Trotsky in New York, 1917. Kenneth D. Ackerman
collapsed and she left her husband to travel and raise the son on her own.
A generation later, in the 1930s, after Kollontai became world famous as Bolshevik Russia’s foremost women’s advocate, its people’s commissar for social welfare, and its ambassador to Norway, she often would be fingered as the inspiration for Greta Garbo’s character in the 1939 film Ninotchka. But the real Comrade Kollontai was far more formidable than any fictional movie character.
She first joined the socialist underground on a European trip, agreeing to smuggle letters from radicals in Switzerland to allies back home. Back in Saint Petersburg, she joined the local Bolsheviks. But her real initiation, the shock that glued her to a lifetime cause, came on January 5, 1905, the day she witnessed Bloody Sunday. Kollontai had decided that day to join the crowd, behind militant Russian Orthodox priest Father Georgy Gapon, that marched on the Winter Palace to ask Tsar Nicholas II for a constitution. Kollontai later described the scene, how she stood watching the tens of thousands of neatly dressed peasants carrying crosses, religious icons, and portraits of the tsar himself, whom they still worshipped as God’s appointed leader. She recalled the white snow, the brilliant sun, the hours of waiting, then her surprise as gunshots rang out, soldiers on horseback charged with drawn swords, and bodies began to fall. She ran for safety with the others. Before it was over, the soldiers had killed an estimated five hundred unarmed, peaceful marchers, including women and children, the spark that set off a year of strikes, protests, and demands for reform.86
Seeing the massacre, Kollontai had immersed herself in the subsequent turmoil. She volunteered to raise money for strikers and served the local Bolshevik organization as its treasurer. In October workers declared a general strike in Saint Petersburg. More than two hundred factories joined the protest, led by the workers themselves through a unique new body called the Saint Petersburg Workers Soviet. Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders ridiculed the idea, but not Kollontai. She joined friends from a local factory to attend one of the soviet’s first meetings. Here she met the soviet’s articulate young leader, the man called Trotsky.
Trotsky had spent much of 1905 hiding in nearby Finland. After returning to Russia in January with a false passport, he had retreated after Natalya had been arrested and police began looking for him too. But hearing about the general strike, he rushed to Saint Petersburg, started speaking out at meetings of the soviet, and soon won himself a leadership post as deputy to the chairman. Kollontai met Trotsky, heard him speak, and saw how he mesmerized the crowd. She appreciated how he, unlike other party functionaries, “instinctively grasped [the soviet’s] significance, outlining with graphic clarity the tasks of this new organization of workers unity.”87
Trotsky would lead the soviet in different capacities for fifty-two days, making himself one of the most visible radicals in the country. In late October, Tsar Nicholas II issued a manifesto promising constitutional rights, but Trotsky denounced it as a fraud. Police arrested the soviet’s chairman in November, so it tapped Trotsky to take his place. To win public support, Trotsky pressed for an eight-hour workday and called on citizens not to pay taxes until the government kept its political promises. As government crackdowns grew increasingly violent, Trotsky moved that they end the general strike.
Finally, on December 3, police came and arrested all the remaining soviet leaders in one clean sweep. But the drama didn’t end there, and Kollontai had a ringside seat for the finale. The tsarist government decided to place fifty-two leaders of the Soviet on public trial as a single group, an attempt to discredit them all. The weeks-long proceeding became a public spectacle. Threatened with eight years of hard labor and a lifetime exile in Siberia, the defendants chose Trotsky to speak for them in open court on the most serious charge against them, that of insurrection, or threatening violence against the Russian state.
Trotsky’s chance to address the court came on October 4, 1906, and he gave a memorable speech widely reported at the time. Rather than deny the charge, he embraced it to denounce the regime. He quoted recent disclosures that tsarist officials had planned anti-Jewish pogroms to distract attention from the workers movement. He then asked the court what it meant to oppose the existing “form of government”:
And if you tell me that pogroms, the arson, the violence . . . if you tell me that Kishinev, Odessa, Bialystock [places where recent violence had killed several hundred Russian Jews] represent the “form of government” of the Russian Empire, then—yes, then I recognize, together with the prosecution, that in October and November we were arming ourselves against the form of government of the Russian Empire.88
It was perhaps the most admirable moment of his life to that point. The court cleared the defendants of insurrection but sentenced Trotsky and a dozen others to lifetime exile in Siberia, leading to Trotsky’s second escape.
Alexandra Kollontai, having seen this drama play out in her city, became a Menshevik for the next decade, until the world war. She kept contact with Trotsky, writing occasionally for his Paris newspaper Nashe Slovo. She was living in Berlin in 1914 when war broke out. As a Russian, she had to flee. She landed in Sweden but soon found herself in trouble again, this time arrested for antiwar agitation and expelled from the country. Finally she settled in Norway, where she helped build a network to smuggle messages between radicals into and out of Russia. It was in this process that she became a friend and pen pal to the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
As pen pals, Kollontai and Lenin argued at first over pacifism and disarmament. She supported both; Lenin thought the ideas nonsense. She wrote a propaganda pamphlet called “Who Needs War” that ultimately would be translated into multiple languages and would reach millions of German and Russian soldiers on the front, urging them not to fight. But even more important, Kollontai decided to back Lenin on his proposal for the watershed 1915 Zimmerwald conference, helped him refine it, and persuaded Norway’s delegation to support him, earning her wings as a Bolshevik. “For it is completely clear now that no one is fighting the war as effectively as Lenin,” she wrote.89 When the chance came to help Lenin in America, she jumped at it.
It was Ludwig Lore, editor of the New Yorker Volkszeitung, who invited Kollontai to visit the United States for a four-month speaking tour in 1915. Their common friend Karl Liebnecht, a German socialist, had recommended her to Lore as a speaker, and Kollontai was thrilled. “This is so incredibly good that I am gasping with joy and am afraid to believe it,” she told one friend on receiving the invitation.90
Lore, for his part, had no regrets. Traveling third class to save money, he and Kollontai crisscrossed the country that year, from New York to San Francisco, Denver to Milwaukee, giving ten speeches to packed halls in Chicago alone. He saw her dazzle crowds whether she spoke English, German, French, Russian, Finnish, or Norwegian. “A very lively and emotional personality,” one critic wrote after watching her address more than a thousand rowdy leftists in New York “with fiery improvisation . . . wit and animation.”91
Along the way, she and Ludwig Lore became friends, sharing hours together on trains, waiting for meetings, grabbing quick dinners at cheap hotels. Her “attractive and polished exterior at once betrayed her aristocratic origin,” Lore wrote admiringly about Kollontai. She was “a simply friendly creature, too intensely interested in the ‘revolution’ to care what she ate or wore.”92 By the time they finished, Kollontai had addressed some 123 meetings in eighty cities.
Vladimir Lenin had quickly grasped the opportunity presented by Kollontai’s American trip and urged her to go. It was a chance for her to raise money, spread propaganda, and basically be his eyes and ears in the New World. As soon as she told Lenin about the invitation in early 1915, Lenin jumped on the bandwagon. “We have built not a few hopes on that trip,” Lenin wrote to her from Switzerland, including first and foremost “securing financial help which is extremely important to us for all those urgent matters.”93
Kollontai agreed. “On my trip to the States I want to spread your ideas as widely as possible,” she wrote back. “I’ve no time for myself now.”94
Americans had money, everyone knew that, and Lenin hoped to tap some of it. But he had no idea what Americans thought, where they stood on big issues, or if they even knew about his Bolshevik ideas. He peppered