Love of Worker Bees - Softcover

Kollontai, A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0897330013 ISBN 13: 9780897330015

Verlag: ACADEMY CHICAGO PUB LTD, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

A rare, graphic portrait of Russian life in 1917 immediately after the October Revolution. The heroine struggles with her passion for her husband, and the demands of the new world in which she lives.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) was a leading member of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution and the foremost Marxist theoretician of women's oppression and sexuality. She was a founding member of the Women's Bureau of the Communist Party.Cathy Porter has published biographies of the Russianwomen revolutionaries Alexandra Kollontai and Larissa Reisner, as well as books about women terrorists of the 1860s, Russia's 1905 revolution, and the Battle of Moscow. She has translated more than thirty books and works for the stage, including plays by Gorky and the Czech Karel Capek. She lives in Oxford.Sheila Rowbotham is a Sociology Research Fellow at Manchester University in England.

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Love of Worker Bees

By Alexandra Kollontai, Cathy Porter

Virago Press Limited

Copyright © 1977 Cathy Porter
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-89733-001-5

Contents

Introduction by Cathy Porter, 
Vasilisa Malygina, 
Three Generations, 
Sisters, 
Afterword by Sheila Rowbotham, 
Glossary, 

CHAPTER 1

Vasilisa Malygina

I

Vasilisa Malygina was a working girl of twenty-eight, employed in a knitter's workshop. She was a real city girl, thin and undernourished looking, with curly hair that had been cropped after a typhus attack. In her plain Russian blouse and with her flat chest you might, from a distance, have taken her for a boy.

She wasn't exactly pretty, but she did have the most wonderful, perceptive brown eyes: just to look into those tender eyes of hers made people feel more cheerful.

Vasilisa was a communist, and had joined the Bolsheviks when war had broken out. She loathed the war, and while everyone else was busily making up garments to send to the front, frantically working overtime for Russia's victory, Vasilisa obstinately argued with them. War was a bloody business, she said-who needed it? It was nothing but a burden to people. And for all those young soldiers going off like lambs to the slaughter it was an outright tragedy!

Whenever she came across groups of soldiers in the street, marching in military formation, she'd turn her back on them. How could they march along so jauntily, singing and yelling at the top of their voices, going off to their deaths as though off on holiday! It wasn't as if they had to go, they could easily have refused. If they'd just said we're not going off to be killed or to kill other people like us there wouldn't have been a war at all.

Vasilisa was well read; her father was a typesetter and he'd taught her to read early. She loved Tolstoy, especially his folktales.

She was the only pacifist in the workshop, and would have lost her job if they hadn't needed workers so badly. As it was, the foreman just gave her a good talking to. Everyone soon knew about her pacifist views, and she was nicknamed the 'Tolstoyan'. All the other women at work tended to keep their distance from her, for hadn't she renounced her country and betrayed Russia? 'A lost cause!' they sighed whenever her name was mentioned.

It wasn't long before her reputation reached the ears of the local Bolshevik organizer, who sought her out. He soon realized that this girl was reliable, sure of her opinions and well suited to Party work. So Vasilisa was gradually drawn towards the Bolsheviks. Not all at once, of course, not by any means. At first she had argued with the committee members, asking question after question, and invariably storming out of meetings in a rage. But eventually she began to understand their position more clearly, and in the end it was she who suggested that she start working properly for them. That was how Vasilisa became a Bolshevik.

She proved herself to be a passionate and assertive public speaker. She was never at a loss for words and could debate skilfully with Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries alike. The other women at work were shy and tongue-tied, but not Vasilisa; she always spoke up when she had to, and she talked sense too. In no time at all she had gained the respect of her Party comrades, who decided to adopt her as their candidate in the town Duma during Kerensky's provisional government.

This made the women workers very proud of her, and from then on, whatever she said was law for them. She got on well with the more conservative women too. And even if she did shout at them and cajole them, they felt that she knew best, for hadn't she been working in a factory ever since she was a young girl.

She felt if she didn't try and understand their needs, nobody would! However, it was not so easy to make her Party comrades see reason about these women. 'You should drop them,' they'd tell her. 'We've got more important things to be thinking about now.' This attitude would utterly infuriate Vasilisa, who would lash out at her Party friends, confront the Party secretary, and insist on her demands being met. Why should women's matters be considered any less important than other things? Women had always been treated like that! It wasn't surprising they were so conservative! How could you ever hope to have a successful revolution without enlisting women? They were crucial. 'Winning over the women, that's half the battle,' was what Vasilisa always said.

She knew what she wanted, and she stuck by it. In 1918 she was a real Bolshevik fighter. Over the years so many people had lost heart, stayed at home, given up. But she was always at work, making speeches, debating, organizing, generally getting things done – she was absolutely indefatigable. It was hard to imagine where she got so much energy, she was so pale and skinny. People always responded to those wonderful eyes of hers though, warm, brown and attentive.

One day a letter arrived for her at her small garret. This was the letter she'd been longing for, a letter from her darling husband and friend from whom she's been separated for so many lonely months. Not, of course, that there was anything to be done about it, what with the civil war and then the industrial Front, for which the Party mobilized all its members.

Vasilisa knew that the revolution was not a game and that everyone had to make sacrifices. That was why she'd lived on her own all those months, away from her husband; that was her sacrifice to the revolution. When they'd been flung to opposite ends of Russia her women friends tried to reassure her by saying 'It will all be for the best, you'll see. This way he'll go on loving you longer and you won't grow bored with him.' They might well have been right, but she didn't care; she was still utterly wretched without him and missed him constantly.

True, she actually had very little time to herself, and was busy from morning until late at night with her work for the Party and the local soviet, one job just piling on top of another. And vital and fascinating work it was too. But nevertheless, when the day was over and she returned to her little room – her garret, as they would have called it in her parents' village – a chill wind would freeze her heart and she longed for her husband. She would sit down to her tea, immersed in gloomy thoughts. Nobody really needed her, she had no real friends, no proper goal to work for. Did other people care about her? Because if they did, she received precious little sign of it from them.

She had been particularly depressed recently because an important project of hers – her communal house – had just been wrecked, and now everyone was going around insulting and criticizing each other. Nobody seemed to realize how important it was to try and live collectively now; or could it be that they just weren't capable of it? The people in the house had insulted her, begrudging her her extra rations as a privileged worker. 'To hell with my rations!' she'd said. 'I can manage quite well without them!' Eventually her Party comrades had calmed her but by then her head had been literally spinning with exhaustion and frustration.

That was how her winter had passed. She would often sit in her room at night, leaning her elbows on the table, nibbling on a fruit drop to save sugar, and thinking over the day's tribulations. She felt there was no hope for the revolution, nothing but an endless series of frustrations, backbiting and losing battles.

If only her Volodya had been...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ACADEMY CHICAGO PUB LTD
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0897330013
• ISBN 13: 9780897330015
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland