A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
Kristen R. Ghodsee
5.0from 206 ratings
- 166
- Episodes
- 2
- Transcribed
- 206
- Ratings
- Daily
- Cadence
- 2019
- First episode
About A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
Kristen R. Ghodsee reads and discusses 47 selections from the works of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a socialist women's activist who had radical ideas about the intersections of socialism and women's emancipation. Born into aristocratic privilege, the Ukrainian-Finnish Kollontai was initially a member of the Mensheviks before she joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks and became an important revolutionary figure during the 1917 Russian Revolution. Kollontai was a socialist theorist of women’s emancipation and a strident proponent of sexual relations freed from all economic considerations. After the October Revolution, Kollontai became the Commissar of Social Welfare and helped to found the Zhenotdel (the women's section of the Party). She oversaw a wide variety of legal reforms and public policies to help liberate working women and to create the basis of a new socialist sexual morality. But Russians were not ready for her vision of emancipation, and she was sent away to Norway to serve as the first Russian female ambassador (and only the third female ambassador in the world). In this podcast, Kristen R. Ghodsee – a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books 2018) – selects excerpts from the essays, speeches, and fiction of Alexandra Kollontai and puts them in context. Each episode provides an introduction to the abridged reading with some relevant background on Kollontai and the historical moment in which she was writing.
- Publisher
- Kristen R. Ghodsee
- Category
- education · government · history
- Language
- en
- Explicit
- No
- First episode
- 2 Jan 2019
- Latest episode
- 27 Aug 2026
Latest episodes
2 of 166 episodes have a transcript.
27 Aug 2026
166 - A.K 47 - Who are the social democrats and what do they want? - part III
10 Jun 2026
165 - A.K 47 - Who are the social democrats and what do they want? - part II
27 May 2026
164 - A.K 47 - Who are the social democrats and what do they want? - part I
Inside a recent episode
162 - A.K. 47 - “Formative Years” - Celebrating the 154th Anniversary of Kollontai’s Birth
Published 31 Mar 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] Shurochka Domontovic received an excellent and broad education at home. Her parents made sure that her children were under the guidance of the best teachers and attached great importance to teaching them music and languages. As a result, already at the age of seven, Shirochka could speak fluently French, German, and English, as well as Finnish, Italian, and Bulgarian. She also could understand Ukrainian. She especially loved reading and spent a lot of time in the family libraries in the St. Petersburg house or on her grandfather's estate, Kuza. Kolontai reflects in her memoirs that her mother and nanny governess were strict and very demanding, and that as a young girl with a keen and active nature, she disliked the rules and opposed those she found unfair. […]
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