The Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai wrote in Pravda, 17 February 1913, that: 'Women's Day is a link in the long, solid chain of the women workers' movement... Let a joyous sense of serving the common class cause and of fighting simultaneously for their own female emancipation inspire women workers to join in the celebration of Womens' Day.' In 'The War and Our Immediate Tasks', 1914, Kollontai wrote: "Social-Democracy ... underestimated the *moral influence* of the old bourgeois world on the mood of the people... the governments of the bourgeois states understood popular psychology better than the very representatives of the democratic and working-class masses! Kollontai was in the Reichstag on 4 August 1914 when the German Social-Democracy voted for Bethmann-Hollweg and the war-credits: 'I experienced horror and despair. I was walled into an atmosphere so suffocating, so claustral and dark there seemed no hope... In that moment of total confusion and the collapse of the Second International, when the bourgeois capitalist parties were rejoicing... there rang out the mighty voice of Lenin. Alone against the whole world, he pitilessly analysed ... the imperialist war and, more importantly, showed how it must be transformed into civil war and revolution. He who desires peace must declare war against opportunism and break with his compromise, with his own bourgeoisie... This was one of the most significant moments of my life...The lower sank the opportunists, he larger towered the fearless image of a man who, amidst all this bloody chaos, clearly pointed the way." >From Pravda, 6 March 1917: 'Our Memorial to the Freedom Fighters': "There are memorable days in the life of mankind which run like a golden thread of popular celebration down the centuries... today we are singing... a hymn of victory over the grave of tsarist autocracy, with all its crimes and bloodshed, its obscurantism, its cruel indifference to the sufferings of the working people, its serfdom, its abuse of the common soldiers, its corrupt tsarist officials, its prisons, its Siberian exile, its whips, gallows, arbitrary violence and oppression. Lenin's room at the Smolny Institute (where the Bolsheviks made their headquarters in preparing for the October Rising) was on second floor. Lenin's table was pushed up against the wall, and an electric bulb hung just above it. The windows of the room looked out on the steel-grey, blustery Neva. Crowding around Lenin at the table, the members of Sovnarkom; by the window, N P Gorbunov , Sovnarkom secretary. Once Kollontai arrived there with some round, red Dutch cheeses sent her to give Lenin, by some Swedish comrades she'd had known in exile. Lenin asked her to divide the cheese up amongst the half-famished ministers of the new Soviet government, `not forgetting Gorbunov'. But pressure of business meant no-one had time to eat the cheese, and when Kollontai returned later that day to Lenin's study the cheese was gone- eaten by the equally-hungry guard on Lenin's room. Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, wearing her plain grey dress, slipping unobserved at the back of crowded meeting-halls, observing and later relating all to Vladimir Ilyich... .... Yelena Dmitryevna Stasova, a comrade-in-arms of Lenin during the underground years, and secretary of the Party CC. Her clear, high brow and tall, statuesque figure was often to be seen at Petrosoviet meetings at the Tauride Palace, or at the house of the ballerina Kshesinskaya, then and then at Smolny. In her hands a notebook, round her a press of comrades from the front, soldiers, workers, Red Guards, women workers, Soviet Deputies, seeking a quick, clear answer or an order.... ...Klavdia Nikolayeva, a working women of humble origins, joined Bolsheviks in 1908, faced arrest, exile, imprisonment (like Stasova). In 1917 she returned to Petrograd and began to edit _Kommunistka... ...Konkordia Samoilova , who died 'at her revolutionary post' of cholera in 1921 - - -another great Bolshevik women's organiser. ...Inessa Armand , `gentle, charming, feminine'... ....December 1917 ... Winter still not set in properly, sleet falling and a cold northerly wind blowing up the Neva. Lenin exhausted, insomniac, is persuaded to visit the Halila sanatorium on the Karelian Isthmus, Finland, for three days- actually he wanted to write a new work amid the frosts of a magnificent Finnish forest, where he could also go hunting. He leaves the Finland Station on the morning of December 24th, with Krupskaya and his sister Maria Ilyinichna- they travel incognito in a 2nd class compartment: as the train is about to leave, Lenin -- head of the first workers state -- remembers he has no money and turns to Kollontai, who has come from the stores of the Welfare Commissariat to say good-bye and loan them furs; Lenin asks to borrow 100 Finnish marks for the journey; but the Commissar for Welfare discovers at the Currency Exchange desk that she has no Russian money either.... Mark Jones _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
