9

The End of Opposition

THE WORKERS’ OPPOSITION continued to exist as a faction after the Tenth Party Congress. Its members planned to keep in touch with one another and to criticize party policy, without violating the congress resolutions. They could not openly espouse the platform that had been condemned as “anarcho-syndicalist.” Indeed, they could not advocate any platform at all, since such action was now illegal. Instead Shliapnikov and Medvedev shifted their attention to the NEP, which they saw as an open acknowledgement of the regime’s preference for the petty-bourgeois peasantry over the proletariat. Lenin’s cautious return to free trade, a concession which would prove a spur to economic recovery, was another compromise the Workers’ Opposition could not accept, especially since no comparable steps toward helping the working class were taken at the same time.

The members of the faction soon found their worst fears about the stifling of inner-party criticism borne out. Not only were they forbidden from speaking freely, but the leadership also began removing them from their union and party positions. Throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1921, the Workers’ Opposition put up a good fight in party and union organizations in Samara, Nizhni-Novgorod, Omsk, Perm, and other cities, but they were no match for the powerful forces arrayed against them.¹

For the most part Kollontai avoided this heroic but hopeless battle. Her lack of union affiliation excluded her from the campaign waged in the union and provincial party committees, and she had the Zhenotdel to attend to. There she could work for samoideiatel’nost’, for a party that allowed some small measure of pluralism, and for reforms for women. Still in touch with the Workers’ Oppositionists throughout the spring, she applauded their efforts quietly from the sidelines.

Kollontai had not abandoned her work at the Zhenotdel during the days before the Tenth Congress. In January 1921 she persuaded Preobra- zhenskii, one of the party secretaries, to co-sign a Central Committee letter instructing provincial committees to improve their support of the woman’s bureau.² After the congress she organized and then presided over a meeting of district workers, who discussed ways of following central guidelines in the provinces.³ Toward the end of March she worked on drawing up instructions for paying the women workers assigned to training programs in government departments. Through negotiations with the Sovnarkom, Kollontai secured a decree supporting the programs and clarifying budget procedures, a decree soon made obsolete by the new conditions of the NEP but hailed in the spring as a major achievement.⁴

In addition to these administrative activities, Kollontai made her usual speaking appearances in the Moscow area and gave a series of lectures on the woman question at Sverdlov University.⁵ She also chaired a meeting of organizers of Eastern women in early April; although the Zhenotdel had not been able to set up the conference for Muslim women she had initially planned for February, Kollontai was still hopeful that one could be held in June.⁶ She was not in disgrace, as she had been after Brest-Litovsk; indeed, she seemed to have lost only her candidate membership on the Central Committee, a symbol of status in the party that was rather meaningless for Kollontai, since she had never participated in the internal politics of that group.

Nor did Kollontai feel as numb and defeated as she had in 1918. She plunged into the work of her department and published an article, “Theses on Communist Morality,” which she knew would be controversial. In it Kollontai argued that the Bolsheviks must abolish the bourgeois family quickly, by accelerating the communalization of society. A “new morality” must be created, and with it a new marriage which would be based on emotional compatibility, common interests, and erotic attraction but would be devoid of the economic dependence and possessiveness that distorted the relations between the sexes in bourgeois society. Communism would not be built without a thoroughgoing change in human relations, without a “new morality,” of which the rules governing the interaction between men and women were a part.⁷

Communalization, not power or industrialization, had always been the core of Kollontai’s conception of socialism. By 1921, substantial progress had been made toward that goal. Large numbers of urban Russians ate in public dining rooms, had their clothes washed in public laundries, and lived in crowded apartments. They did so not out of choice, however, but largely because the civil war had robbed them of the means to feed and house themselves. Furthermore, the food was dreadful, and the laundries mutilated as many clothes as they cleaned; these conditions gave the masses cause for prejudice against communal, or rather governmental, services.

As she had for years, Kollontai was arguing for a major investment of resources in communal facilities, but she was doing so subtly now. The Workers’ Opposition platform had advocated communalization, and she was careful in the spring of 1921 to avoid any statements that could be attacked as harkening back to the Workers’ Opposition.⁸ For three months, from mid-March to mid-June, her public behavior was irreproachable. Privately, Kollontai was growing increasingly alarmed by the NEP, for she too saw the policy as a capitulation to the peasantry. Finally in June she decided to take the Workers’ Opposition’s criticism of the NEP to the Communist International, which was scheduled to meet at the end of that month.

It was not an easy decision. Kollontai told Bernhard Reichenbach, a representative of the German Communist Labor Party (KAPD), that she feared the party leaders would order her arrest. That was not a realistic possibility at the time, since Kollontai had every right as an individual to express her opinions before the Comintern. Furthermore no Bolshevik leader had been jailed for dissent. Kollontai may have been apprehensive because she understood full well that none of her comrades would applaud her for criticizing them in front of foreign Communists. She felt she owed the workers and the Workers’ Opposition this statement of principle, but she was not eager to make it.

For safekeeping, Kollontai gave Reichenbach a copy of her pamphlet, The Workers’ Opposition; she thought it might be confiscated should she be arrested. She chose him as a confidant because the leftist KAPD had broken with the German Communist Party in 1920 in a center- versus left-Marxist split, similar to the feud between the majority Bolsheviks and the Workers’ Opposition. Reichenbach promised to take care of the pamphlet, and a few days later he sent it to Berlin with a returning comrade.⁹ Kollontai passed the middle week of June at the International Women Communists Conference, where she worked with Clara Zetkin and Lilina to draft resolutions for submission to the main Comintern Congress, chaired the general sessions, and talked enthusiastically about increasing work among women. The warmth of the delegates’ response must have buoyed her flagging spirits.¹⁰

The Third Comintern Congress convened in the last week of June, with Lenin leading the Russians in speeches that counseled a retreat from expectations of world revolution and greater adherence to the proper line, the line of the Russian party. It was realistic to temper the always inflated hopes for rebellions in Europe, but highhanded and ultimately destructive to demand that foreign Communists sacrifice their independence just as the Bolsheviks were doing. Lenin held his party together in that demand until July 5, when Kollontai spoke.

