97 - A.K. 47 - Bonus Episode - 100 Years of Kollontai's Work in Yugoslavia and Serbia

Kristen Ghodsee records part of a spontaneous chat with Minja Bujakovic and Marta Chmielewska, both Ph.D. researchers at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Over a bottle of wine, Minja discusses her Master's thesis examining the work of Kollontai as it was disseminated in interwar Yugoslavia. Of particular interest is the reported conversation that the French liberal feminist Louise Weiss had with Kollontai when Weiss visited Moscow in 1921. Minja Bujakovic is a first-year Ph.D. researcher at the Department of History and Civilization. In her Ph.D. project titled: Revolutionary Women Transcending Borders: The Communist Women’s International and the Struggle for Women’s Emancipation , she proposes a transnational analysis of the Communist Women’s Movement in the interwar period, mapping its evolution and development over time, through the membership and activism of individual communist women.Marta Chmielewska is second-year PhD researcher at the Department of History and Civilization interested in labour and gender history, queer theory, and global socialism. Her thesis "Bra Production in Socialist and Postsocialist Small-Town Central Poland: from Cooperation to Competition? explores how the introduction of capitalism influenced transitions in labour organisation, gender order and family lives at the local level. Kristen Ghodsee's author website: www.kristenghodsee.comPopular Books:Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic IndependenceRed Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary WomenThanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon account and receives no funding. If you would like to support the work being done here, please spread the word and share with your friends and networks, and consider exploring the following links:Buy Kristen Ghodsee's new book now: Everyday UtopiaSubscribe to Kristen Ghodsee's (very occasional) free newsletter. Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work at: www.kristenghodsee.com

Om Podcasten

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.