(1989). Voenno-tekhnicheskaia politika SShA v 80-e gody. Moscow: Nauka. Larionov, Valentin, and Kokoshin, Andrei. (1991). Prevention of War: Doctrines, Concepts, Prospects. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
(1873-1920), admiral, supreme ruler of White forces during the Russian civil war.
Following his father’s example, Alexander Kolchak attended the Imperial Naval Academy, and graduated second in his class in 1894. After a tour in the Pacific Fleet and participation in scientific expeditions to the Far North, he saw active duty during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). By July 1916 he merited promotion to vice-admiral and command of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Kolchak continued to serve under the Provisional Government following the February Revolution of 1917, but resigned his command when discipline broke down in his ranks. At the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, Kolchak was abroad. But he responded with alacrity to the invitation of General Dimitry L. Horvath, manager of the Chinese Eastern Railway, to help coordinate the anti-Bolshevik forces in Manchuria.
White resistance to Soviet rule was also mounting along the Volga and in western Siberia, as well as in the Cossack regions of southern Russia. During May and June 1918 in Samara, KOMUCH (Committee of Members of the Constituent As-sembly)-a moderate socialist government with pretensions to national legitimacy-emerged to compete with the even more anti-Bolshevik but autonomist-minded Provisional Siberian Government (PSG) in Omsk for leadership of the White cause. Under pressure from the Allies, KOMUCH agreed to merge with PSG into a five- man Directory as a united front against the Bolsheviks in September 1918. But the short-lived Directory lasted only until November 18. On that day, Kolchak was appointed dictator with the ambitious title of supreme ruler of Russia-and in due course recognized as such by the two other main White military commanders, Anton Denikin in the south and Nikolai Yudenich in the Baltic region.
The arrival of French General Maurice Janin, as commander-in-chief of all Allied forces in Russia, complicated the issue of the chain of command
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and authority. Its significance became obvious when Janin and the “Czechoslovak Legion” (pris-oners-of-war from the Austro-Hungarian Army who were in the process of being repatriated with Allied assistance) took over guarding the Trans-Siberian railway and proceeded at their discretion to block the passage of the supreme ruler’s echelons.
While Kolchak’s British-trained army came to number approximately 200,000 men (with a very high proportion of officers), it was never an effective fighting machine. Moreover, the admiral failed to implement a popular political program. Indeed, he was unable to unite the White forces completely, even in Siberia and the Far East. The Russian heartland remained under control of the Bolsheviks, and their depiction of the admiral as a tool of the old regime and foreign interests had enough of the ring of truth.
For Kolchak the military tide turned decisively in the summer of 1919. In mid-November his capital in Omsk fell. By late December, the chastened supreme ruler was in the less-than-sympathetic custody of Janin and the hastily departing Czech Legion. Consequently, even his safe passage to Irkutsk-where the moderate socialist Political Center had just taken over-could not be guaranteed. When the Center demanded Kolchak as the price of letting the Legion and Janin go through, the Admiral was unceremoniously surrendered on January 15, 1920. To forestall Kolchak’s rescue by other retreating White forces, he was shot early on February 7. His dignified conduct at the end has long been admired by White emigr?s, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kolchak’s reputation has undergone a dramatic rehabilitation in Russia as well. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; WHITE ARMY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dotsenko, Paul. (1983). The Struggle for a Democracy in Siberia, 1917-1921. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Pereira, N. G. O. (1996). White Siberia. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Smele, Jonathan D. (1996). Civil War in Siberia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Varneck, Elena, and Fisher, H. H., eds. (1935). The Testimony of Kolchak and Other Siberian Materials. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
KOLKHOZ See COLLECTIVE FARM; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE.
(1872-1952), theoretician of Marxist feminism; founder of Soviet Communist Party’s Women’s Department.
Kollontai was born Alexandra Domontovich. Her father, Mikhail Domontovich, was a politically liberal general. Her mother, Alexandra, shared Domontovich’s free-thinking attitudes and supported feminism as well. They provided their daughter a comfortable childhood and good education, including college-level work at the Bestuzhevsky Courses for Women. When Alexandra was twenty-two, she married Vladimir Kollontai. Within a year she had given birth to a son, Mikhail, but the matronly life soon bored her. She dabbled in volunteer work and then decided in 1898 to study Marxism so as to become a radical journalist and scholar.
Between 1900 and 1917 Kollontai participated in the revolutionary underground in Russia, but mostly she lived abroad, where she made her reputation as a theoretician of Marxist feminism. To Friedrich Engels’ and Avgust Bebel’s economic analysis of women’s oppression Kollontai added a psychological dimension. She argued that women internalized society’s values, learning to accept their subordination to men. There was hope, however, for the coming revolution would usher in a society in which women and men were equals and would therefore create the conditions for women to emancipate their psyches. In the meantime socialists should work hard to draw working-class women to their movement. Kollontai was a severe critic of feminism, which she considered a bourgeois movement, but she shared with the feminists a deep commitment to women’s emancipation as a primary goal of social reform.
In the prerevolutionary period Kollontai also became known as a skilled journalist and orator. She was a Menshevik, but in 1913, when Bolsheviks Konkordia Samoilova, Inessa Armand, and Nadezhda Krupskaya launched a newspaper aimed at working-class women, they invited Kollontai to be a contributor. She responded enthusiastically. In 1915 she came over to their faction because she believed that Vladimir Lenin was the only Russian SoKOMBEDY cial-Democratic leader who was resolute in his opposition to World War I.
Kollontai returned to Russia in the spring of 1917. She spent the revolutionary year working with other Bolshevik feminists on projects among working-class women. She also became one of the Bolsheviks’ most effective speakers; her popularity earned her election to the Central Committee. After the party seized power in October, Kollontai became Commissar of Social Welfare, and in that capacity she laid the foundation for socialized obstetrical and newborn care. In early March 1918 she resigned her post to protest the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany, and for the next two years she divided her energies between agitation on the front, writing, and organizing activities with working-class women. In fall 1920 she was appointed head of the Zhenotdel, the Communist Party’s Women’s Department.
Kollontai had argued for a woman’s department since before the revolution. When she became its head she worked diligently to build up the organization, which suffered from poor funding and lack of support. She managed to stave off efforts to abolish the Zhenotdel and also publicized widely the party’s program for women’s emancipation. Kollontai’s tenure in this office was short, however, because in 1921 she joined the Workers Opposition, a group critical of Party authoritarianism. She was fired from the Zhenotdel the next year.
In the following two decades Kollontai became a distinguished Soviet diplomat. She served as Soviet ambassador to Sweden from 1930 to her retirement in 1945. Her most important contribution was as mediator in negotiations to end the Winter War between the USSR and Finland (1939-1940). In the 1920s she also published novels and essays that analyzed the gender and sexual liberation that would come with the construction of a communist society. These works drew strong criticism from more conservative communists, and Kollon-tai ceased to publish on her favorite subject after the Stalinist leadership consolidated power in the late 1920s. Thereafter she wrote multiple versions of her memoirs. She survived the party purges in the 1930s, probably because she was a respected diplomat who lived far away from party politics.
Kollontai died in Moscow on March 9, 1952. With the revival of feminism in the 1960s, her writings were rediscovered, and she came again to be seen an important Marxist feminist.
Diplomat, feminist, and revolutionary, Alexandra Kollontai was the world’s first female ambassador. ©