Before her appearance she told Lenin she planned to criticize the Bolsheviks, which she knew would be taken as a breach of party discipline, regardless of its technical legality. He snapped back, “Are you asking my blessing for it? Then do it, but don’t talk about it beforehand.” “I’ll take you at your word, Vladimir Il’ich,” Kollontai replied. “I am not asking and I am putting my name down [to speak].” He said she should not, recommending instead that she visit a new hydroelectric project to see the progress Russia was making.¹¹ Kollontai remained unpersuaded.

She came to the podium after a speech by Radek, and the delegates, anticipating a stir, hurriedly returned to their seats. She spoke in German, the first language of the Comintern, then translated her remarks into French and Russian. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Ry- kov and Radek sat in a row behind her. As they whispered to one another, Kollontai’s face flushed, but she continued to address a silent audience.¹²

She began by announcing that she appeared as a representative of the Workers’ Opposition, which was a minority group in the Bolshevik Party but which nevertheless felt a responsibility to report to the Comintern on the current, dangerous policies in Russia. There were several important questions that must be asked. First, would the NEP build a communist economy? No, Kollontai answered, it marked a return to private trade, hence to private property, and outdated capitalism. In taking these steps, the party was catering to the needs of the peasants, who wanted individual land ownership, and to the bourgeoisie working in the government, who were agents of foreign capital.

That last charge was patently false, but Kollontai clung tenaciously to her belief that the middle class was the cause of bureaucratization. The chief danger of the concessions to the peasantry lay, she said, in their effect on the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat. A retreat from communism as a goal would make the working class question communism as an ideology. The resulting crisis of confidence would strip the workers of “faith in their ability to achieve anything through samodeiatel’nost’, in their ability to create a new communist economic system.” “I am seriously afraid,” Kollontai warned, “that if we continue this policy of concession, we shall get to the point that when a social revolution breaks out in other countries it will be too late, for then we shall not have a genuine, solidly conscious revolutionary class on which a revolution can rely.”¹³ The bourgeoisie and the peasantry would have become so strong that the demoralized Russian proletariat would be unable to complete the final stages of communist construction.

Instead of catering to the enemy, the Bolsheviks should be building up the working class; but they refused to take substantive measures in that direction. There were no large-scale programs of worker education, no ideas about harnessing the people’s creativity, nothing but paper resolutions. Thus, slowly, the Bolsheviks were squandering the revolutionary consciousness that had been awakened in 1917. No temporary gain in production achieved by the NEP could compensate for the stifling of mass initiative and the resultant loss of worker support for the party. She was speaking out now, Kollontai said, so that non-Russian communists would help the Bolsheviks by pointing out their errors. She defiantly affirmed her belief in world revolution and her resolve to continue to criticize.

Genuine salvation for us consists in consolidating in our party a strong core which stands for our old, firm principles and which is able to show itself at the moment of the revolutionary outburst. If the deviation in all Soviet policy develops to the fullest and our Communist republic turns into simply a Soviet and not a Communist one, then this core of strong Communists will take into its hands the red banner of revolution to guarantee the victory of communism throughout the entire world.¹⁴

“The core of strong Communists” was presumably the Workers’ Opposition, or perhaps a broader group of people committed to her notions of world revolution and proletarian democracy. Kollontai’s claim of a redemptive mission for them—saving the revolution—was a bit arrogant, but the plea behind that bravado came through clearly. She was appealing to the international Communist community to rescue the ideals of 1917 now being compromised in Russia. She was calling again on her comrades to rely on the proletariat rather than the peasantry, and she warned that if they did not, the proletariat, already damaged by war, already wavering in its loyalty to the Bolsheviks, would lose its revolutionary spirit. Without a revolutionary class the party could not lead a revolution. The end result must inevitably be “a Soviet republic, but not a Communist one.”

Kollontai’s attack on the NEP displayed a characteristic left-Bolshevik hostility toward the peasantry. She clung to the Marxist dictum that the peasants were at base a petty-bourgeois class interested only in private property, and when she did mention them as people worthy of attention, she carefully noted that she was referring to the landless peasantry. That group, according to Bolshevik doctrine, could be rallied to oppose the richer peasants, the kulaki, and therefore support the Bolsheviks. Given Kollontai’s childhood experience with the rural Finns, however, and the concern for them she manifested in her early writings, her outbursts against “the petty-bourgeoisie” in 1921 seem dogmatic and not a little cruel. The peasantry had suffered terribly during the civil war at the hands of both Reds and Whites, yet their greater hostility toward the Whites aided the Red victory considerably. They resisted the Bolshevik requisitioning squads that came from the cities to seize their grain, just as they avoided the early efforts to collectivize them, because they had learned over the centuries to rely on themselves and their neighbors. Why should a peasant trust outsiders, who must be either tax collectors or police? Why should he follow the Bolsheviks, except to rid himself of the landlord? That accomplished, the peasant wanted to be left alone to raise his crops and take care of his family. But although Kollontai was justified in viewing the peasants as less revolutionary than the proletariat, there was also reason to understand their attitudes, and even greater reason to compromise with them. Continued confrontation would further alienate the people of the countryside; far better to allow them to sell their grain than to risk more war by turning rural Russia into an armed camp.

Kollontai refused to admit the wisdom of the new tax law, and she decried the lack of comparable concessions to the working class. No programs were forthcoming that would cater to the proletariat’s “healthy” desires for independence, no reforms had been launched to diminish the influence and prerogatives of bourgeois bureaucrats. To Kollontai, the relaxed official policies toward the peasantry seemed part of a pattern of disregard for the revolutionary class; that was the heart of her objection to them. If the Bolsheviks placated the enemy and alienated those who had made the October Revolution, they would lose not only their souls but their revolution as well.

Fear that the proletariat was turning away from them had plagued many Bolsheviks for months, and this fear had been one element causing them to react so strongly against the Workers’ Opposition. When Kollontai made it the central charge of her speech, therefore, she spoke to an anxiety many felt, an anxiety justified by contemporary developments. Between June and September 1921, trade union membership dropped by six percent, a loss of 514,744 workers. Stories circulated among the Bolsheviks of long-time workers tearing up their party cards in disgust over the NEP; the representation of workers in the party fell by almost two percent during 1921.¹⁵ Kollontai and her comrades saw this disillusionment as a major threat, for both ideology and history told them that the proletariat was their source of power. Kollontai attacked the NEP not because she was heartless where the peasantry was concerned, but primarily because she wanted measures equally supportive of the working class to be taken, and because she saw evidence all around her of a growth in proletarian disillusionment.

She was still fighting for her version of the ideals of 1917; now she appealed to foreign comrades for pressure on their Russian brothers. However, the international socialist community had disintegrated in August 1914, and her own party was busy stifling free criticism. When she gathered her notes together at the conclusion of the speech, she did not look at the audience, for she knew by the chilly reception that her plea had gone for nothing.¹⁶

Trotsky and Bukharin rebutted Kollontai’s charges later in the day. First Trotsky asserted that the Russian party could make concessions to the peasantry, because the proletariat’s rule in Russia was secure and therefore would not be threatened by dealing with the enemy. Bukharin brought up Kollontai’s former Menshevism to explain her opposition to the NEP, accusing her of claiming to represent the Workers’ Opposition when in fact she spoke only for herself. Bukharin’s speech was an exercise in demagogy that resorted to slander and misrepresentation, but Trotsky, in attacking Kollontai’s refusal to acknowledge the necessity for compromise with the peasantry, went straight to the weakness of the Workers’ Opposition. The Bolsheviks must cope with a real world of miserable, inefficient, ignorant workers and hostile peasants, or they would perish. Still, Trotsky was unable to offer real improvement in the life of the proletariat. More fundamentally, he did not respond to Kollontai’s demand that the workers be given a primary role in creating the new society. He simply declared that they already possessed it, which was not true.¹⁷

Not that Trotsky’s evasions really mattered. The Comintern delegates ignored Kollontai and she felt isolated. “The speech ended,” she wrote later. “I walked through the hall and left. No one noticed me. I had known it would be this way. But it was painful. Very painful. My soul was dark and heavy. Nothing is more terrible, more painful, than dissension with the party. Why had I spoken?”¹⁸

A day or two later, she asked Reichenbach to return the copy of The Workers' Opposition she had given him. (He later heard that Trotsky had convinced her that she should break off all contact with the KAPD.) But Reichenbach had already sent the pamphlet to Berlin. Upon his return to Germany in August, he published it, against Kollontai’s wishes, and The Workers’ Opposition began to circulate widely among socialists and Communists abroad.¹⁹

Kollontai’s fears of party retaliation proved exaggerated. On July 8, she was back on the podium with Clara Zetkin to introduce the resolutions on Comintern work among women. If she felt subdued by Trotsky’s pressure, she did not show it in a speech that chided the Russian party’s attitudes toward women. She concluded with a ringing endorsement of an activist and independent Zhenotdel, and the delegates responded with “animated applause and approval.” Three days later Kollontai and Zetkin spoke again at the session which passed the resolutions.²⁰ Thus despite the earlier rebukes, Kollontai continued to work at the congress and to receive a warm welcome. She had made her statement of principle without having Lenin’s full wrath fall on her, although she later told Marcel Body, a French Communist and close friend, that Lenin had warned her not to participate in the opposition again.²¹ She had suffered some humiliation and had consented to ask for the pamphlet back, but those were small penalties compared to the arrest she had feared.

Kollontai was determined now to avoid opposition activity and to attend to the mounting problems of the woman’s bureau. The organizational weakness and the hostility of local Bolsheviks which had plagued the bureau since its creation were coming to a head in the summer of 1921. A resolution on agitation and propaganda passed by the Tenth Party Congress in March had included an innocuous sentence that read, “The Zhenotdely and the Sections for Work in the Country should be part of the regular agitation section of the given organization.”²² This brief reference was apparently designed to clarify accounting procedures, since the Zhenotdel still had no budget of its own, but some local party officials had taken the sentence as an order to merge the woman’s bureau into Agitprop, the party’s Agitation and Propaganda Department, and hence in effect abolish the Zhenotdel. Where sections were allowed to continue, their workers were often transferred to other jobs or ordered to restrict their activities. Provincial party conferences in Tver, Kostroma, and Astrakhan, among others, discussed abolishing the woman’s bureau altogether.²³

Word of these activities began to reach the Central Section in early summer, and on July 20 Kollontai issued a decree in the Izvestiia of the Central Committee, a biweekly newsletter, forbidding “the liquidation” of Zhenotdel sections on the local level.²⁴ Two weeks later a circular letter signed by Kollontai and Party Secretary Emelian Iaroslavskii reaffirmed Moscow’s support for the bureau by clarifying its structure and functions. The letter noted carefully that in agitation campaigns the Zhenotdel sections should work “jointly” with Agitprop and that the party leaders should consider the sections’ needs before transferring people. Both this decree and another addressed specifically to provincial officials stressed that the Zhenotdel must be included in general party work.²⁵

In the September issue of Kommunistka, the journal for Zhenotdel workers, Kollontai lashed out at “the liquidators,” those who wanted to abolish the bureau. Now the Zhenotdel must be strengthened, not weakened, she wrote, for there was much work to be done among peasant women and there was a growing unemployment problem for factory women. Yet some Communists still thought they did not need separate organizations for women.

