by James Millar
(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. © HULTON ARCHIVE See also: ARMAND, INESSA; BOLSHEVISM; FEMINISM; KRUPSKAYA, NADEZHDA; SAMOILOVA, KONKORDIA; ZHENOTDEL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clements, Barbara Evans. (1979). Bolshevik Feminist: the Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farnsworth, Beatrice. (1980). Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Holt, Alix, ed. (1977). Selected Writings of Alexandra Kol-lontai. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill. Kollontai, Alexandra. (1978) The Love of Worker Bees, tr. Cathy Porter. Chicago: Academy Press Limited.
BARBARA EVANS CLEMENTS
KOMBEDY See COMMITTEES OF THE VILLAGE POOR.
KOMI
KOMI
The Komi are an indigenous Arctic people. Of the 497,000 Komi (1989 census), the majority (292,000) live in the Komi Republic, which extends to the Arctic Circle, and in the contiguous Permian Komi Autonomous okrug within the Perm oblast (Komi population 95,000). Their language belongs to the Finno-Ugric family and is mutually semi-intelligible with Udmurt, farther south. In the 1300s the Komi were the merchants of the Far North and had a unique alphabet. Most Komis have Caucasian features. Distinguished U.S. sociologist Pitrim Sorokin (1889-1968) was a Komi cultural activist in his youth.
The northern Komi partly converted to Greek Orthodoxy in the late 1300s, prior to the Novgorod conquest, and maintained Komi-language liturgies up to 1700. The Permian Komi Duchy of Great Perm converted under duress just before Novgorod was seized (1472) by Moscow, which allowed the duke to stay as a vassal but dismissed his son. Cultural renaissance was strong by 1900.
Despite Komi pleas, Moscow excluded the Permian Komi from the Komi Autonomous oblast, formed in 1921 and upgraded to Autonomous Republic in 1936. The Permian Komi National okrug (district), formed in 1925, remains a “periphery of a periphery” within the Perm oblast. Two separate literary languages were developed. Numerous slave labor camps were located in Komi lands. Russian immigration has reduced the Komi from 92 percent of the population in 1926 to 23 percent in 1989. In the okrug the drop has been from 77 percent to 60 percent.
The huge and flat Komi Republic (population 1.3 million) produces 10 percent of Russia’s paper, 7 percent of its coal, and also oil and gas. Indigenous Komi live mainly in the southern agricultural zone. Those who have shifted to Russian as their main language (25%) participate actively in the economic life. The Permian Komi okrug is a depressed area where the only resource, lumber, has been depleted.
In 1989 the First Komi National Congress established a Komi National Revival Committee, which succeeded in having Komi and Russian declared coequal state languages in the Republic. The impact has been real but limited, leading to the creation of a more activist organization, Doriam As-n?m?s (Let’s Defend Ourselves). See also: FINNS AND KARELIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lallukka, Seppo. (1995). “Territorial and Demographic Foundations of Komi-Permiak Nationality.” Nationalities Papers 23:353-371. Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
REIN TAAGEPERA
KOMUCH
The Committee of the Constituent Assembly (Komitet Uchreditelnogo Sobraniya) or KOMUCH the first constitutional alternative to the Soviet rule in Russia, emerged during the spring of 1918. The alternative derived its legitimacy from the Constituent Assembly, whose nine hundred deputies had been elected in late 1917 to draft a new constitution for the Russian Republic, proclaimed by the Provisional Government on September 9. The electoral victory of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR or SRs)-which won 58 percent of the popular vote and 440 seats i
n the assembly, compared to the Bolsheviks’ 25 percent of the vote and 175 seats-augured well for the possibility of a constitutional and peaceful evolution of Russia into a modern democratic republic.
This possibility was thwarted, however, when Lenin dissolved the Assembly on January 6. However, the SRs convened a secret conclave in Petro-grad at the end of January and decided to organize an armed uprising on behalf of the Assembly to divest the Bolsheviks of power. They aimed to reconvene the Assembly as the only source of legitimate authority in the country on the territories liberated from the Bolsheviks; to renew the Assembly’s work on drafting a new constitution; and to enact land and other reforms. To implement these policies the party decided to shift the center of its activities from Petrograd to Samara, Saratov, and other strongholds in the Volga region. In Samara the party established a Revolutionary Center early in February 1918, to organize the uprising as soon as twenty of its deputies from that region returned to their home constituencies. The center entrusted B. K. Fortunatov with organizing
KONDRATIEV, NIKOLAI DMITRIEVICH
the military forces, while P. D. Klimushkin and I. M. Brushvit engaged in political work to secure cooperation with the deputies of other political parties and other anti-Bolshevik forces in the region.
