She supported Lenin's radical proposals and, as a member of the party's Central Committee, voted for the policy of armed uprising which led to the October Revolution and the fall of Alexander Kerensky's Provisional Government.

She was appointed People's Commissar for Social Welfare in the first Soviet government, but soon resigned due to her opposition to the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk in the ranks of the Left Communists.

The celebrated Soviet-Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, music director of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra for fifty years (1938–1988), was the only son of Mravina's brother Alexander Kostantinovich and thus Kollontai's half nephew.

[11] 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.

She spoke French with her mother and sisters, English with her nanny, Finnish with the peasants at a family estate inherited from her maternal grandfather in Kuusa (in Muolaa, Grand Duchy of Finland), and was a student of German.

[15] In 1890 or 1891, Alexandra, aged around 19, met her cousin and future husband, Vladimir Ludvigovich Kollontai (9 July 1867 – July/August 1917), an engineering student of modest means enrolled at a military institute.

[16][2] Alexandra's mother objected bitterly to the potential union since the young man was so poor, to which her daughter replied that she would work as a teacher to help make ends meet.

[20] Marxism, with its emphasis on the class consciousness of factory workers, the revolutionary seizure of power, and the construction of modern industrial society, attracted Kollontai and many of her peers in Russia's radical intelligentsia.

Kollontai's first activities were timid and modest, helping out a few hours a week with her sister Zhenia[citation needed] at a library that supported Sunday classes in basic literacy for urban workers, sneaking a few socialist ideas into the lessons.

In 1905, Kollontai was a witness to the series of events in Saint Petersburg, known as Bloody Sunday, where tsarist soldiers opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in front of the Winter Palace causing hundreds of deaths and injuries.

In 1911, while abruptly breaking off her long-term relationship with her faction comrade Peter Maslov (1867–1946), an agrarian scientist, she started a love affair with another fellow exile, Alexander Gavrilovich Shliapnikov.

The couple appeared quite oddly assorted: she was a Menshevik intellectual, of noble origins, thirteen years older than him; he was a self-taught metalworker from provincial Russia and a Bolshevik leading exponent of some prominence.

She was a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and "for the rest of 1917, [she] was a constant agitator for revolution in Russia as a speaker, leaflet writer and worker on the Bolshevik women's paper Rabotnitsa".

[29] Three days earlier, on 25 January, after about a month delay, Pravda finally published the faction's platform for the upcoming Tenth Party Congress:[30] it mainly advocated unionized workers' control over factories and generally over "the management of the national economy", on the grounds that the construction of a communist society could only be carried out by the industrial proletariat through its class work in history and through the intelligence it would acquire in concrete economic experience.

[31][l] In the run-up to the congress, scheduled for 8–16 March, at Shliapnikov's urgent request, Kollontai had a pamphlet printed with the title of The Workers' Opposition: it expounded her personal views on the subjects under discussion, was intended to be distributed only to the delegates and has since remained probably her most famous work.

[m] "Kollontai's propositions for reform mostly repeated those enumerated by the Workers' Opposition, but she placed a greater emphasis on reducing 'bureaucratisation',"[30] and denouncing petty-bourgeois or non-proletarian influences on Soviet institutions and on the party.

[35] Nevertheless, despite subsequent misunderstandings with the former leaders of the Workers' Opposition and Kollontai's own resentment at their having renounced the pamphlet she had written to support the faction, on 5 July 1921 she tried again "to help [them] by speaking on their behalf to the Third Congress of the Comintern".

In her speech, she bitterly attacked the New Economic Policy proposed by Lenin, warning that it 'threatened to disillusion workers, to strengthen the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie, and to facilitate the rebirth of capitalism'.

[38] When 'Kollontai attempted to speak before the Comintern Executive on 26 February 1922 on behalf of the views expressed in the appeal,' Trotsky and Zinoviev had her name removed from the list of orators and insisted that she should not take the floor.

In 1946 and 1947 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Scandinavian political circles, including the Finnish president and erstwhile Envoy to Moscow, Juho Kusti Paasikivi, on the grounds of "her diplomatic efforts to end war and hostilities between the Soviet Union and Finland during the negotiations in 1940-44.

"[49] Being sent abroad in a sort of de facto exile for over twenty years, Kollontai gave up "her fight for reform and for women, retreating into relative obscurity"[50] and bowing to the new political climate.

[51] The following words she allegedly pronounced in a private conversation with her friend Marcel Body [fr] in 1929 give a suggestion of her attitude towards advancing Stalinism: "Everything's changed so much.

On asking the publisher to make the changes requested, Kollontai apologized with obvious embarrassment, inviting repeatedly to debit her all expenses and writing twice that, under current circumstances, it was not absolutely possible "to do otherwise".

'[52] Yet, it could also be argued that she had just internalized for good the lesson Trotsky had taught her at the aforementioned 1922 meeting of the Comintern, when he had tamed her last remnants of recalcitrance, forcing her into bowing to party discipline.

It seems that the policy of the party and the structure of the apparatus become unfit only from the day that a group of oppositionists breaks with the party.The degree of her adherence to the prevailing ideas of the Stalinist regime, whether it was spontaneous or not, may be gauged from the opening of an article she wrote in 1946 for a Russian magazine.

In opening up to women access to every sphere of creative activity, our state has simultaneously ensured all the conditions necessary for her to fulfil her natural obligation – that of being a mother bringing up her children and mistress of her home.Alexandra Kollontai died in Moscow on 9 March 1952, less than a month from her 80th birthday, and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.

A spate of books and pamphlets by and about Kollontai were subsequently published, including full-length biographies by historians Cathy Porter, Beatrice Farnsworth, and Barbara Evans Clements.

Instead she believed that true socialism could not be achieved without a radical change in attitudes to sexuality[citation needed], so that it might be freed from the oppressive norms that she saw as a continuation of bourgeois ideas about property.

[60] This is likely a distortion of the moment in her short story "Three Generations" when a young female Komsomol member argues that sex "is as meaningless as drinking a glass of vodka [or water, depending on the translation] to quench one's thirst.

Capitalism has placed a crushing burden on woman's shoulders: it has made her a wage-worker without having reduced her cares as housekeeper or mother.Kollontai's views on the role of marriage and the family under Communism were arguably more influential than her advocacy of "free love".