Kollontai admitted that prejudice alone had not led to the misinterpretation of the Tenth Congress resolution. In many provinces the Zhenot- del sections had remained cut off from the party committees because party officials did not support their work. Thus the initial hostility between the activist women and the local leaders grew into separatism, which heightened the hostility. None of the Central Women had ever envisioned a hierarchy of independent women’s bureaus working in isolation, because they knew the male majority would not tolerate it and because it would promote the notion that the Zhenotdel was a woman’s auxiliary. If they wanted to do any work on the local level, however, the sections had to work apart, contributing to the very separatism they wanted to avoid.

The unintended autonomy of the Zhenotdel meant that the young, inexperienced women were on their own; consequently, they made mistakes that further irritated party officials and of course confirmed those officials’ already low estimate of the worth of work among women. The Zhenotdel sections set up projects, such as famine relief, that duplicated the efforts of other departments or exceeded their authority, or both. When the leaders of one such section could not persuade factory women to attend meetings, they ordered them to hard labor as punishment. Such incompetent high-handedness reinforced the opinion of many Bolsheviks that the woman’s bureau was a foolish waste of valuable resources.²⁶

Kollontai did not spell out these shortcomings in detail in her September article; she did admit that the Zhenotdel sections had some problems which aggravated their relations with the party committees. But she could not resist adding that “the provincial committees’ complete lack of information about the direction, principles, and methods of Zhenotdel work leads them with total naivete to sanction these errors.”²⁷ Furthermore, since provincial officials refused to help the women’s sections, they bore some responsibility for the confusion. To correct it, Kollontai urged them to allow the Zhenotdel to work closely with the rest of the party apparatus, without sacrificing its special role as advocate for women or its special expertise where women were concerned.²⁸

The problems in the bureau were not confined to the local level. Weaknesses existed also in Kollontai’s Central Section, where there was a severe shortage of personnel. Without control over the budget or staffing, Kollontai could not prevent her workers from being transferred away from her. Between March 1921 and March 1922 she lost nineteen of the forty-two people assigned to the Central Section.²⁹ She did not have enough workers to answer the mail from the provinces. Staffers shifted from job to job without the time to concentrate on any one task effectively.³⁰ Encumbered by these organizational difficulties, the Zhenotdel workers had to participate in famine relief during the summer of 1921, formulate ways to deal with rising unemployment among women, reassign trainees to departments involved in NEP programs, and preserve the local sections at the same time.

To what extent was Kollontai herself responsible for the disorganization at the center? It is hard to say, since none of the available documents discusses individual performance. Kollontai had shown an interest in and an aptitude for administration as commissar of social welfare in 1917, and later she would run efficient embassies, but she could not have spent much time at the Zhenotdel in February and early March, or in late June and July. She was also devoting some attention to the Woman’s Secretariat of the Comintern, and the absences caused by this other work may have hurt her supervision of the Central Section.

The bureau was further damaged by the loss of Samoilova, who had died of cholera while on an agitation tour in the spring of 1921. Samoilova had been a tireless worker who shared Kollontai’s general view of female emancipation but who also possessed enough political realism to curb her colleague’s tendency to rush ahead oblivious of party opposition. In May 1922 Kollontai wrote of her, “When the chances of putting through some Zhenotdel question at a bureau meeting were few, we brought up the heavy artillery—Comrade Samoilova.”³¹ Her death meant that of the initial three who pushed for the woman’s bureau—Inessa, Samoilova, and Kollontai—only Kollontai was still alive, and of the small group active in 1917 only Lilina and Nikolaeva still worked with women. Most of the Central Women were young, inexperienced, and lacking status in the party.

Kollontai made some efforts to improve the functioning of the Zhenotdel in the fall of 1921, but they were not enough to prevent a serious loss of morale among Zhenotdel workers themselves. On November 2 a conference of provincial section leaders met in Moscow, and there Kollontai learned how disillusioned the local people had become. The conference began with the usual self-congratulatory speeches, including one by a Central Committee representative, L. S. Sosnovskii, who assured the assembly that the party leadership would support the Zhenotdel against all “liquidators.” Later that day the real business of the meeting began with the reading of a Central Section report on Zhenotdel activity over the last six months, a report which included criticism of the provincial sections. The delegates responded angrily that the problems on the local level had arisen because the Central Section had failed to instruct local workers adequately. Defending Kollontai’s staff, the two representatives of the Central Committee, Sosnovskii and P. A. Zalutskii, then admitted that the Central Committee had not given the Central Section of the Zhenotdel adequate personnel or guidance and at the same time had asked the Central Section to formulate new programs. The orders to the provinces, therefore, had become confused or communications had broken down altogether.³²

Two speeches by Sosnovskii and one by Kollontai may have soothed the protest,³³ but there were still provincial leaders at the meeting who were so discouraged by the lack of help they received from Moscow and by the struggle with local Communists that they themselves thought the Zhenotdel should be abolished. Kollontai had been aware of this demoralization in October when she issued a directive ordering the local workers to speed up their preparations for the conference, but the full scope of the problem did not become apparent until the delegates poured out their frustration in Moscow.³⁴ Now Kollontai knew that the general party disbelief in the Zhenotdel’s usefulness had permeated the bureau itself, in part because of failures in her own staff.

