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Alexandra KollontaiThe flaws of Soviet feminism.

By Clive James
Posted Monday, Feb. 26, 2007, at 2:55 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

A textual scholar might say that she was taking a conscious risk when she wrote: "If there are shortcomings in the Party and its political line … " It is quite easy to imagine a Lubyanka interrogator asking her: "Oh yes, and what shortcomings are those?" But the interrogation never came. Kollontai managed to stay alive, partly by spending as much time as possible on diplomatic duties in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. (Talleyrand said, "He who is absent is wrong." In the Soviet Union, however, being absent was often the key to survival.) Her ­dreamed-­of principle was "winged Eros," love set free. The Soviet actuality of love set free was a ­one-­size-­fits-­all contraceptive diaphragm, with the overspill taken care of by serial abortions. In her early writings—just as charmless as the later ones but a touch more personal—she was already exploiting the standard langue de bois technique of speaking as if she herself were the incarnation of the proletariat. She probably hoped that if she sounded like the party line, the party line might be persuaded to incorporate her views. A sample:

The proletariat is not filled with horror and moral indignation at the many forms and facets of "winged Eros" in the way that the hypocritical bourgeoisie is. ... The complexity of love is not in conflict with the interest of the proletariat.

In the event, she found winged Eros a hard taskmaster. In a touching forecast of the policy declared by Germaine Greer 40 years later, Kollontai favored the notion that a nonacademic but suitably vigorous proletarian might be a fitting partner for a female high­brow. But either the muscular young lovers she chose for herself did not understand that in offering them freedom she required their respect, or else she found parting from them hurt more than it was supposed to. It would be cruel not to sympathize, and patronizing too: Even while she was earning her decorations she was in fear for her life, and during the Yezhov terror in the late 1930s she thought every trip back to Moscow might be her last. She died in 1952, shortly before her 80th birthday, with two Orders of the Red Banner to her credit, if credit that was.

Our real sympathy, however, we should reserve for those who were not spared. An impressive proportion of them were women, even within the party itself, where they were seldom given high office, but certainly had unhampered access to the status of victim. If Kollontai had been sent to the Gulag and somehow survived it, she might conceivably have written a book along the lines of Evgenia Ginzburg's Into the Whirlwind, although it is hard to believe that any amount of deprivation and disillusionment would have given her Ginzburg's gift for narrative. Kollontai wrote boilerplate even on the few occasions when she felt free to speak. Besides, she already had the disillusion: She ­didn't have to be locked up to have that. A single week in the company of the regime's ­high-­ranking thugs and boors would have been enough to tell her that there was no hope. We should not go so far as to greet her every statement with laughter, but we should try to rein in our pity. Pity belongs to the countless thousands of her sisters who were sent to the unisex hell that lay beyond Vorkuta, where they aged 30 years in the first three months unless they were granted the release of a quicker death. Did she know about all that? Of course she did. Women always know.

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Clive James, the author of numerous books of criticism, autobiography, and poetry, writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He lives in London.
Reprinted from Cultural Amnesia by Clive James © 2007 by Clive James, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company Inc. This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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