10

Winged Eros

WHEN SHE LEFT Russia, Kollontai had no intention of becoming a career diplomat. Rather she planned to avoid further contact with opposition politics and to concentrate on writing about the problems of women in Soviet society. In November 1922 and again in the summer of 1923 when she returned to Moscow for brief visits, she was questioned about her affiliation with the Workers’ Opposition and, more importantly, about her attitudes toward the power struggle among the party leaders. By 1923 they knew Lenin was dying, and Zinoviev and Kamenev had forged an alliance with Stalin to block Trotsky’s succession. Bolshevik gossip said that Kollontai had been sent abroad not just to punish her but to remove her from the new infighting.¹ This was a dubious claim, since she had never been close to Trotsky politically. Now however, she also avoided public association with Shliapnikov and Medvedev, who were continuing their criticism of the leadership. She did not respond to overtures from various opposition members, and she refused to answer when foreign Communists asked her opinions of the opposition.²

Kollontai used her exile to do her last writing on the woman question. In several articles she returned to her old theme of the psychological emancipation of women, but where once she had explored woman’s position under capitalism, she now examined it in the emerging socialist society. She also tried her hand at fiction, producing short stories which examined woman’s lot and also made frank political criticism. Kollontai probably believed that if she kept her distance from the opposition, she could write as she pleased.

The first of the articles was part of the series she had begun before leaving home, “Letters to Toiling Youth.” In the third letter, “About ‘The Dragon’ and ‘The White Bird,’ ” Kollontai discussed Anna Akhmatova, a lyrical poet distinguished by the introspective, individualistic quality of her work. Akhmatova could provide guidance to the young woman attempting to emancipate herself in the new, transitional society, Kollontai wrote, because she was deeply sensitive to the difficulties a woman experienced in reconciling love and work. Akhmatova understood and had examined in her poetry the conflict between woman’s desire for a relationship with a man and her resentment of the sacrifices such a relationship often required.³

From discussing Akhmatova’s sympathy for woman’s dilemma, Kollontai moved in the next article to picturing the kind of erotic love that would not entrap and therefore not create that dilemma. “Make Way for the Winged Eros!” described the relations between men and women in the present and under communism. Kollontai wrote that during the civil war the party had been too busy to deal with the question of love, but now a respite had come in which Communists could think about how to live together. In the crisis of war they had time only for the “wingless Eros,” hasty physical liaisons that satisfied sexual needs at the most primitive “biological level.” Kollontai condemned such promiscuity as expressing merely “the reproductive instinct” and therefore lacking the “spiritual” interaction that should characterize love. She, like Engels and Bebel before her, believed erotic love should contain emotional commitment. It was understandable, Kollontai wrote, that in a period of upheaval people would concentrate on survival, thus having no energy left for long-term relationships, but now the crisis was over. Now the new society could cultivate the “winged Eros,” love which would function as part of the building of communism by forging bonds of “comradely solidarity” between the members of the collective. This was the vision which Kollontai had created in her prewar articles on the new woman. The “winged Eros” was eroticism with the possessiveness removed, it was the attraction of equals that enhanced the harmony of the group rather than isolating the couple in self-absorption. Such love was based on three principles:

Kollontai saw the development of such love as an integral part of the building of communism. For a collective to prosper, its members must care for one another. All must learn to work together in mutual respect and forebearance, and those men and women who loved one another erotically must learn to live that love without separating themselves from the group or attempting to possess one another. To achieve this transformation, communist society must increase the human being’s ability to care for his fellow creatures, must civilize, or rather perfect, human nature. People must learn to express all of the varieties of love freely, and to do that they had to escape the bourgeois notion that the only form of erotic love permissible was the “love of the legally married, conjugal pair.”⁵

Kollontai did not declare that marriage should be abolished. She merely said that bourgeois monogamy was not the only form in which heterosexual love should be permitted. Often a woman was drawn to one man by his spirit, to another by his physical appeal, and she should not be barred from pursuing both loves. So long as love was based on the “higher,” less carnal human emotions, Kollontai welcomed it. She did not recommend that everyone should have multiple affairs. She said that the proletariat must release eroticism from its bourgeois fetters and allow people to express their love for one another freely. Then whatever happened would be part of the proletariat’s new morality and therefore progressive. Kollontai, like Engels, refused to prophesy the exact form of relations between women and men in the future. She knew only that isolation would end.

