Alexandra Kollontai
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Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai 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 w
Kollontai, c. 1900
1888 portrait
International Socialist Congress, Copenhagen 1910. Alexandra Kollontai holds a delegate's hand.
Alexander Shliapnikov, Kollontai's fighting comrade and, for some time, her lover
Workers' Opposition
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The Workers' Opposition was a faction of the Russian Communist Party that emerged in 1920 as a response to the perceived over-bureaucratisation that was occurring in Soviet Russia. They advocated for
Alexandra Kollontai
…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…
Yury Lutovinov, secretary of the VTsSPS, a key founding member of the Workers’ Opposition
The hand that will rule the world
Shliapnikov alexander