Cultural Amnesia (56 page)

ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI

Alexandra Mikhaylovna Kollontai (1872–1952) was born and raised in comfortable circumstances
in old St. Petersburg; rebelled against her privileges on behalf of women and the poor; and was exiled to Germany in 1908. During World War I she travelled in the U.S.A., preaching socialism
rather in the manner that an American feminist like Naomi Klein would nowadays preach against globalization when travelling in Europe. Upon the outbreak of revolution in Russia in 1917,
Kollontai returned home, where she served the Soviet government first as a commissar for public welfare, then in a succession of foreign ministerial and ambassadorial posts. She was the
regime’s recognized expert on women’s rights: special rights, that is, in a state where there were no general ones. She was thus the twentieth century’s clearest early case
of the fundamental incompatibility between feminism and ideology. Feminism is a claim for impartial justice, and all ideologies deny that such a term has meaning. Kollontai managed to live
with the contradiction, but only because she was unusually adroit when it came to aligning herself with the prevailing power. Her dogged service to a regime that condemned large numbers of
innocent women to grim death has rarely resulted
in her being criticized by left-wing feminists in the West. The pattern, alas, continues today, especially when it comes
to the spurious alliance between feminism and multiculturalism, an ideology which necessarily contains within itself a claimed right to confine women to their traditional subservience.
Against the mountain of historical evidence that left-wing ideology has been no friend of feminism, there is some comfort to be drawn from the fact that fascism was even less friendly:
Hitlerite Germany, in particular, did little to release women from their traditional typecasting. But it remains sad that women who seek a release for their sisters from the crushing
definition of a biological role have always found so many bad friends among those theoretically wedded to the betterment of the working class. Readers of Spanish might care to look at a file
of Cuba’s
Bohemia
magazine for 1959, the year of Castro’s revolution. The yellowing pages are full of stories about the heroic women who
fought and suffered beside all those famous beards for the liberation of their island from tyranny and backwardness. How many of those women ever became part of the government? At least
Kollontai got a job, and perhaps she and the Soviet Union she so loyally served both merit a small salute for that.

The masses do not believe in the Opposition. They greet its every
statement with laughter. Does the Opposition think that the masses have such a short memory? If there are shortcomings in the Party and its political line, who else besides these prominent
members of the Opposition were responsible for them?

—ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI,
“THE OPPOSITION AND THE PARTY RANK AND FILE,” IN
Selected Writings
, P. 313

A
FAMOUS FIGURE AMONG
the
Old Bolsheviks, Alexandra Kollontai was a sad case, and sadder still because it is so hard to weep for her. Her career is a harsh reminder that feminism is, or should be,
a
demand for justice, not an ideology. It should not consider itself an ideology and it should be very slow to ally itself with any other ideology, no matter how progressive that other ideology
might claim to be. Kollontai was an acute and lastingly valuable analyst of the restrictions and frustrations imposed on women by the conventional morality of bourgeois society. Fifty years
later, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer did not say much that Kollontai had not said first, even if they said it better—as they were bound to do, because they were proposing feasible
modifications to a society already developed, whereas she was trying to make herself heard over the roar of chaos. Armed with her hard-won awareness of how injustice for women had been
institutionalized in the bourgeois civil order, she thought that the Russian Revolution, the universal solvent of all institutions, would give feminism its chance. She spent the next thirty-five
years finding out just how wrong she was. From the viewpoint of the slain, the best that can be said for her is that she backed the regime for a good reason. Unfortunately she backed the regime
no matter how murderous it became. This outburst from 1927 is really a declaration of faith in Stalin, making an appearance under his other name, “the masses.” “The
Opposition” were those brave few among the Old Bolsheviks who still dared to question him, starting with Trotsky. As always, it is advisable to note that Trotsky, the butcher of the sailors
at Kronstadt, was no humanitarian. Only a few years further up the line, he actually thought that Stalin’s treatment of the peasants sinned through leniency. But it was obvious at the time
that any conflict among the leaders had nothing to do with principle: it was a power struggle, with absolute power as the prize. Kollontai was weighing in unequivocally on the side of an
infallible party with an unchallengeable leader.

