Alexandra+Kollontai

=Alexandra Kollontai= Alexandra was born in 1872 in the Ukraine. She was the daughter of a Russian general. Her parents didn’t believe that she should go to school because of “undesirable elements”. A man named Victor Ostrogorsky gave her private lessons. He was a literary historian. In 1893 she got married to Vladimir Kollontai. He was an engineer. She had a son after that. She felt as if she married too early so she left her husband after three years. She worked for many educational charities. She visited a lot of people in poverty. She then began studying Marxism. She read journals such as Nachalo and Novoye Slovo. During the 1896 strike of textile-workers in St. Petersburg, she organized collections for the strikers. She also started writing articles for political journals about the trouble of industrial workers in Russia. In August, 1896 Alexandra left Russia and became a student of labour history at the University of Zurich. She read lots and was interested by what George Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky wrote. She also went to London where she met the labour historians, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb. She was now a committed Marxist and she didn’t agree to their Fabian reformist views. When she came back to Russia she had a new interest in the Finnish fight for independence (Kollontai's mother was from Finland). She helped workers in Finland organize themselves into trade unions and wrote articles about the fight between the Finnish people and the Russian autocracy. Her book, The State of the Working Class in Finland was published in 1903. Alexandra was a member of the Social Democratic Labour Party. At its Second Congress in London in 1903, there was a dispute between two of its leaders, Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov. Lenin argued. Eventually she decided not to join either group of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. She witnessed bloody Sunday and became increasing concerned about the dictatorial attitudes of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks and in 1906 she joined the Mensheviks. She books like The Class Struggle, The Social Foundations of the Female Question, Society and Motherhood and The Working Class and the New Morality. Later on she joined the Mensheviks and was a Social Revolutionist.