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
36 - A.K. 47 - Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman - Discussion II
In this episode, Kristen Ghodsee gives some more context to Alexandra Kollontai's life by reading from the texts of two women who knew her personally: the American Louise Bryant and the Spaniard Isabel de Palencia. Based on her personal meeting with Kollontai in the early years of the revolution, Louise Bryant wrote about Kollontai in her 1918 book, Six Red Months in Russia, and in her 1923 book, Mirrors of Moscow. Isabel de Palencia knew Kollontai in Stockholm where they were both diplomats in the 1930s. Her book, Alexandra Kollontay: Ambasadress from Russia, was published in English in 1947 and is based on both Palencia's personal memories of Kollontai as well as interviews with Kollontai's friends and colleagues.
From these two texts we get a sense that Kollontai deeply impressed her female comrades with her charm, charisma, beauty, and fashion sense as well as her exceptional work ethic, oratory skills, diplomatic tact, and perseverance in the face of adversity.
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Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and a professor and chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
