Alexandra Kollontai

The Plight of the Radical’s Children

The Russian Revolution aimed to dissolve the family. Neither true equality nor true freedom could be achieved, the Bolsheviks argued, until class bonds trumped all other loyalties—that is, until people no longer felt greater responsibility toward their family than they did toward strangers. “The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine,” Alexandra Kollontai, the Soviet Union’s first people’s commissar for social welfare, wrote.