The provincial leaders concluded their conference with several resolutions aimed at improving their organization. They stressed the importance of ending “parallelism” between the work of the Zhenotdel and that of Agitprop, promised to bring the sections’ activities under “the systematic leadership” of the party committees, and committed the sections to greater work in the protection of female labor, the trade unions, and the party schools. So serious was the demoralization, however, that representatives of four provinces—Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kaluga, Vladimir, and Novo-Nikolaevsk—actually voted at the meeting to dissolve the Zhenotdel. After the delegates adjourned, the Central Women secured a Central Committee circular letter instructing the provincial and district party committees to support the Zhenotdely, not to do away with them.³⁵

The Central Section concentrated in December and January on improving its organization. Kollontai had to retreat on the women’s training programs and on work among ethnic minorities and peasants because there was no funding available. In general all the Zhenotdel’s operations were hurt by smaller appropriations. At the same time the Central Women scored some success in a program allowing them to do more work among union women. The Central Trade Union Council had refused to permit such campaigns earlier, apparently because the union administrators did not want the Zhenotdel participating in union membership drives. They may also have resented Kollontai’s demands to promote women within the unions. In their own defense the union leaders cited the fact that earlier in the year untutored Zhenotdel workers had made confused efforts which only interfered with the unions’ programs. Finally, in late 1921, the Central Section and the Trade Union Council managed to draft a plan to cooperate in future agitation.³⁶

The disorganization and demoralization of the bureau did not cause Kollontai to temper her conception of it as an advocate for women within the party. She continued her efforts to increase female participation at the higher levels of Soviet institutions. On November 9 she gave an interview to a reporter for the Chicago Tribune in which she declared, “I badgered the Government single-handed on the question of giving women representation in all economic institutions and won my point.”³⁷ Just before the Ninth Congress of Soviets which convened in December, the Central Section sent out a letter instructing local Zhenotdel workers to campaign for the election of women delegates to the congress. The Central Women also drafted a slate of ten candidates to the Soviet Executive Committee, of whom four were elected, including Kollontai.³⁸ In an article in Pravda on December 27, the last day of the congress, Kollontai sternly criticized the lack of female representation at the meeting, and stressed, as she had so often before, the contribution women could make to economic reconstruction if they were only given a chance.³⁹

Kollontai managed to hold the Zhenotdel together in the fall of 1921. She had to adjust some of the department’s programs to aid economic reconstruction, and she had to cut back on most of the department’s activities, but in the face of a crisis in organization and morale she was able to keep the Zhenotdel functioning. She also continued to demand attention to women, pushing particularly now on the question of granting women representation and therefore power in government and party. Meanwhile a few members of the Workers’ Opposition, most notably Shliapnikov and Medvedev, were planning another protest.

In August 1921, at a party cell meeting, Shliapnikov had attacked the NEP, a move which was within the bounds of free inner-party criticism but which angered Lenin. Lenin demanded that the Central Committee expel the offender from the party for defying the Tenth Congress resolutions. Apparently Lenin was more upset than the rest of the leadership, however, for they refused to vote the two-thirds majority required to expel a Central Committee member, deciding instead to reprimand Shliapnikov and remove him from work in the party purge then underway.⁴⁰

The purge itself took some toll among the Workers’ Opposition, although its purpose was larger—to cleanse the party of the kind of nonrevolutionaries against whom the Opposition itself protested. Lenin shared Kollontai’s concern that alien elements were infiltrating the Bolsheviks, and he wanted the party purified so it could better meet the challenge of the NEP. At the same time he and his colleagues were still defining criticism as dangerous, so they used the purge mechanism to harry conscientious but independent Communists, as well as drunks and idlers. In addition to being threatened with expulsion, the Oppositionists were transferred, reminded that they must watch their tongues, and even spied on through intercepted mail and tapped telephones.⁴¹

Despite these pressures, Shliapnikov and Medvedev refused to face the fact that organized opposition had become impossible. They were still angry over the inadequacy of the party response to the workers’ plight, and as famine spread through the countryside in the summer and unemployment began to rise in the fall, their concern grew. They finally decided after a brief consultation in January or early February 1922 that they must launch an open protest again, so Shliapnikov drew up a petition, the “Declaration of the Twenty-two,” for submission to a plenary session of the Comintern Executive Committee scheduled for late February. In the declaration, the Workers’ Opposition charged that the Russian party was using the trade unions to suppress the workers. Bureaucratic union officials worked closely with bureaucratic government officials and therefore the workers were growing ever more disillusioned with the Bolsheviks. The declaration called on the Comintern “to do away with all abnormalities” in the Russian party.⁴²

Shliapnikov did not expect the foreign Communists to reprimand the Bolsheviks now, when they had been unwilling to do so during the preceding summer. Rather, he sought to force a new round of debate in his own party. He felt that the obstacles to inner-party criticism had grown so great that the leadership would not allow him to make a statement that would reach the rank and file. A plea to the Comintern, on the other hand, would be heard by his entire party.⁴³ Probably he also assumed that the leadership would have to respond to the protest at the Eleventh Party Congress in late March and therefore would also have to give its signers a chance to speak at that meeting. In presenting the “Declaration of the Twenty-two” to the Comintern Executive Committee in late February, Shliapnikov forced Lenin to discuss the Workers’ Opposition at the party congress, rather than continue to coerce the faction into silence.

Kollontai did not sign the initial draft of the declaration. At the Eleventh Party Congress she denied playing any leading role in drawing up the petition, and her critics could produce no evidence that she had been involved in Workers’ Opposition activities in the fall of 1921.⁴⁴ To all outward appearances she had avoided the faction. Keeping Zhenotdel afloat took all her time. She doubtless stayed informed of Shliapnikov’s difficulties and shared his outrage at the continuing harassment of Oppositionists, but she confined her public criticism to demands for improvement in the status of women.

