Alexandra Kollontai

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (née Domontovich; 31 March 1872 – 9 March 1952) was a Russian revolutionary, politician, diplomat, and Marxist theoretician. Serving as 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 in history to be a cabinet minister, and one of the first women to be appointed as a diplomatic representative of a modern state, and the first to be promoted to the rank of ambassador. 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. Following the 1917 February Revolution which ousted Emperor Nicholas II, 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. This period in her life is captured in the writing of fellow Plenipotentiary from Spain, Isabel de Palencia, titled Alexandra Kollontay, Ambassadress from Russia, published in 1947. 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.