When the Czechoslovak Legion captured Samara on June 8, 1918, the Revolutionary Center assumed power in the name of the KOMUCH, in order to govern, on behalf of the Constituent Assembly, not only that city but also other cities liberated by the joint forces of the Legion and the KOMUCH. These joint operations captured Nikolayevsk on July 20, Khvalinsk on July 11, Kunzetsk on July 15, Syzran on July 10, Simbirsk on July 22, Sterlitamak on July 15, and Kazan on August 6. As a result, a beachhead more than 300 miles long was established on the western bank of the Volga. The objective was to hold it until the arrival of the Allied forces from Vladivostok to reestablish the Eastern Front in Russia, according to the decision of the Allied Supreme War Council of July 2. While this was a feasible project-the entire Trans-Siberian Railway from the Volga to that port was under the control of the Czechs-the Allied forces never came, because of President Woodrow Wilson’s opposition.
Although by the beginning of October the Legion and the KOMUCH deployed on this beachhead 62,370 men, they were outnumbered by Trotsky’s 93,500 troops, a large number of them composed of former German, Hungarian, and Austrian prisoners of war serving now in the Bolshevik ranks. Samara was evacuated on October 8. The evacuation of the administrative and political activities of KOMUCH from Samara to Ufa terminated its four-month-long effort to establish the constitutional alternative to the Soviet rule in the Volga region. And in Ufa, by accepting the authority, although grudgingly, of the All Russia Provisional Government established there on September 23, 1918, the Komuch ceased to exist. See also: ALLIED INTERVENTION; CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
KONDRATIEV, NIKOLAI DMITRIEVICH
(1892-1938), agricultural economist and business cycle analyst.
Internationally renowned for his work on long-run economic cycles, Nikolai Kondratiev was born in 1892 in Ivanovskaya region. He studied economics under Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky and became an important member of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party. His first major work was a detailed study of the Russian grain market, and in 1921 he created the world-famous Conjuncture Institute in Moscow. In 1922 he published his first account of long cycles. These were approximately fifty-year economic cycles, revealed in price levels and trade statistics, which appeared to provoke (or be provoked by) technological innovations and social upheavals, and which were caused by the periodic renewal of basic capital goods. This idea, subsequently called the Kondratiev cycle, has been very influential among non-mainstream economists and is even employed by historians and stock market analysts, but it is fundamentally questioned by more orthodox economists.
From within the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, Kondratiev also wrote insightful commentary on the economic development of Russia, particularly on agriculture and planning methodology, and advocated a market-led industrialization strategy for the USSR. This involved specializing in the export of agricultural produce in the short term in order to fund industrial development in the medium term, in line with the Ricardian idea of comparative advantage. This approach received impetus from Kondratiev’s trip overseas in 1924 and 1925, and was crystallized in Kondratiev’s plan for agriculture and forestry from 1924 to 1928. Such thinking was anathema to Josef Stalin, who had Kondratiev arrested in 1930, jailed for eight years, and finally shot. While in jail, Kondratiev wrote a book on economic methodology as well as moving letters to his wife on the human condition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fic, Victor M. (1998). The Rise of the Constitutional Alternative to Soviet Rule. Provisional Governments of Siberia and All-Russia: Their Quest for Allied Intervention. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs; New York: Columbia University Press.
VICTOR M. FIC
See also: AGRICULTURE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barnett, Vincent. (1998). Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Economic Development: Long Cycles and Industrial Growth in Historical Context. London: Macmillan.
KONEV, IVAN STEPANOVICH
Makasheva, Natalia; Samuels, Warren J.; and Barnett, Vincent, eds. (1998). The Works of Nikolai D. Kon-dratiev. London: Pickering and Chatto.
VINCENT BARNETT
KONEV, IVAN STEPANOVICH
(1897-1973), military leader and marshal of the Soviet Union.
Born to a peasant family in Viatsky, Konev entered the Old Army in 1916 and rose to the rank of junior officer before joining the Party and the Red Army in 1918 and being appointed commissar of Nikolskii District. During the civil war, he was commander of Armored Train No. 105, attached to the 5 Rifle Brigade, and fought in Siberia and the Far East. From 1921 to 1922 he took part in putting down the Kronshtadt Rebellion and was appointed commissar in the staff in the National Revolutionary Army of the Far East Republic.