Then, some time in January or early February, Kollontai was dismissed from her post at the Zhenotdel, for reasons which are not altogether clear.⁴⁵ She had not distinguished herself by running the woman’s bureau well, and she had vocally pointed out shortcomings in the party’s work among women. She had even given a critical interview to a capitalist newspaper. Thus it is probable that in the view of party leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, and Zinoviev, her performance as head of the Zhenotdel had been unsatisfactory. She had proved to be just as flamboyant as they had feared when they passed over her for Inessa in 1919.

But Kollontai did not lose her position simply because the Zhenotdel had disintegrated or because she had given an interview to the Chicago Tribune. These events did not help her, but the decision to fire her was probably taken largely because of her association with the Workers’ Opposition. The charge most often leveled against her at the Eleventh Party Congress was that she had sent her pamphlet, The Workers' Opposition, abroad.⁴⁶ There the German Communist Labor Party, now roundly critical of the Russian Communists, had spread Kollontai’s views all over Europe and North America. In early 1922 the IWW published the pamphlet in Chicago, with an introduction that praised Kollontai for demonstrating all the errors of the Bolshevik dictatorship.⁴⁷ It was an embarrassment to Lenin and the other party leaders to have her words used against them by their critics abroad, and to have foreign socialists and Communists see a crack in the facade of Bolshevik unity. Thus it seems likely that Kollontai was dismissed from the Zhenotdel in early February because of the popularity of The Workers’ Opposition abroad and because of reports that she was still in touch with the faction at home. Then, angry and defiant, she signed the “Declaration of the Twenty-two.” With little left to lose, she flung herself back into open opposition, adding her name and that of her old friend Zoia Shadurskaia to the petition.

On February 24 Kollontai made a report to the Comintern Executive Committee on the activities of the Woman’s Secretariat during the past six months. On February 26 she returned with Shliapnikov and A. G. Pravdin to present to the committee the “Declaration of the Twenty- two.” The delegation demanded a hearing, which they got several days later, but the outcome was never in doubt. An investigative commission was chosen, composed of several members of the Executive Committee, including Kollontai’s mentor Clara Zetkin. The commission held hearings, then issued a report which found the “Declaration of the Twenty- two” in violation of the resolutions of the Tenth Party Congress. The commission members agreed with Trotsky and Zinoviev, who had supplied them with copies of the resolutions and who accused the protestors of violating them.⁴⁸

Shliapnikov and Kollontai must have expected this rebuke. The real arena they sought was the Eleventh Party Congress, and in the early weeks of March they made some efforts to rally their supporters in the lower ranks of the party.⁴⁹ They still met a sympathetic response in Nizhni-Novgorod and other cities of the central industrial area, but the general reaction was negative. When the Central Committee sent out an order that local party committees should condemn the “Declaration of the Twenty-two,” most did so, including Samara, formerly a bastion of the Workers’ Opposition. A high-powered delegation headed by Lenin and Zetkin went to a congress of Communist metalworkers in early March, and persuaded them to pass a resolution supporting the decision of the Comintern Executive Committee. Shliapnikov and Medvedev fought to elect their supporters to the governing board of the union, but were defeated.⁵⁰

Shliapnikov, Medvedev, and Kollontai also had to appear before the Central Control Commission of the party to defend their appeal to the Comintern, and those hearings indicated that disciplinary action awaited them. When the congress convened, however, the Oppositionists could take heart from a rebellious mood among the delegates, some of whom questioned the form the NEP was taking, others of whom were planning a resolution to abolish the meddlesome control commissions. Furthermore Lenin, now in failing health, could not attend all the sessions; thus his overwhelming personal influence would be absent. Under those circumstances the Workers’ Opposition could hope to convince discontented Communists to vote measures that would improve conditions for the workers and democratize the party.

Lenin was well enough to present the Central Committee’s report on the first day of the congress. He admitted that the NEP was a retreat, and he said that in a period of retreat the Bolsheviks needed discipline. The Workers’ Opposition had damaged discipline. “When such a retreat occurs in a real army,” Lenin threatened with a typically heavy-handed metaphor, “the machine guns stand by, and when an orderly retreat becomes disorderly, the order ‘Fire’ is given. And rightly.”⁵¹

Lenin did not plan to shoot Bolsheviks, but he did want Kollontai, Shliapnikov, and Medvedev expelled from the party. They had violated discipline repeatedly over the last year and he was through with them. On the evening of March 28, 1922, A. A. Sol’ts, a member of the Central Control Commission which had investigated the Workers’ Opposition earlier in the month, accused the signers of the “Declaration of the Twenty-two” of factionalism in that they had written the petition without telling anyone else in the party. Factionalism was now a crime, the punishment for which was expulsion, and Sol’ts asked that this penalty be applied to Shliapnikov, Medvedev, and Kollontai, “who are the organizers of this business.” He specifically accused Kollontai of having been a Menshevik until 1915, and of having allowed The Workers’ Opposition to be published abroad. G. I. Petrovskii, a Ukrainian Bolshevik, then suggested that the congress should appoint a special committee to study the Workers’ Opposition’s protest “more precisely and objectively.” The committee was duly elected, and a group of nineteen men, including Sol’ts, Zinoviev, Stalin, and Dzerzhinskii, began to deliberate the recommendations of the Control Commission.⁵²