A textual scholar might say that she was taking a conscious risk when she wrote: “If there are shortcomings in the
Party and its political line . . .” It is quite easy to imagine a Lubyanka interrogator asking her: “Oh yes, and what shortcomings are those?” But the interrogation never came.
Kollontai managed to stay alive, partly by spending as much time as possible on diplomatic duties in Norway, Sweden and Finland. (Talleyrand said, “He who is absent is wrong.” In the
Soviet Union, however, being absent was often the key to survival.) She died in 1952, shortly before her eightieth birthday, with two Orders of the
Red Banner to her credit,
if credit that was. The terrible truth was that the only real equality made available to women in the Soviet Union of her time was the equal opportunity to be a slave labourer. Her dreamed-of
principle was “winged Eros,” love set free. The Soviet actuality of love set free was a one-size-fits-all contraceptive diaphragm, with the overspill taken care of by serial
abortions. In her early writings—just as charmless as the later ones but a touch more personal—she was already exploiting the standard
langue de
bois
technique of speaking as if she herself were the incarnation of the proletariat. She probably hoped that if she sounded like the Party line, the Party line might be persuaded to
incorporate her views. A sample:

The proletariat is not filled with horror and moral indignation
at the many forms and facets of “winged Eros” in the way that the hypocritical bourgeoisie is. . . . The complexity of love is not in conflict with the interest of the
proletariat.

In the event, she found winged Eros a hard taskmaster. In a touching forecast of the
policy declared by Germaine Greer forty years later, Kollontai favoured the notion that a non-academic but suitably vigorous proletarian might be a fitting partner for a female high-brow. But
either the muscular young lovers she chose for herself did not understand that in offering them freedom she required their respect, or else she found parting from them hurt more than it was
supposed to. It would be cruel not to sympathize, and patronizing too: even while she was earning her decorations she was in fear for her life, and during the Yezhov terror in the late 1930s she
thought every trip back to Moscow might be her last.

Our real sympathy, however, we should reserve for those who were not spared. An impressive proportion of them were women,
even within the Party itself, where they were seldom given high office, but certainly had unhampered access to the status of victim. If Kollontai had been sent to the Gulag and somehow survived
it, she might conceivably have written a book along the lines of Evgenia Ginzburg’s
Into the Whirlwind
, although it is hard to believe that any amount
of deprivation and disillusionment would have given her Ginzburg’s gift for narrative. Kollontai wrote boilerplate even on the few occasions when
she felt free to speak.
Besides, she already had the disillusion: she didn’t have to be locked up to have that. A single week in the company of the regime’s high-ranking thugs and boors would have been
enough to tell her that there was no hope. We should not go so far as to greet her every statement with laughter, but we should try to rein in our pity. Pity belongs to the countless thousands of
her sisters who were sent to the unisex hell that lay beyond Vorkuta, where they aged thirty years in the first three months unless they were granted the release of a quicker death. Did she know
about all that? Of course she did. Women always know.

HEDA MARGOLIUS KOVALY

Heda Margolius Kovaly (b. ca. 1920) could have been sent into history specifically to remind us,
after we have read about an initially worthy but fatally compliant apparatchik like Alexandra Kollantai, that there really can be such a creature as an incorruptible human being, and that it
quite often takes a woman to be one. The broad details of Kovaly’s life are outlined in the short essay below. Harder to evoke is the personality that sets its healing fire to every
page of her terrible story. Reading
Prague Farewell
is like reading about Sophie Scholl, the most purely sacrificial protagonist of the White Rose
resistance group in Munich in 1942; like reading Nadezhda Mandelstam’s
Hope Against Hope
in its saddest chapters of resignation; like reading one
of the interviews that the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali gave just after her friend Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a fanatic who took exception to her
views about the subjection of women under Islam. Examples could be multiplied. Unfortunately, for some reason, they have hardly ever been codified: either the modern encyclopedia of feminist
heroism has not yet been assembled, or else it has never been made popular.
Almost certainly the reason is that ideology gets in the way. An uncomfortable number of the
heroines achieved their true bravery by questioning the political cause they first espoused, and a chronicler who still espouses it is not likely to tell their story well, or at all. The real
opportunity—to evoke a set of humanist values that lie beyond the grasp of any single political programme, and thus form a political and ethical ideal in themselves—remains
untouched. Yet it would be a poor man who could finish reading Kovaly’s book without asking himself how an experience like hers could ever have been thought to be subsidiary. Why, he
must surely ask himself, isn’t this the central story? If the world can’t be ruled by the values that come naturally to a woman like her, how can it be worth living in?