Collectivism of will and spirit will conquer individualistic self-sufficiency. The coldness of spiritual solitude, from which people in bourgeois culture often seek salvation in love and marriage, will disappear; a multitude of ties binding people to one another in emotional and spiritual union will grow. The feelings of people will change in the sense of a growth of community, and the inequality between the sexes and every kind of dependence of woman on man will disappear without a trace, lost in the memory of past centuries.⁶

In the present Kollontai asserted that the proletariat was working out its morality as part of building the new society. Already the “winged Eros,” the coupling of women and men who were equals, was emerging. It should be “free love,” that is, it should be unbound by convention. This was a liberal view of sexuality, but not a libertine one; it was very close to Engels and Bebel and to Kollontai’s articles on the new woman. Erotic love remained for her what it had always been—an expression of the human search for community.

Kollontai continued to conjure up this vision in six works of fiction also published in 1923. In the fiction she added criticism of the unemployment that was rising among women and she railed against the material need that still made women sell themselves to men. For example, “Sisters,” a short story, painted a sympathetic portrait of a woman who had been driven to prostitution because she had no job. Kollontai wrote that the prostitute and the wife of the party official who bought the prostitute were “sisters,” because the oppression of woman by man created a bond between them.⁷ She made this argument repeatedly in the fiction, and she also explored the difficulties women faced in choosing between love and work in the new society.

In a collection of short stories published early in 1923 under the title Woman at the Turning Point, Kollontai presented women torn between men who did not want them to work and the work which was their means to independence. The unnamed heroine of “Thirty-two Pages” finally chooses to leave her husband, but only after much agonizing over the loneliness that such a choice entails. Walking alone along a foggy street at night, she examines her love for a man and for her work as a scientist, which she has had to curtail in order to live in the provincial town where her husband is employed.

She will go her own way, she won’t let herself be shackled by the chains of love. Not thinking about him, not looking back. Going ahead all the time, toward her goal. Alone, so that no one will delay her on the way, deflect her to the side. Going, as now, through the fog, but knowing that ahead there is a light, her goal, her scientific work. It doesn’t matter that it’s difficult, that her feet stick in the sand, that the package of books and provisions weighs down her arms, that the hem of her skirt beats around her legs unmercifully. Isn’t it difficult to be alone? In return, you gain freedom, in return you belong to your beloved work—scientific work. Herself and her work! And no more misunderstanding, no resentment that there are differences with him, that he doesn’t listen to her soul, doesn’t value her cherished work. Living and not suffering. Living and not loving anymore with a feeling of despair. Well, so what? Let him not understand. Let him not listen. But being together, seeing him, reassuring herself over and over again that he still loves her. And work, her work, well conceived, stands still, doesn’t progress. All these months. Oh, that waking up with the sharp thought that burns the consciousness like a pain until it hurts: five months, and only thirty-two pages written.⁸

The third and longest story in Woman at the Turning Point, “A Great Love,” describes Kollontai’s affair with Maslov in the same terms, reaching the embittered conclusion that relationships with men always end in mutual recrimination, that women must pursue their own careers, that no man will allow them to do that. With an anger she had not shown in “Make Way for the Winged Eros!” Kollontai declared that marriage was doomed because people did not know how to love. Perhaps she was still suffering over her divorce from Dybenko, or perhaps she was simply expressing the disillusionment of a lifetime spent pursuing a lasting relationship she never found. Her condemnation of marriage did not limit her faith in the possibility of a purified erotic love, however. That faith had endured all her disappointments. Kollontai had always believed in love, but she had never believed that it could be successfully institutionalized in marriage.

There has been speculation that “A Great Love” was actually a portrait of Lenin’s relationship with Inessa, and that Stalin forced Kollontai to publish it in 1927 because he wanted to humiliate Krupskaia. Thereby he dissuaded Krupskaia from joining the United Opposition led by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev.⁹ In fact, however, Kollontai was writing about herself, and the story first appeared in 1923, not 1927. It is doubtful that Stalin would have tried to threaten Krupskaia with such a weak reed, when he could have used more persuasive weapons against her.¹⁰

The present economic difficulties women faced and the love-work conflict were also Kollontai’s central concern in a second set of short stories published in 1923, The Love of the Worker Bees. The heroine of the first story, Vasilisa Malygina, is a dedicated Communist who chooses to put her career ahead of her marriage to her comrade husband, who has been corrupted by the NEP. She leaves him, after coming to pity his mistress, a bourgeois woman unable to live without a male to support her. When Vasilisa returns to Moscow from the provincial town where her husband works, she finds that she is pregnant, but rather than go back to the father of her child she decides to rear the baby herself and continue her career as a party member alone.¹¹ Once again Kollontai sees solitude as the price women must pay for independence.

In this story Kollontai added to her portrait of the emancipated woman direct criticism of Soviet society under the NEP. She pictured party officials as overly fond of power and material possessions, and in one particularly scathing characterization she presented a police agent as a fop with carefully waxed mustache and fine leather boots. The compromise tactics of the party had led now, Kollontai said in no uncertain terms, to the corruption of weak-willed communists and to a widening of the already dangerous rift between party and proletariat.

The Love of the Worker Bees also contained a story entitled “The Love of Three Generations,” which was destined to become well known in Europe and to brand Kollontai as an advocate of promiscuity. Its heroine, a young woman named Zhenia, is caught up in the civil war and has no time for commitment to anything but revolution. Desiring to satisfy herself physically, yet unwilling to divert herself with a real love affair, Zhenia sleeps with many men, including her mother’s husband. She becomes pregnant but plans to have an abortion and go back to party work. Kollontai appears in the story as an older Communist to whom Zhenia tells her story; she listens bemused and tolerant, understanding the girl’- amorality as a product of her dedication to communism and her inabili to establish long-term relationships in a time of crisis. Kollontai does not approve of Zhenia’s promiscuity, but neither does she condemn it. It is presented as a phase through which society is passing, a symptom of the genesis of a new morality.¹²

Through her fiction Kollontai’s ideas on erotic love spread around the world, becoming known by the end of the twenties even in China. This was unfortunate, because the stories do not contain as full a statement of her views as articles such as “Make Way for the Winged Eros!” A reader unaware that Kollontai disapproved of promiscuity could see Zhenia as a model, and even young, middle-class Chinese cited Kollontai as advocating casual sex.¹³ In Soviet Russia, her name was widely identified with “the glass of water theory,” a defense of promiscuity on the grounds that one should satisfy the sex drive as simply as one satisfies thirst. Kollontai did not originate or even favor “the glass of water theory,” but one could draw that conclusion from reading only “The Love of Three Generations.”

Kollontai’s fiction is thus an incomplete guide to her views on erotic love. It is also bad literature. It lacks the strength of her sometimes overwritten but generally lucid and well-organized nonfiction. The characters are one-dimensional, the females all saintly, maternal, and committed to the cause and to other women, the men childish, demanding, selfish, and not a little stupid. The men are also easily corrupted by the NEP, while the women remain untarnished, unless they are bourgeois in origin. The prose is florid, and the ideas are hammered home with a lack of subtlety suited more to an agitational harangue than to fiction. Kollontai made major points—that women were still having to choose between love and work, that they still had to contend with economic insecurity, unsympathetic husbands, and pregnancy, that Soviet society should permit a variety of relationships between women and men. When she discussed the same issues in nonfiction, she produced work which suffered less from her didactic tendencies and which presented her ideas in more complete form.

The publications of 1923 were the last in which Kollontai spoke for women, for party reform, and for communalization. Her socialism was based on those three elements—community, revolutionary purity, and female emancipation. The uniqueness of her voice within Bolshevism came from her eloquent defense of her ideals and from the way those ideals intermingled and were strengthened by their mutual dependence. The emancipation of women and the emancipation of all people would proceed from the creation of a harmonious society, built by the working class and by a party of revolutionaries who refused to compromise their principles. It was a fine vision, unsullied by realism. Factories, electrification, uneducated workers, military power, foreign policy, nuts and bolts —none of these concerned Kollontai. She demanded communes, revolutionary purity, and the emancipation of women. And 1923 was the last year she was allowed to do so.

A Soviet reviewer in that year pointed out the deficiencies of Woman at the Turning Point. The style was poor, he wrote, and the subject matter reminiscent of prewar ladies’ magazines. The reviews of The Love of the Worker Bees were more mixed; one commentator said the book was “lively and fascinating,” but another advised Kollontai to confine herself to nonfiction.¹⁴ These notices in relatively nonpolitical journals, however, were not the ones that mattered, and by the fall of 1923 Kollontai found herself under attack in the party press.

The new criticism of her work began with a hint in midsummer. On July 26 Polina Vinogradskaia, one of Kollontai’s former colleagues at the Zhenotdel, published an attack on recent articles by Trotsky. She said he was wasting his time writing about literature when the workers were struggling with the practical problems of daily life. In fact, Trotsky had been taking a rest from political squabbling to explore serious questions of art in the new society, and Vinogradskaia was picking at his ruminations.¹⁵ She went on to lay out her own thoughts about abolishing the bourgeois family, but in a footnote she included a gibe at Kollontai. “Comrade Kollontai, in the journal Molodaia gvardiia, occupies herself now with purely intellectual literary exercises about the ‘winged, wingless, etc., Eros.’ ” The average woman cared far more about feeding her children than about reforming love.¹⁶ Vinogradskaia was probably correct in that assertion, but her criticism of Trotsky and Kollontai was gratuitous. The reforms she discussed in the article were those Kollontai had always championed, and she did not need to attack either Kollontai or Trotsky in order to argue for better communal facilities.

The attack on Kollontai became more intense in the fall. In Molodaia gvardiia a Communist named Arvatov criticized her theories on sexuality. Arvatov took issue with Kollontai’s praise of Anna Akhmatova, whom he condemned as a bourgeois poet. He did not want young people reading Akhmatova, and he advised them not to accept Kollontai’s positive appraisal of her. Furthermore he did not approve of Kollontai’s concentration on female personality. The problem under socialism, he wrote, was the development of a new human personality, not just a new woman. Kollontai’s special emphasis on women was feministic. After he made that charge, Arvatov added in parentheses, “I personally beg the author’s pardon.”¹⁷

Arvatov did not care for Kollontai’s stress on the difficulties of reconciling love and work. Like many Communists, he did not understand her assertion that women had to overcome the tendency to put their lover’s needs ahead of their own. Kollontai felt that the psychological development of women under socialism would be somewhat different from men’s, because female bondage was deeply ingrained in the psyches of both sexes; Arvatov rejected that notion because he felt it was not “scientific,” but “feministic.” In so charging, he was expressing the fundamental Marxist reluctance to see woman’s position as determined by elements different from those determining man’s. Such criticism might not be original, but it was genuine, in that it was part of the ideological argument over female oppression which Marxists had been engaged in for years.

In her second, direct attack on Kollontai, which may have been approved in advance by Krupskaia,¹⁸ Polina Vinogradskaia did not debate issues so much as she attempted to demolish Kollontai’s writing in order to discredit her politically. Vinogradskaia began by saying that now was indeed a good time to discuss questions of secondary importance, such as sex and family, but that one must be careful to keep the discussions thoroughly Marxist. Kollontai’s articles in Molodaia gvardiia did not do that; they wandered off into “metaphysics.” “Comrade Kollontai takes off with great zest on trips to the communist future, filling the sails of the socialist boat with the wind of sexual problems.”¹⁹ Vinogradskaia accused Kollontai of not grounding her speculations in materialism, of ignoring the practical problems of daily life, and of claiming the development of socialism depended on relations between the sexes. The article was laced with slander and half-truths: Kollontai had always been petty- bourgeois, she was guilty of “George Sandism,” she had been influenced by the anarchists Kropotkin and Tolstoi. She was “a woman Communist with a solid dose of feminist trash.” Almost at the end of the article, Vinogradskaia came to the crux of the matter. “How could she have been considered for so long one of the leaders not only of the Russian, but of the international Communist women’s movement?”²⁰

Like Arvatov, Vinogradskaia stood on solid ideological ground when she charged that Kollontai wanted sexual relations changed independently of the material substructure. The dispute among Marxists over how much purposive effort would be required to alter social relations was longstanding; Kollontai had always believed in morality as a tool in the change, not as a simple concomitant of it, and in that belief she differed significantly from many Bolsheviks. Vinogradskaia went beyond intellectual debate, however. She threw every slander she could summon into the fight, with the purpose of destroying Kollontai’s influence. Her goal was more political than intellectual: she wanted to be certain that young Communists would wonder why this woman, with her “petty-bourgeois” notions, had ever been considered a leader.

Kollontai took these articles as a sign from the party leadership, and after 1923 she published nothing more about female personality and never ventured a public word of political criticism. Marcel Body, a French Communist who had worked with Inessa and who was Kollontai’s friend and colleague in the trade mission to Norway, said many years later that Kollontai had at the time protested strongly against the attacks on her. She may even have returned to Moscow for a hearing before the Control Commission on her association with the Workers’ Opposition. Body’s memory was not always reliable, but he wrote that after Kollontai convinced Stalin that she had severed her connection with her former comrades, the press campaign stopped. An apology for the Vinogradskaia article was published in December.²¹

Although the exact details of Kollontai’s response to Vinogradskaia are uncertain, the motives for the attacks of 1923 and their effect are relatively clear. The accusations that Kollontai was a feminist, made by Krupskaia and Natalia Sedova (Trotsky’s wife) to the New York Times early in the year,²² and repeated by Arvatov and Vinogradskaia in the fall, were at least in part politically motivated. No doubt the accusers also disliked Kollontai’s articles for their content, but Kollontai’s theories on erotic love had been well known for years, and she had been attacked publicly for her writing about women only in 1921, during the Tenth Party and Comintern congresses. Even then Bukharin and Trotsky joked about her opinions on the woman question, without directly charging feminism. Now, in 1923, worry lingered that she would return to opposition, and she herself may have increased that concern with the criticism of NEP society that appeared in the fiction. Thus a few Communists attacked her ideas on female emancipation, which had always been controversial, as a way to diminish the influence of a woman who had once been “one of the leaders not only of the Russian but of the international Communist women’s movement.”

Again, it is true that many party members found Kollontai’s articles unacceptable because they thought her “winged Eros” a grand name for old-fashioned promiscuity. Vinogradskaia wrote much later that she and Krupskaia had discussed Kollontai’s writings on erotic love, and that Krupskaia had said such ideas should not appear in party publications.²³ Nor did the majority of Communists understand Kollontai’s talk about woman’s complete psychological emancipation. Rarefied notions of the perfecting of human personality through communalization had never appealed to the more traditional Marxists, who saw revolution primarily as a process of political and economic change; now the party contained more people than ever who had few intellectual predilections and an overwhelming interest in practical matters—personal improvement, decent housing, bureaucratic management. To them Kollontai’s ideas really did seem bourgeois, the ramblings of a George Sand, sanctioning immorality.

Furthermore, these Communists considered promiscuity to be a problem in Soviet Russia. In the early twenties, there really were thousands of Zhenias who preached that the revolution meant sexual freedom; complaints circulated in the party that young Bolsheviks were pressuring each other into bed by accusing anyone who resisted of petty-bourgeois morality. Given the primitive quality of birth control methods then available, many girls found themselves pregnant and abandoned by their once ardent comrades. Without sufficient day care, without decent jobs, these young women were burdened by liberal sexual mores. How to protect them from the new freedom was becoming a heated point of debate among Communists just when Kollontai published “The Love of Three Generations.” Some favored increasing maternity and child care and other communal facilities.²⁴ Others, advocates of traditional marital relations, wanted to diminish sexual experimentation and make fathers responsible for supporting their children.²⁵ By 1926 the party leadership had swung toward the more traditional position, because they disliked the instability produced by the new morality, because they had never accepted the liberal attitude toward sexuality of Engels, Bebel, and Kollontai, and because they did not think they had the funds to pay for the maternity care and nurseries that would support the offspring of unregulated sexuality. This renewed stress on traditional morality was beginning in 1923, and the criticism of Kollontai reflected a growing feeling against the Zhenias.

When Kollontai left Russia in 1922, she had thought that if she avoided contact with the opposition she could write. She had sought to retreat to Norway, from which she could continue to examine the position of women and vent her spleen over the effects of the NEP. That had been a realistic hope, for the twenties were a period of experimentation in Soviet Russia, and the press teemed with debate about the daily life of the new society. Kollontai found, however, that the role of writer in exile was not open to her. She was expected to cease her feministic musings and behave herself.

After 1923 she concentrated on diplomatic notes and her memoirs. In 1924 she published Fragments from a Diary, which described her experience in Germany in August 1914. As she had done in Around Workers’ Europe so many years before, Kollontai shaped her diaries into a good journalistic narrative, in which she controlled her sentimentality and allowed herself to be an observer. It was an unusual accomplishment, since autobiography is such a personal medium, so conducive to egocen- tricity, but Kollontai was adept at it. In the Fragments and a later book, In Kerensky’s Prison (1927), she recorded personal images of events that are far more successful as literary works than was the fiction she loved but had not the temperament to master.²⁶

Kollontai did allow her work to be published abroad in translation, so that at the very time she was being condemned at home she was reaching a new audience in Western Europe. Feminists and socialists accepted her as one of a number of writers on the new sexual freedom of the twenties, and some students of the status of women read the lectures she had given in 1921, published as The Labor of Woman in the Evolution of the Economy. In the thirties, when the interest in feminism waned, Kollontai’s writing also went into eclipse, to be rediscovered with the woman’s movement that began in the 1960s. This development has been confined to those countries where feminism has reappeared. In the Communist nations of Eastern Europe and Asia, only Kollontai’s proposals for social services such as day-care centers remain known, for those governments consider sexual liberation libertine and irrelevant.²⁷

No longer able to write about the psychological emancipation of women, Kollontai thought she could continue to make suggestions for reforms that would improve women’s daily lives. In 1926, therefore, when she returned to Moscow after completing her assignment in Norway, she joined in a debate over revision of the Soviet marriage code. Since 1918, evidence had been growing that the law enacted with such fanfare during the early days of the revolution had actually increased women’s burdens. Community property had been abolished, allowing men to walk out on their wives and take all the family’s assets with them. The lack of a clear statement of the father’s financial responsibility for his children meant that he could abandon them, and the wife could receive restitution only through litigation. Women who had not registered their marriages with the government—and there were many such women—were in even greater difficulty, for they had no legal recourse. A marriage code that had been designed to liberate was thus enabling some men to victimize dependent women. By 1925 the government had decided that the law had to be rewritten to reinstitute alimony. If men could be forced to support their families, it was believed they might not abandon so many women or father so many unwanted children. The proposed law also recognized common law marriages, that is, those that had not been registered, as legal and the spouses in such marriages as entitled to alimony. Furthermore it asserted the right of the wife to share in property which the couple had acquired during their marriage.²⁸

However circumspect she had now become, Kollontai could not ignore the marriage law debate. It was so much a part of her life’s work. In a speech to a group of Soviet workers in January 1926, she suggested dealing with the problem of woman’s dependence on the father of her children by broadening public funding of child care. She dismissed as petty-bourgeois the proposed law which reinstituted the legal responsibility of men. Equally mistaken were those people who claimed that easy divorce encouraged licentiousness. Society had moved to a new stage, Kollontai said; its marital relations now must perforce be new, and therefore difficult for people nurtured in old values to understand.

Kollontai urged Communists to innovate, not to cling to the morality of the past. The proposed law code required the payment of alimony in both common law and registered marriage, which seemed a great advance, superficially. Suppose, however, a man had several common-law wives? Suppose a woman had one “registered” husband and one common-law husband? Suppose the man was too poor to support his wife? Above all, what would happen to the unmarried woman with a child to rear?

Rather than alimony, Kollontai proposed marriage contracts which would spell out the division of family property. The peasants were greatly concerned about the ambiguity of present laws as they applied to land and household goods. Kollontai believed that a clear contract drawn up between the spouses when they married would resolve that problem. She also wanted marriage contracts among the proletariat, but for a different reason.

These contracts . . . are important for women workers, who in this way can know that their housework also counts for something and is recognized to be just as important as work in factories and plants. For as long as we have the consumer cell in the person of the working family we must understand that the woman’s labor in this cell should be taken into account in some way and valued. This would lead to a real equality of the members of the cell, not in words but in deeds.²⁹

Kollontai was making an extraordinary proposal. She had backed away from her calls for the immediate construction of collectives, had accepted the nuclear family as inevitable in the present, and was suggesting written agreements which took into account the full economic contributions of the woman. One Soviet economist estimated very conservatively in 1923 that the Russian woman spent ten percent more time working than her husband, chiefly because five hours of her day were taken up with housework.³⁰ To remedy this situation Kollontai wanted marriage contracts, a solution that would be suggested by feminists in the United States forty years later.

For unmarried women she proposed the creation of maternity benefits funded by payroll deductions of about two rubles per year per worker. Single women could draw payments for obstetrical care and child support, as could divorced women. The obligation for bearing those expenses among the married would be spelled out in their marriage contracts. Privately paid alimony and the complicated laws regulating it would then be unnecessary. Nor would the new system encourage immorality; Kollontai sensed strongly that much of the pressure for more conservative measures came from people reacting against the freer sexual mores of the young. Communists must fight excesses by teaching their children to work for the collective, not retreat into “petty-bourgeois family illusions.”³¹

There was support for Kollontai’s proposals among youthful party members, but the leadership felt the conservative peasantry would not accept the contract notion. Nor was it feasible in a nation of high illiteracy. The leaders themselves did not give serious consideration to Kollontai’s plan, because she was too discredited for her ideas to count for much. After a few critics accused her of feminism, her suggestions were ignored. The new marriage law attempted to protect women in marital relationships with a clear statement of the responsibilities of the partners. Irritated at what she saw as another compromise of socialist principle, Kollontai wrote shortly thereafter that the Soviet Union’s code was little better than those of the most progressive Western democracies.³²

Her contribution to the marriage law debate was the last echo of the work for women Kollontai had begun in 1905. She recognized that a great deal had been accomplished in the Soviet Union since the revolution. Women had made substantial advances toward political equality. They were equal to men in the eyes of Soviet law. Education was now fully open to them. They could claim generous maternity benefits. The government still had not provided substantial day care; it would not do so for decades, but a start had been made. These were major gains, achieved very rapidly by a regime that had also been struggling to survive, and Kollontai accepted them as laying the foundation for female emancipation. Her disappointment over the marriage law did not diminish her awareness of the enormous significance of her government’s dedicating itself to emancipating women. None of the Western democracies had made even such a verbal commitment.