Shliapnikov and Medvedev defended themselves in eloquent speeches to the congress. Both men denied that they had formed a faction, but claimed instead that the people in their group were simply Old Bolshevik comrades who had become worried about the growing disaffection of the proletariat from the party and who had decided on the spur of the moment to present their worries to the Comintern. They had been unable to appeal to the Central Committee of the party because the leaders would not listen.⁵³

When Kollontai spoke on March 29, she too denied that the petitioners were a faction. Responding to the specific charges Sol’ts had leveled against her, she said that she had, in good faith, asked the KAPD to stop publishing her pamphlet. If her former Menshevism was a crime, she could name a number of other Bolsheviks who had still been Mensheviks after she had joined the Zimmerwald Left. In any event, Sol’ts did not dispute the substance of the “Declaration of the Twenty-two,” Kollontai declared, because he knew it to be true. She continued:

The basic content of the appeal says: “The party is split off from the masses.” The split exists, it is present, no one denies it. This is our misfortune, this is our pain. When you go to a factory where there are 900 workers, and where during a meeting on a party resolution 22 vote, 4 abstain, and the rest simply do not vote, this shows inertia, a split, that dark side of party life which we must fight against. And another thing shows the split; isn’t it typical that here, at the congress, we do not hear a word in the political report about what the working class, strictly speaking, should do.⁵⁴

The party had ruptured its relations with the proletariat because it had stifled free discussion and initiative among its rank and file, and not just because the war had taken its toll among the masses. Thus the link between people and party which existed in the factories had snapped, the Communist worker had lapsed into passivity, and the leaders had become increasingly unresponsive. Kollontai did not renew her attack on bourgeois influences as responsible for this degeneration, and the absence of that argument paradoxically made her charges all the more devastating. No broad social forces, no enemy agents explained the party’s betrayal of the revolutionary class in this speech. The Bolshevik leaders’ lack of faith in the workers and their intolerance toward the rank and file of their own party had led to the loss of proletarian support, which Kollontai had feared for over a year. Without party democracy, the revolution was in danger. She concluded with a strong call for the Bolsheviks to honor their principles.

We stand by the resolutions of the Tenth Congress on workers’ democracy and freedom of inner-party criticism, we want them to be put into practice, and we shall do everything so that workers’ democracy will be firmly established not only on paper, not only in words, but in fact. We want a fundamental, principal, leading role for the workers in the party to be firmly established, recognized in reality. In the creativity of the working masses is our salvation!⁵⁵

It was a fine speech, worthy of Kollontai’s oratorical skills and her revolutionary idealism, full not of demands for worker control of industry, which she could not advocate without breaking the Tenth Congress resolutions, but of calls for party reform, which were quite in line with other Tenth Congress resolutions. She, Medvedev, and Shliapnikov had gotten their forum at the Eleventh Congress, and perhaps they had even impressed some delegates. The Special Commission deliberating the fate of the Workers’ Opposition recommended that Kollontai, Shliapnikov, Medvedev, and two other members of the group, F. A. Mitin and N. V. Kuznetsov, be expelled from the party. The congress delegates did expel the last two, who had joined the Bolsheviks recently. They refused, however, to inflict such drastic punishment on Old Bolsheviks such as Kollontai, Shliapnikov, and Medvedev. Instead the delegates instructed the Central Control Commission to expel the three, should they ever engage in “antiparty relations” in the future.⁵⁶

Throughout the congress Kollontai retained her defiant mood. At a hearing of the Special Commission, she responded to the charge that the twenty-two had held factional meetings by declaring that they should have met more often than they did.⁵⁷ But after the congress her spirits fell. No reform was forthcoming, the trade unions lost even more autonomy and experienced further centralization of their internal structures.⁵⁸ Although the delegates refused to bow completely to Lenin’s will, they did censure the protestors for a violation of party discipline and they refrained from dealing with the issues the opposition had raised. Kollontai had lost her position at the Zhenotdel and now felt the threat of expulsion hanging over her. She later described the spring and summer of 1922 as “months without fruitful work.”⁵⁹

Without Kollontai, the Zhenotdel struggled through 1922. It survived, but it never became the assertive advocate for women Kollontai had envisioned. Such a role would have been possible only in a relatively pluralistic party, where interest groups were free to operate openly. The Bolsheviks were not such a party; they institutionalized their distrust of separatism in general and feminist separatism in particular. Strong personalities such as Inessa and Kollontai had been able to overcome this resistance to establish a position of advocacy for the Zhenotdel, but by 1922 they were both gone from the bureau. Kollontai’s successor was Sofia Smidovich, who had little status in the party. Nor did she share Inessa’s and Kollontai’s socialist feminism. Under Smidovich’s leadership, the Central Women toned down their demands for female representation in the government and party. They sought to achieve less controversial goals: full employment for women, maternity protection, child care, delegate conferences, liberation of Muslim women. The radical demands of the founders of the Zhenotdel for the abolition of the family and for female equality throughout the society were not pursued with the vigor accorded to more acceptable social welfare measures which helped women but did not alter their roles as wife, mother, and worker.

