Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

The Woman Who Tried to Rewrite Love: Alexandra Kollontai’s Dangerous Heart

By the time she wore a silk sash and sipped champagne with Norwegian dignitaries, Alexandra Kollontai had already dismantled an empire or two — one political, one personal.

Picture this: Petrograd, 1917. The city smells of coal smoke and revolution. Workers are flooding Nevsky Prospect like ants loosed from a kicked anthill. A woman with a steel gaze and flaming red scarf ducks into a dim back room, scrawls words that will outlive guns: Comrades, the family must be overthrown as surely as the Tsar. The ink is barely dry when Alexandra Kollontai — Bolshevik, firebrand, and erotic heretic — becomes the most radical voice in Lenin’s inner circle. Her agenda? Sex, socialism, and the total renovation of human intimacy.

Kollontai didn’t just want to redistribute wealth. She wanted to abolish emotional tyranny. To her, the monogamous, possessive couple was just another bourgeois prison — a microcosm of capitalism, locked with love as the velvet shackle. A century before “ethical non-monogamy” was a trending search term, she was preaching free love in soldier’s councils. While others handed out rifles, she handed out pamphlets titled Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle.

To call her a Soviet feminist is too tidy, too clean. Alexandra Kollontai was a gender incendiary — the only woman to serve in Lenin’s government, and later, the first female ambassador in modern history. She carved out her space like a saboteur in a world designed to erase her.

But let’s rewind. Before the revolutions and manifestos and wild-eyed declarations of love-as-communism, there was the girl. Sasha.

Born in 1872 to an aristocratic Ukrainian-Russian family, Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich — the child of a czarist general and a radical mother — learned early how to speak in both velvet and fire. Her mother gave her liberal tutors. Her father gave her horse-riding lessons and the icy stare of the imperial elite. Sasha read Herzen and Pushkin, played piano, and married a pale, forgettable engineer named Vladimir Kollontai — then left him and their infant son within a few years.

Society, predictably, collapsed in horror. A woman leaving her child? For politics?

She ran to Zurich. Studied Marx. Took lovers. Became fluent in German, Finnish, class theory. Somewhere between Rosa Luxemburg’s lectures and factory tours in Manchester, she decided history would not forget her name — and that men were beautiful, but never essential.

Still, the maternal wound never quite healed. She wrote about it later — the ache of leaving her boy, the loneliness it pressed into her ribs. But motherhood, to her, was too often a trap with silver bars. She wanted choice. And she believed every woman should have that same unalienable right.

By the time the 1905 revolution lit up the Russian Empire like a match to kerosene, Kollontai was already organizing textile workers and publishing searing indictments of patriarchal socialism. She argued, publicly and persistently, that the working-class woman would never be free until her body, too, belonged to her.

Radical love. Revolutionary love. Love as a collective act. It wasn’t just theory to her. She lived it. She fell, again and again, for men who could never match her fire — a dashing sailor, a young commissar, an actor or two. Her affairs, often with younger men, scandalized even her own comrades. Lenin, exasperated, once snapped that she had “a mind too clever to be wasted on liaisons.”

But she was never reckless. Not really. She simply refused the bargain that every woman was offered: silence in exchange for acceptance.

In 1917, with the February Revolution shaking St. Petersburg, Kollontai returned from exile like a prophetess with callused feet. The Bolsheviks were scrambling to consolidate power. She — composed, precise — knew exactly what to do.

She became People’s Commissar for Social Welfare. Abolished the church's grip on marriage. Legalized abortion. Built maternity homes. Fought to give working women daycares and laundries and hot meals. Her office was chaos: crying babies, bureaucrats, prostitutes, poets. But it was real power — and she used it like a scalpel.

Then Stalin arrived. The music changed. The dream curdled.

By the mid-1920s, Kollontai’s vision of the “new woman” — independent, sexually autonomous, equal in the field and the bed — was under siege. Stalin didn’t want utopians. He wanted order. Obedience. A return to “traditional values.” The same suffocating patriarchy, now dipped in red.

Kollontai was exiled not by train or prison, but by appointment: Ambassador to Norway. Later, Mexico. Then Sweden. Her exile was cushioned in velvet and diplomacy, but it was exile nonetheless. The Kremlin had no use for erotic communists in love with abstract liberty.

And yet — she survived. Not many old Bolsheviks could say that. Her colleagues were shot or disappeared. She poured tea for Scandinavian politicians and kept her notebooks close, writing fiction and essays too incendiary to publish. In private, she still believed. Still hoped.

There’s a line in one of her short stories, written under Stalin's nose, that lingers like perfume: “They taught us that love was a private flame, but I knew it could be a bonfire.”

Kollontai died in 1952, in a modest Moscow apartment. No parades. No statues. Her son — the one she left — sat at her funeral, a stern Soviet officer. She had lived long enough to become a footnote in the regime she helped build.

But history has a perverse sense of timing. In the 1970s, feminist scholars in the West stumbled across her essays. Her voice, fierce and oddly contemporary, crackled off the page: passionate, ironic, ruthlessly clear-eyed. Alexandra Kollontai, once redacted, was reborn — not as a martyr, but as a prophet of feminist socialism. A woman who believed that love without freedom is just another form of debt.

Today, her name trends quietly on radical corners of the internet. Search engines serve her image — a severe, brilliant face under a fur hat — to Gen Z TikTokers dissecting polyamory, mutual aid, and class consciousness. Her words surface in manifestos, zines, and unlikely Tinder bios.

Was she right? Is it possible to build a world where love is free, but still deep? Where sex doesn’t chain us, and motherhood doesn’t erase us?

We’re still asking.

Maybe that’s her legacy: not as a figure preserved in amber, but as a question still burning — still unfinished.

The woman who tried to reinvent intimacy before the ink on the Soviet constitution was dry. Who wrote love stories as political texts. Who believed revolution should reach into your bed, your heart, your most secret fears.

Alexandra Kollontai: Bolshevik. Feminist. Diplomat.

And the last romantic of the Russian Revolution.