Konev attended a higher course in the military academy in 1926 and graduated from the Frunze Academy in 1934. During the 1920s and 1930s he commanded the 2 Rifle Division and later a corps. Untouched by the purges, he was elected to the Supreme Soviet in 1937, and in 1938 he took over as the commander of the newly formed 2 Independent Red Banner Far East Army. Despite rumors to the contrary, Konev was not involved in fighting the Japanese in Lake Khasan or Khalkhin Gol. In 1939 he was elected as a candidate member of the Central Committee. During 1940 and 1941, he commanded the Transbaikal and North Caucasus Military Districts. The latter was reinstituted shortly before World War II as the 19 Army and was transferred to the Western Special Military District to be mauled by the blitzkrieg.
In September, 1941, Konev took over the command of the Western Front, which was pushed back in the Battles of Orel and Viasma by the Germans, and for a few anxious days in October contact was lost with him. Josef Stalin threatened to courtmartial him but was persuaded by Zhukov to appoint Konev as commander of the newly formed neighboring Kalinin Front, which played a significant part in finally stopping the German advance toward Moscow. In August 1942 Konev replaced Zhukov as commander of the Western Front, which failed to defeat the now well-entrenched Germans. For a brief period in March 1943 Konev commanded the Northwest Front before being appointed commander of the Steppe Military District (later Steppe Front), the massive reserve force formed by the Russians in anticipation of the German attack against the Kursk Bulge. Konev’s units were deployed sooner than planned, but managed, with enormous losses, to persuade the Germans to break off their offensive. With the German defeat at Kursk, which Konev called the swan song of the German panzers, the Red Army went on the offensive with Konev commanding the 2 Ukraine (October 1943) and later 1 Ukraine (May 1944) Fronts.
Konev was involved in most of the major battles of the last two years of the war, which included the crossing of several major rivers, including the Dnep
r and Vistula-Oder. During the Battle of Berlin, Stalin used the rivalry between Konev and Georgy Zhukov, who now commanded the neighboring 1 Belorussian Front, to advance his military and political goals. In the last phase of the campaign, forces commanded by Konev captured Prague. In both 1944 and 1945 Konev received the title Hero of the Soviet Union. After the war, Konev was appointed commander of the Central Group of Forces, and in 1946 he took over the ground forces, as well as being appointed Deputy Minister of the Armed Forces. He lost the former position in 1950. In 1951 he was appointed commander of the Carpathian Military District.
In late 1952 Konev wrote to Stalin claiming that he had been a victim of the Doctor’s Plot. In December 1953 Konev presided over the military court that sentenced to death Laurenti Beria and his colleagues. In 1955-1956 Konev was once again commander of the Ground Forces. From 1955 to 1960, he was also the first deputy minister of the Armed Forces, and from May 1955 to June 1960 commander of the Warsaw Pact Forces, taking part in putting down the 1956 revolution in Hungry. In 1961-1962 Konev was commander of Soviet forces in Germany before being transferred to the military inspectorate. In 1965 he represented the USSR at Winston Churchill’s funeral. Konev himself is buried at the Kremlin Wall. Konev was a typical Soviet commander in his indifference to losses and was one of Stalin’s favorites. See also: MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; WORLD WAR II; ZHUKOV, GEORGY KONSTANTINOVICH
KONSTANTIN NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Polevoi, N. (1974). Polkovodets. Moscow: Politizdat. Portugal’skii, R. M. (1985). Marshal I. S. Konev. Moscow: Voenizdat.
MICHAEL PARRISH
KONSTANTIN NIKOLAYEVICH
(1827-1892), political and naval figure, second son of Tsar Nicholas I, brother of Tsar Alexander II, and an advocate of liberal reform.
Because Konstantin Nikolayevich was not the tsarevich, his designation as a general admiral at the age of four marked him early for a career in the Imperial Russian Navy. In 1853 he actually began to discharge the functions of his rank, and between 1855 and 1881 he simultaneously headed the Naval Ministry and served as commander-in- chief of Russian naval forces. A reformer of broad vision and originality, he bore responsibility for modernizing the navy, overseeing the transition from sail to steam. After 1845 he was also honorary president of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, from whose membership sprang a number of future Russian reformers. Characteristically, the grand duke viewed his own naval bailiwick as an engine of change, in contemporary parlance “a ministry of progress,” engaged in training personnel for service in other branches of government. His reform-minded prot?g?s were known as the kon-stantinovtsy.