Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai

Kollontai was among the first Marxists to elevate women's liberation as a central task of socialist revolution. She argued not for bourgeois 'sexual liberation' but for structural emancipation through the socialization of housework and collective childcare. As Commissar of Welfare in 1917 she became the world's first woman cabinet minister, then led the Zhenotdel (Women's Department), organizing working women and advancing maternity protection and child welfare. Her advocacy of 'free love' and her Workers' Opposition stance made her controversial in the 1920s, but the question she posed (whether genuine women's liberation is possible without dismantling the private family) became foundational for all subsequent socialist feminism.

From 1922 Kollontai was moved into diplomatic work abroad: Norway (1922–26 and 1927–30), Mexico (1926–27) and Sweden (1930–45), serving within the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations. This posting kept her out of any further leading political role at home, and the sources call it a sort of de facto exile; she at first hoped it was a passing phase and that she would return to her political work in the Zhenotdel, but had to realize that it was not. The Russian source marks the same phase without the exile wording: she entered diplomatic work in 1922, and the appointment of a woman as envoy, among the earliest such appointments in world history, rested on her established ties to the European socialist movement and her 1921–22 work as secretary of the Comintern's International Women's Secretariat. In Norway she contributed substantially to that country's political recognition of the USSR, and in Mexico to improved Soviet–Mexican relations.

In the Swedish posting she was promoted to Ambassador in 1943 and retired in 1945. Among her main tasks was countering German influence in Scandinavia. During the Soviet–Finnish 'Winter War' she worked to soften Sweden's stance and to secure Swedish mediation in the Soviet–Finnish talks, and in 1944 she again mediated Finland's exit from the war. In 1946 and 1947 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Scandinavian political circles, including Finnish president J. K. Paasikivi, on the grounds of her diplomatic efforts to end hostilities between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1940–44; the Nobel Committee did not endorse the initiative.

During the years in Stockholm her health failed: she suffered a first stroke in August 1942, a severe crisis with left-sided paralysis in 1943, and a second stroke in 1945. She returned to Moscow in March 1945, left the ambassadorial post in July, remained listed as an adviser to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, retired from service that year and turned to memoirs, especially of Lenin.

The sources characterize these years as a political retreat: sent abroad in a de facto exile for over twenty years, she gave up her fight for reform and for women and raised no objection to the patriarchal legislation of 1926 and the 1936 constitution. She has been criticized, and in some accounts held up to contempt, for failing to speak out during the Stalinist purges, in which her former husband Pavel Dybenko and her former partner and Workers' Opposition comrade Alexander Shliapnikov were executed while she was in Sweden. This criticism is attributed to her critics in the sources rather than asserted by the dictionary itself, and is balanced by the record that she did not have full freedom of action and had to fear for her family. Attributed testimony bears on her attitude to the advancing Stalinist order: in a private conversation with her friend Marcel Body in 1929 she is said to have remarked that one 'cannot go against the apparatus' and that she had 'put my principles aside in a corner of my conscience', while Trotsky in his memoirs contemptuously wrote that she had at first taken an ultra-left stand against both him and Lenin and later 'bowed most movingly' to the Stalin regime. Her subsequent public writing, such as the 1946 article 'The Soviet Woman, a Full and Equal Citizen of Her Country', praised Soviet gains for women in terms at odds with her earlier positions.