai, Indiana University Press, 1979
- Isabel de Palencia, Alexandra Kollontaj: Ambassadress of Russia, 1947
- Beatrice Farnsworth, Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford University Press, 1980
- Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography (Updated Edition) Haymarket Books, (1980) 2014
Other books about early Soviet policies about women and the family:
- Wendy Goldman: Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936, Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Indiana University Press, 1997
- Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Bold Type Books, 2018
Drafts of the Communist Manifesto:
- Friedrich Engels: Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith (first draft)
- Friedrich Engels: The Principles of Communism (second draft)
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto (final version)
The intro music is a Russian version of The Internationale.
More info about the host can be found at: www.kristenghodsee.com
Also see: AlexandraKollontai.com – A Website for All Things Kollontai
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