Alexandra Kollontai was a major figure in the Russian revolutionary movement, an activist from the 1890s, a pioneer of women's liberation and one of the founders of International Women's Day. This new collection is a wide-ranging selection of her writings from the revolutionary struggle, from her first discovery of Marx in her twenties, to her place in the first Bolshevik government, and her fight to defend Soviet power. Edited and translated by Cathy Porter, this collection includes articles translated for the first time into English.

A rare, graphic portrait of Russian life in 1917 immediately after the October Revolution. The heroine struggles with her passion for her husband, and the demands of the new world in which she lives.

Kollotai was a brilliant and passionate defender of the ideals of the Russian revolution and women's liberation.

The revolutionary legacy of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) has slipped into relative obscurity. This is somewhat surprising, because she was a voluminous writer - on politics, Marxist theory, country-specific economic studies, and the women's question. She left letters, diaries, memoirs and pamphlets, theoretical tracts, articles, and creative literature. She authored two novels, The Love of Worker Bees and Red Love, which explored issues of love and socialist morality. Kollontai was resolutely opposed to bourgeois feminism, the term used to demarcate a form of feminism that was anti-Marxist and that drove an agenda of free love. She was, however, perhaps the only one amongst a small group of women and men communists in her time who engaged intellectually with issues of sexual morality in the context of women's liberation. She envisioned the many possibilities for women's freedom that lay locked in a socialist future, and set out the mechanisms by which women's subordination - political and economic of course, but equally in terms of ideas and attitudes - could and must be undone under socialism. This volume brings together some of her most important writings on gender, sexuality and women's liberation.

Richard Stites views the struggle for liberation of Russian women in the context of both nineteenth-century European feminism and twentieth-century communism. The central personalities, their vigorous exchange of ideas, the social and political events that marked the emerging ideal of emancipation--all come to life in this absorbing and dramatic account. The author's history begins with the feminist, nihilist, and populist impulses of the 1860s and 1870s, and leads to the social mobilization campaigns of the early Soviet period.

This is the first time that the complete autobiography which Alexandra Kollontai wrote in 1926 has been published. "For it is not her specific feminine virtue that gives her a place of honor in human society, but the worth of the useful mission accomplished by her, the worth of her personality as human being, as citizen, as thinker, as fighter. Subconsciously this motive was the leading force of my whole life and activity. To go my way, to work, to struggle, to create side by side with men, and to strive for the attainment of a universal human goal (for nearly thirty years, indeed, I have belonged to the Communists) but, at the same time, to shape my personal, intimate life as a woman according to my own will and according to the given laws of my nature. It was this that conditioned my line of vision."

Alix Holt, in her careful, objective comments on the life and work of Miss Kollontai, has served her subject well. . . .She has given us this chance to become acquainted with the thought of a woman liberated before her time. New York Times Book Review"