She comes from well-to-do middle-class parents and her first husband while not rich was, as an officer of the old régime, able to afford her a good deal of comfort. They had one child, a son. As a young girl Kollontai went to the best schools and after her marriage never ceased to study. She is an unusually gifted linguist, speaking eleven languages and often acting as official interpreter at the Soviet, as well as the International Congresses.
A curiously touching and disillusioning phase of the revolution was the Soviet Government’s sincere attempt to wipe out prostitution from the young republic. In this fight Kollontai took and still takes a leading part. Way back in March, 1917, the infamous Yellow Tickets were destroyed. On the surface it appeared then as if the whole idea of traffic in women had forever ended. But even after the economic pressure was removed the curse returned. Angelica Balabonova, one of the most loved and honored of the women revolutionists as well as one of the most intellectual, wrote a stinging denunciation of what she called the “Soviet Barishnas.” (Translated, Soviet Ladies.) The term soon came to be the most insulting phrase in the Russian language. It came to mean a woman who, in spite of everything, insisted on a life of shame.
So disgraceful do the Soviets regard this phase of Russian life that indignant citizens formed committees and raids took place. Women were arrested and thrown into concentration camps. And still the evil continued. At last the Central Government took the problem in hand, as did the Central Organ of the Communist Party. Kollontai, writing on this matter, concludes: “The Women’s Sections show lively and active interest in this matter since prostitution is a scourge which falls chiefly upon the women of the working class. This is our task, the task of the Women’s Sections, to begin a general propaganda concerned with questions connected with prostitution, since it is in our interest to develop the revolution in the domain of the family and to stabilize relations between the sexes.”
The government report is illuminating and shows above all else that the Soviet officials are not afraid to face facts, which is the first and best weapon of defense.
The Inter-departmental Commission makes the statement that, in Soviet Russia, prostitution appears in two forms:
1. In the form of professional prostitution.
2. In the form of secret earnings.
The first form is very slightly developed and is of slight extent. In Petrograd, for example, where raids were undertaken against prostitutes, this mode of combating prostitution practically yielded no results. The second form, although highly developed in other countries, also assumes a great variety of forms in Russia. Prostitution is practised by Soviet employees, in order to obtain for the sale of caresses, boots that go up to the knees; prostitution is resorted to by mothers of families, working women, peasant women, who are out after flour for their children and sell their bodies to the manager of the rations division in order to obtain from him a full bag of the precious flour. Sometimes the girls in the Offices associate with their male superiors, not for manifestly material gain, for rations, shoes, etc., but in the hope of advancement in office. And there is an additional form of prostitution—“careerist prostitution”—which is also based in the last analysis on material gain.
The Commission made this recommendation after many hot debates: “All persons wandering in the streets and deserting their work should be assigned to the Commissariat of Social Welfare and thus sent out, in accordance with general fundamental considerations, either to the Sections for the Distribution of Labor Power of the People’s Commissariat of Labor, or to courses, sanatoria, hospitals, and only after a repeated desertion by a prostitute, in other words, after a malicious effort to desert, should the individual be subjected to forced labor. There is no special culpability attached to prostitutes. They are in no way to be segregated from the other bodies of deserters from work. This is a revolutionary and important step, worthy of the first Workers’ Republic of the world.”
That such a liberal attitude is really effective is proven by the fact that in Soviet Russia to-day there is less prostitution than anywhere else in the world. Under the Tsar, Russia was known as the most disgraceful country in this respect. And Kollontai says, “There is no doubt that the poor, insufficient pay for female labor continues, in Soviet Russia, to serve as a chief factor. Under the law the earnings of men and women are equal, but the great majority of women are unskilled laborers. It resolves itself into a question of how to make female labor skilled labor. And the second case is the political backwardness of women. It is not the woman who is inspired and carried away by the idea of the revolution and the desire to aid reconstruction who falls into this pool of degradation.”