Video: The world's first female ambassador - "Valkyrie of the revolution" Alexandra Kollontai
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
This woman was truly outstanding - a revolutionary, a feminist, a women's rights activist, an orator, a publicist, a minister. Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai called for the social emancipation of women and preached the idea of free love. And she went down in history as the world's first female ambassador and minister of the USSR.
Alexandra Domontovich was born in 1872 in a general's family, received a good education and upbringing. She was destined for the traditional fate of an aristocrat - to get married and raise children. But at the age of 17, she refused the general's son and the imperial adjutant. She said: “I don't care about his brilliant prospects. I will marry the man I love. So she did - in spite of her family, she married a poor officer, Vladimir Kollontai. Most of all, she appreciated in him that it was possible to discuss with him the ways of liberating the Russian people.
But the joys of family life and the birth of a son could not make a woman absolutely happy - she needed social realization. Fascinated by revolutionary ideas, she wrote: “I loved my handsome husband and told everyone that I was terribly happy. But it seemed to me that this "happiness" somehow connected me. As soon as my little son fell asleep, I went to the next room to take up Lenin's book again."
She soon divorced her husband to devote herself entirely to community service. After the revolution of 1917, Alexandra Kollontai received a high party post - she headed the women's department of the Central Committee of the party. Trotsky called her "the Valkyrie of the revolution." It was she who defended paid maternity leave for women, free maternity hospitals, kindergartens and sanatoriums.
In her articles, Kollontai wrote: “Bourgeois morality demanded: everything for a loved one. Proletarian morality prescribes: everything for the collective! Eros will take its rightful place among the members of the labor union. It's time to teach a woman to take love not as the basis of life, but only as a way to reveal her true self. Kollontai urged women to be liberated, but at the same time advocated not for promiscuous sexual intercourse, but for absolute equality in the “new family”.
Alexandra Kollontai became not only a theoretician, but also a practitioner of the sexual revolution: at the age of 45, she herself proposed to 28-year-old Pavel Dybenko. To all the condemning remarks, she replied: "We are young as long as we are loved!" This was the first marriage record in the first book of civil status in Soviet Russia.
Kollontai's diplomatic work began in 1922 when she was sent as a trade advisor to Norway. In 1926 she was assigned to Mexico, in 1930 to Sweden. They say that it was she who saved Russia from the war with Sweden. The USSR owes her the conclusion of a number of lucrative trade agreements. She worked until the disease confined her to a wheelchair, and remained active until the age of 80, until her death. in Russia still causes a lot of controversy among historians, in particular, October revolution: facts that are not written about in history textbooks
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