Across Struggles And Time: If I Could Speak To Alexandra Kollontai

It is 3 a.m. I am lying in my room, surrounded by silence and the faint glow of dim lights. My eyes keep drifting to the big poster on my wall—Alexandra Kollontai, her eyes steady, her presence almost alive in the quiet. Kollontai, the Russian revolutionary and feminist who became the world’s first woman to hold the position of a cabinet minister, has always felt like more than a historical figure to me. Above her image, the words seem to stare back: “Women can become truly free and equal only in a world organised along new social and productive lines.”

Why I admire Alexandra Kollontai

I often joke with my friends that Kollontai would laugh at the way I keep using her arguments, living in a right-wing state and still trying to imagine differently. But when I look at her, I feel she would be kinder, gentler—encouraging me to keep dreaming, to keep insisting on a world that seems impossible yet necessary.

She showed that the personal was never separate from politics: that how we love, marry, and live together is as much a battleground as the factory or the parliament.

In her 1909 pamphlet The Social Basis of the Woman Question, she wrote about the ways family and law placed women in dependence, giving men power not just over property but over women’s bodies. To her, love built on ownership and sacrifice could never coexist with freedom. Sometimes I wonder if I am foolish to think this way.

Being from a small city in Uttar Pradesh, where I studied and live, I often feel that even to question marriage and the ways love is controlled is enough to be called crazy. Around me, marriage is the destiny for women, an unquestioned truth. To resist it feels like speaking into a barren space, as if my dreams are not only unreal but wrong. And yet, here, in this imagined conversation with Kollontai, I find hope.

So I ask her the questions that trouble me most:

How difficult must it have been to imagine something so new, so radical, in a world where even your own comrades sometimes refused to understand it?

How did you continue to insist that freedom meant more than wages or the ballot—that it also meant rethinking how we love, how we live together, how we build bonds with one another?

How did you dare to imagine love as something beyond possession, beyond the narrowness of one man and one woman bound by law and believe that freedom also meant new relationships, new intimacies, and new bonds of comradeship?

I ask these questions not just out of curiosity, but because in this imagined conversation I feel the only guidance for thinking about love, care, and human connection differently, beyond monogamy, beyond marriage, toward comradeship and equality. Here, in this space with her, I find a kind of hope that no other conversation around me can offer. And she listens carefully and replies with calm certainty.

“The stronger the ties of all members of the collective,” Kollontai explained in 1921, “the less the need for the creation of strong marital relations.” True freedom comes from building many bonds—friendship, comradeship, love so that intimacy is shared, not possessed. Her words echo in the quiet.

I think about how radical this must have sounded in 1921, and how radical it still sounds today. Even now, to say that love could be free, that intimacy could mean comradeship instead of control, unsettles everything we are taught. But I feel a kind of release in her voice, as if she is reminding me that there is nothing unnatural about wanting love to be equal, generous, and free.

KR Ghodsee 

I think of Prof. Kristen Ghodsee, whose work first opened up Kollontai’s world for me. Through her, I began to see that these were not just forgotten dreams of the past. Ghodsee speaks of “everyday utopias,” the fragile but real ways we can begin to live differently even in the present. She taught me that my own dreams are not meaningless—they are part of a long tradition of imagining otherwise, of refusing to accept that intimacy must mean dependence or domination.

In my mind, I press further. “But was it lonely, to stand by these ideas when even your comrades dismissed them?” Kollontai nods her eyes soft but steady. “Yes, lonely. But to be ahead of your time often means to stand alone. I knew that without freeing love, women could never be free. No revolution could be complete if it left intimacy tied to ownership and inequality.”

Her answer sits heavy in me, but not as despair. It feels like responsibility. I think of the women around me in India, pushed into marriages they did not choose, judged for their desires, silenced when they ask for freedom. I think of how often I have been told that my questions are unreal, my imagination too wild.

And I realize that Kollontai, across time, is telling me that imagination is the beginning of freedom. That to speak, to dream, even to be called crazy, is itself part of the struggle.

To carry her courage, to keep imagining new ways of loving and living, is already to be in conversation with her. And perhaps that is the truest way of meeting Alexandra Kollontai: across struggles, across time, through the fragile but unyielding act of imagination.

Authored by Mridula Mangalam | Views expressed by the author are their own.