a biography of the day--alexandra kollontai
Alexandra Kollontaii
Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (March 31 [O.S. March 19] 1872 – March 9, 1952) was a Russian Communist revolutionary, first as a member of the Mensheviks, then from 1914 on as a Bolshevik. In 1919 she became the first female government minister in Europe. In 1923, she was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Norway, becoming the world's first female ambassador in modern times.
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Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born on March 31 [O.S. March 19] 1872 in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire. Her father, General Mikhail Alekseevich Domontovich, from a Ukrainian family which traced its ancestry back to the 13th Century,[1] served as a cavalry officer in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 and as an advisor to the Russian administration in Bulgaria after the war until 1879. He entertained liberal political views, favoring a constitutional monarchy like that of the United Kingdom, and in the 1880s had written a study of the Bulgarian war of independence which was confiscated by the Tsarist censors, presumably for showing insufficient Russian nationalist zeal.[2] Alexandra's mother, Alexandra Androvna Masalina-Mravinskaia,[3] the daughter of a Finnish peasant who had made a fortune selling wood, obtained a divorce from an unhappy arranged first marriage so that she could marry Domontovich, with whom she had fallen in love.[2] The saga of her parents' long and difficult struggle to be together in spite of the norms of society would color and inform Alexandra Kollontai's own views of relationships, sex, and marriage.[citation needed]
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While Kollontai was initially drawn to the populist ideas of a restructuring of society based upon the peasant commune, effective advocates of such theories in the last decade of the 19th century were few.[12] Marxism, with its emphasis on the enlightenment of factory workers, the revolutionary seizure of power, and the construction of modern industrial society, held sway with Kollontai as with so many of her peers of Russia's radical intelligentsia. Kollontai's first activities were timid and modest, helping out a few hours a week with her sister Zhenia at a library that supported Sunday classes in basic literacy for urban workers, sneaking a few socialist ideas into the lesson sideways.[13] Through this library Kollontai met Elena Stasova, an activist in the budding Marxist movement in St. Petersburg. Stasova began to use Kollontai as a courier, transporting parcels of illegal writings to unknown individuals, which were delivered upon utterance of a password.[14]
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After the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 Kollontai's political career began. She became People's Commissar for Social Welfare. She was the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration and was best known for founding the Zhenotdel or "Women's Department" in 1919 . This organization worked to improve the conditions of women's lives in the Soviet Union, fighting illiteracy and educating women about the new marriage, education, and working laws put in place by the Revolution. As a foremost champion of women's equality like the other Marxists of her time, she opposed the bourgeois ideology of liberal feminism;[20][21] though later feminists have claimed her legacy. The Zhenotdel was eventually closed in 1930. Kollontai also married Pavel Dybenko in 1917.[22]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai
