Alexandra Kollontai

Alexandra Alexandrovna Masalina became known as Alexandra Alexandrovna Masalina-Mravinskaya after her marriage to her first husband, Konstantin Iosipovich Mravinsky (originally spelled Mrovinsky) (1829–1921).

Her marriage to Mravinsky was an arranged marriage which turned out to be unhappy, and eventually she divorced Mravinsky in order to marry Mikhail Domontovich, with whom she had fallen in love.

Russian opera singer Yevgeniya Mravina (stage name) was Kollontai's half-sister via her mother.

Kollontai's father, General Mikhail Alekseyevich Domontovich (1830–1902), descended from a Ukrainian family that traced its ancestry back to the 13th century and Daumantas of Pskov.

Alexandra's mother, Alexandra Alexandrovna Masalina (Massalina) (1848–1899), was the daughter of Alexander Feodorovich Masalin (Massalin) (1809–1859), a Finnish peasant who had made a fortune selling wood.

In 1890 or 1891, Alexandra, aged around 19, met her cousin and future husband, Vladimir Ludvigovich Kollontai (9 July 1867 – July/August 1917), an engineering student of modest means enrolled at a military institute.

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (Александра Михайловна Коллонтай; Domontovich (Домонтович); 31 March 1872 – 9 March 1952) was a Russian revolutionary, politician, diplomat and Marxist theoretician.

Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born on 31 March 1872 in St. Petersburg.

"Shura", as she was called growing up, was close to her father, with whom she shared an analytical bent and an interest in history and politics.

Her relationship with her mother, for whom she was named, was more complex.

She later recalled:

"My mother and the English nanny who reared me were demanding. There was order in everything: to tidy up toys myself, to lay my underwear on a little chair at night, to wash neatly, to study my lessons on time, to treat the servants with respect. Mama demanded this."

Alexandra was a good student growing up, sharing her father's interest in history, and mastering a range of languages.

She spoke French with her mother and sisters, English with her nanny, Finnish with the peasants at a family estate inherited from her maternal grandfather in Kuusa (in Muolaa, Grand Duchy of Finland), and was a student of German.

Alexandra sought to continue her schooling at a university, but her mother refused her permission, arguing that women had no real need for higher education, and that impressionable youngsters encountered too many dangerous radical ideas at universities.

Instead, Alexandra was to be allowed to take an exam to gain certification as a school teacher before making her way into society to find a husband, as was the custom.

Her father served as a cavalry officer in the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878).

After his participation in the war, he was appointed Provisional Governor of the Bulgarian city of Tarnovo, and later Military Consul in Sofia.

In May 1879, he was called back to St. Petersburg.

He entertained liberal political views, favouring a constitutional monarchy like that of United Kingdom.

In the 1880s he wrote a study of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878.

This study was confiscated by the Tsarist censors, presumably for showing insufficient Russian nationalist zeal.

The daughter of an Imperial Russian Army general, Kollontai embraced radical politics in the 1890s and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1899.

During the RSDLP ideological split, she sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks.

Exiled from Russia in 1908, Kollontai toured Western Europe and the United States and campaigned against participation in the First World War.

In 1915, she broke with the Mensheviks and became a member of the Bolsheviks.

Serving as the People's Commissar for Welfare in Vladimir Lenin's government in 1917–1918, she was a highly prominent woman within the Bolshevik party.

She was the first woman to be a cabinet minister, and the first woman ambassador.

Following the 1917 February Revolution which ousted the tsar, Kollontai returned to Russia.

She supported Lenin's radical proposals and, as a member of the party's Central Committee, voted for the policy of armed uprising which led to the October Revolution and the fall of Alexander Kerensky's Provisional Government.

She was appointed People's Commissar for Social Welfare in the first Soviet government, but soon resigned due to her opposition to the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk in the ranks of the Left Communists.

In 1919, Kollontai was a leading figure in the foundation of the Zhenotdel, the then-new women's department of the Central Committee that was aimed at improving the status of women in the Soviet Union.

She was a champion of women's liberation, and later came to be recognized as a key figure in Marxist feminism.

Kollontai was outspoken against bureaucratic influences over the Communist Party and its undemocratic internal practices.

To that end, she sided with the left-wing Workers' Opposition in 1920, but was eventually defeated and sidelined, narrowly avoiding her own expulsion from the party altogether.

From 1922 on, she was appointed to various diplomatic posts abroad, serving in Norway, Mexico and Sweden.

The celebrated Soviet-Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, music director of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra for fifty years (1938–1988), was the only son of Mravina's brother Alexander Kostantinovich and thus Kollontai's half nephew.

The saga of her parents' long and difficult struggle to be together in spite of the norms of society would color and inform Alexandra Kollontai's own views of relationships, sex, and marriage.

In 1943, she was promoted to the title of ambassador to Sweden.

Kollontai retired from diplomatic service in 1945 and died in Moscow in 1952.