Bolshevism, the Woman Question, and Aleksandra Kollontai

Abstract

THE UTOPIAN SOCIALIST, Charles Fourier, believed that the emancipation of women was the best general measure of the moral level of a culture, that the degree of feminine emancipation was a natural measure of general emancipation. Karl Marx liked to quote Fourier. So did Old Bolsheviks.1 The Russian intelligentsia had long been absorbed with the problems of two oppressed groups: women and peasants. And as the relationship of the backward peasantry to the Bolshevik revolution underwent tortuous analysis, finally to become by the mid-twenties a source of bitter factionalism, the seemed one of the few issues on which party leaders, Left and Right, agreed. I would argue that it was an unfortunate consensus, deriving in part from a superficial commitment, in part from a limited understanding of the problem, so that at a critical time when the regime was taking form, the woman question moved not in the direction of a socialist solution, but rather toward conversion to revolutionary myth. Only one leading Bolshevik, Aleksandra Kollontai, the central figure in the socialist woman's movement, fought singlemindedly for the socialist course. But by the mid-twenties, having established herself as an oppositionist, she was isolated from decision making. This article will suggest that her capitulation to Stalin in 1927 ended the most serious attempt of bolshevism to treat the woman question on the basis of socialist theory.