Word: kollontay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
False Hopes. Last week, three days running, Erik Boheman of the Swedish Foreign Office called Soviet Ambassador Mme. Alexandra Kollontay in Stockholm to tell her that the Finns would form a new government any minute now and please to remain close to the phone. As the Finns continued to fumble, the Swedes' embarrassment became more & more acute, for they are almost as anxious as the Russians are to get the matter settled. The Russians, watching Finland writhe, her defensive positions shattered, a large part of her army knocked out and her politicians still arguing about a new government...
Woman of Faith. Alexandra Mihailovna (as Russians call her) grew up in a setting lifted straight from Turgenev. She married a cousin, Vladimir Kollontay, bore him a son and left him, all within three years. She rebelled against the brittle brilliance of St. Petersburg society, dove into the pinkish dawn of social revolution. At 24 the police nabbed her, pink-handed, in an attempt to start a strike among girl textile workers. Her father whisked her abroad. That...
Woman of Fire. Early in World War I, Kollontay turned up in Sweden again, was promptly deported as an undesirable alien. She sought refuge in the U.S., toured the country lecturing against war. helped Trotsky edit Novy Mir (New World...
When Czardom went to the wolves in the early spring of 1917, and Kerensky tiptoed onto the stage, Kollontay and her friends streamed back to Petrograd. Kerensky had her arrested, later released her. Now she was ready for Bolshevism and the November Revolution. She was made the first People's Commissar for Social Welfare. Then the "Red Rose of the Recolution" fell in love with a huge, illiterate, black-bearded sailor named Dybenko, who had led the revolt of the Baltic Fleet. In the midst of revolutionary history, the two made a counterrevolution of their own, went...
Dybenko was purged in 1938 but not the redoubtable Kollontay. She survived "deviations" which would have doomed another Russian. Twice in the Revolution's early years she quit the party. Once she started a "workers' opposition"; Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin joined forces to destroy it but did not destroy her. An old hand at Bolshevik ways said recently: "When you think of the political company Kollontay kept and the casual way she treated the party line, you realize she must have been a hell of a beautiful something to by-pass liquidation...