Yet Kollontai wanted more. She could propose a plan as impractical and visionary as marriage contracts in 1926, when peasant men still considered it their right to beat their wives and when in Central Asia outraged Muslims murdered Zhenotdel workers for attempting to unveil Muslim women.³³ Kollontai had always envisioned a far more thoroughgoing emancipation than did other Bolsheviks and the people of her country. Over the years she had encountered resistance to her most controversial proposals from women as well as men, resistance which meant that the full scope of her vision—women working equally with men, their children cared for collectively and their household duties taken over by communal facilities—could not have been realized. There simply was not enough support among the population, and the party could not be induced to push the people into Kollontai’s conception of full emancipation when the party itself gave it only lukewarm support. The Bolshevik leadership made pledges to communalize “housework,” but they were considerably less enthusiastic about the communalization of child rearing, which would have meant a genuine alteration in the assignment of roles within the nuclear family. Had they been wholly committed to that change, they would have lacked the resources to realize it and they would have faced enormous public resistance.

More feasible was Kollontai’s demand that the party promote women into positions of authority throughout the Soviet system. Here the male leadership balked. They had always resented calls for special treatment for women, but by the early twenties they could no longer defend that resistance on ideological grounds. There were already too many reforms that took account of women’s burdens, and there existed the Zhenotdel. The party leaders believed, however, that granting women equality of opportunity was enough; special efforts to encourage their progress, such as instructing middle-echelon managers to promote them, were unnecessary. Soviet women did in fact make great strides in subsequent decades, rising to prominent positions in industry, education, and the arts, far outstripping the women of Europe and North America. They did not gain access to political power, however. The upper echelons of the Communist Party remained almost exclusively male, because women were still tied down by marriage and family responsibilities and because men did not want to grant them access to power. Kollontai, seeing that the party leadership was making no effort to bring women into the inner sanctums of the Soviet hierarchy, called for deliberate efforts to advance women. She did not win her case, and the reason seems largely to have been male prejudice, reinforced by the ideological resistance to separatism.

Kollontai’s party, impelled by the commitments to women in its platform and by the prodding of Kollontai, Inessa, Samoilova, and the Zhenotdel, accomplished more reform for women between 1917 and 1929 than any other European political movement. In so doing, the Bolsheviks overcame significant opposition within Russia but they stopped short of abolishing women’s traditional roles and eliminating traditional discrimination. Thus women continued to work as wives and mothers, and added work outside the home to their duties. This triple responsibility meant they could not function as men’s full equals in Soviet society. They lacked the time and the mobility of men and they still had to battle discrimination.

Furthermore, the Bolsheviks persisted, before and after they took power, in tempering their commitment to women with their fears of separatism and their unexamined prejudice. Thus they screamed “feminism” far too often, and on these grounds, resisted Kollontai’s demands for the enactment of reforms to which they were already committed on paper. When Stalin came to power, he openly embraced the nuclear family as the basic unit of Soviet society, and woman remained wife, mother, and factory worker. Thereafter the Soviet Union proudly and complacently claimed to have emancipated women completely. But as Lenin had said:

The party had never sought female emancipation to the extent that it preached it, and this difference between professed goals and actual performance was the source of Kollontai’s anger. The communism of which Lenin spoke, of which women’s equality was so integral a part, had been postponed to an indefinite future, and Kollontai’s socialist feminism was once again unacceptable to Bolsheviks. She turned to her work as a diplomat. When she wrote about the position of women again, it was to praise Soviet achievements in the docile prose that became characteristic of her chastened middle age.