Workers Opposition in Russia Describing the Conflict between the Communist Workers and the Russian Soviet Government

London: Dreadnought Publishers. Very Good. [1921]. First English Edition. Pictorial wrappers. 63, (5) ads pages; Contents clean and secure in original pictorial wrappers. OCLC 220108365 Author identified as "First Commissary for Social Welfare in the Soviet Government, October 1917". Publication date reported as either 1921 or 1923; not printed in the publication. Publisher's ads at rear include a full page ad for "Workers' Dreadnought Edited by Sylvia Pankhurst -- A Journal of Communist Thought and Culture". Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (1872 – 1952) was a Russian revolutionary, politician, diplomat and Marxist theoretician. Serving as the People's Commissar for Welfare in Vladimir Lenin's government in 1917–1918, she was a highly prominent within the Bolshevik party. She was the first woman to be a cabinet minister, and the first woman ambassador. In 1905, Kollontai was a witness to the popular uprising known as Bloody Sunday at Saint Petersburg in front of the Winter Palace. During the RSDLP ideological split, she sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks. Exiled from Russia in 1908, Kollontai toured Western Europe and the United States, advocating against participation in the First World War. In 1915, she broke with the Mensheviks and became a member of the Bolsheviks. Following the 1917 February Revolution, Kollontai returned to Russia where she supported Lenin's radical proposals and voted for the policy of armed uprising which led to the October Revolution and the fall of Alexander Kerensky's Provisional Government. In 1919, Kollontai was a leading figure in the foundation of the Zhenotdel, the then-new women's department of the Central Committee that was aimed at improving the status of women in the Soviet Union. She was a champion of women's liberation, and later came to be recognized as a key figure in Marxist feminism. In political life, Kollontai increasingly became an internal critic of the Communist Party and, with an article published in Pravda on 28 January 1921, she publicly sided with the Workers' Opposition, a left-wing faction of the party that had its roots in the trade union milieu and was led by Shliapnikov and by Sergei Medvedev, both of working class extraction. In the run-up to the congress, scheduled for 8–16 March 1921, at Shliapnikov's urgent request, Kollontai had a pamphlet printed with the title of The Workers' Opposition: it expounded her personal views on the subjects under discussion, was intended to be distributed only to the delegates and has since remained probably her most famous work. "Kollontai's propositions for reform mostly repeated those enumerated by the Workers' Opposition, but she placed a greater emphasis on reducing 'bureaucratisation'," and denouncing petty-bourgeois or non-proletarian influences on Soviet institutions and on the party itself. Her language "conveyed much harsher criticism of the party and CC than did Shlyapnikov's language" in the official faction platform. Upon reading her pamphlet, Lenin said clearly to Kollontai -- "For this you should not only be excluded, but shot as well." The Congress condemned the Workers' Opposition as the 'Anarcho-syndicalist deviation' within the party, leading to the Workers' Opposition being forcibly dissolved, and Kollontai was effectively sidelined. In 1946 and 1947 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Scandinavian political circles on the grounds of "her diplomatic efforts to end the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland during the negotiations in 1940-44." .