"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!'"
This is an observation that must be constantly borne in mind, appreciated,
understood and dealt with to the best of our abilities.
Mark Jones wrote:
> 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
>
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