For Kollontai, the middle months of 1922 were a time of despair. She went to Odessa to be with Dybenko, who was stationed there, but their relationship had deteriorated beyond salvation. Now Kollontai discovered that he had taken her advice and found himself a younger woman. To the differences between them was also added a fear that her own political disgrace might impede his career. Kollontai wrote to him, “There was a time when our closeness helped you, made your way easier. Now, Pavel, you are grown, strengthened, I am proud of you. But now I not only do not help you, but our closeness is a positive hindrance to your future activity.”⁶⁰

The tension in her marriage, coming on the heels of the apparent end of her career, plunged Kollontai into depression. In the summer she wrote to Stalin, the party secretary, asking for a new assignment, and he responded that she should return to Moscow to await a diplomatic post abroad.⁶¹ This was an offer of exile, but Kollontai accepted it. “I truly thought,” she confessed later, “that this appointment was to be purely a formality and that I would also find time . . . to devote myself to my literary works.”⁶²

Georgii Chicherin, the commissar of foreign affairs who had sent her on speaking tours from Paris so many years before, now briefed Kollontai on her impending foreign service. He said she had been chosen because she possessed the necessary social graces, foreign languages, and experience abroad. Chicherin noted that there was resistance in the commissariat to appointing a woman diplomat, but he personally did not think her sex would be a problem. He told her that she was being proposed as envoy to Canada.⁶³

While Kollontai waited through the late summer and early fall of 1922 she wrote several articles. One pamphlet, Soon (In 48 Years), described a commune in the Soviet Russia of 1970. The people of that time were pictured as beautiful children who had never experienced capitalist injustice or, Kollontai added in reference to present injustice, known about the Cheka, the Communist secret police.⁶⁴ She also wrote the second in a series of articles for the journal for young people, Molodaia gvardiia. The first piece, published in January 1922, had been couched as an answer to a young Communist who had written to her asking about communist morality. What standards should a young person use to guide his or her behavior? Kollontai had answered that there were no hard and fast rules, no communist Ten Commandments. Moral norms had a purpose, she wrote, returning to her argument on ethics from 1905; they allowed people to live and work together peacefully. Therefore “right” behavior was behavior which prompted the harmony of the group.⁶⁵ Apparently the young Communist thought Kollontai’s answer too vague, for he wrote back demanding more substantive rules to govern his behavior. In her second reply, written after the Eleventh Congress, Kollontai told him that she could not give specific guidelines. One learned how to be a communist by mastering Marxism and, she added in a subtle rebuke to the party leadership, by living with the workers.

These were themes Kollontai had been stressing for over a year, and her fundamental premise on the function of morality in furthering “social cohabitation” dated back to her writings of 1905. But now she began gently to add a note of disillusionment.

So long as a member of a collective he loves (nation, class, party) depends on that collective, the commands of that collective will be compulsory for him. For if a member of a collective does not come to obey and support the orders of the collective, its morality, its rules of society, the collective will not tolerate him in its midst. Expulsion from the midst of the collective has always been and remains the harshest and most terrible punishment for a person.⁶⁶

Kollontai steadfastly defended the right of the group to enforce its rules by disciplining its members, but she now showed a realization of the price of her earlier, blind espousal of total dedication to the collective. Before, when she praised the collective, she had meant the working class. Now she added to her list of collectives the nation, which she, the internationalist, had vowed to destroy, and the party, which was expelling her from her homeland for breaking its rules. Was she implying by this juxtaposition that the party, like the nation, was a bogus collective that endangered proletarian solidarity? Was she acknowledging here that the party had become a collective separate from and in some ways equivalent to an entire class? Perhaps, but the evidence for those associations is tenuous at best. What she was saying clearly was that the party was a collective that demanded the absolute loyalty of its members in the belief that only through unity could it survive.

In 1905 and in January 1922 Kollontai had written easily about the group’s right to exact obedience to laws of its own creation. Now she had experienced the intolerance of comrades and the isolation of ostracism, and the rules were so strict that she could not express her anguish openly. She masked it with paragraphs that praised, and perhaps attempted to justify, the very “self-defense” of which she was a victim. She now understood the price of her collectivism. During the past year her individual opinions, the fundamentals of her ideology, had come into conflict with the will of the party majority. She had lost, and she was willing to submit to the group’s decision. She did not admit that she had been wrong, but only that the party had the right to demand obedience and that she had a duty to obey, to accept the diplomatic exile she had been offered, to leave opposition politics for good. She had always been torn between independence and dependence, solitude and community. Now she chose community, she would subordinate herself to the party because it was the vehicle of the revolution to which she had dedicated herself so many years before. She still had some of the rebelliousness of her youth, she was still capable of fine explosions in the name of her anarchistic Marxism, but she was also fifty years old, and the party and the revolution were her life, however she might disagree with Lenin and Trotsky. In her middle age Kollontai resolved that obedience was preferable to isolation.

In September 1922 Canada refused to accept her because of her reputation as a fiery orator and probably also because of her sex. The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs then nominated Kollontai for a post in a Soviet trade delegation to Norway. The Norwegian authorities approved her quickly, and on October 9, 1922, she left Petrograd for Christiania, five and a half years after the jubilant day she had made the same trip in the other direction.

Kollontai’s life at the center of Bolshevik politics had ended. The collective to which she belonged, the collective which had once shunned her friend John Reed, now shunned her. She had taken on her old comrades in open confrontation once too often. The New York Times reported, “One ungallant Communist remarked that Mme. Kollontai had constituted herself the official gadfly of the Communist Party, to sting it back into universal opposition.”⁶⁷ The Bolsheviks had no more use for gadflies than did the ancient Athenians. When she was given the choice of remaining in opposition (as did Shliapnikov and Medvedev) or leaving her country, Kollontai chose to leave. She made a graceful exit to Norway, where she had been happy before. There she could write and see her old friends and perhaps even make something of a career for herself in diplomatic work.

The battle she had joined for the revolution as she defined it had been lost. The easy optimism of 1917 was gone. To industrialize Russia, the Bolsheviks were relying on hierarchy, persuasion, and coercion; they were seeking technological modernization through government fiat, a goal which they had inherited from the tsars but which they pursued with far greater dedication and organization. The world they inhabited was filled with enemies, Russia was a backward country, and the Bolsheviks had to temper their utopianism to hold power and build factories. One of the first ideals they sacrified to a harsh reality was the notion of proletarian democracy for which Kollontai had spoken.