Alexandra Domontovich

Alexandra Domontovich, the daughter of a General Mikhail Alekseevich Domontovich, was born in the Ukraine in 1872. The family moved to St. Petersburg but Alexandra was not allowed to go to school as her parents were worried that she would meet "undesirable elements." She later recalled: "My mother and the English nanny who reared me were demanding. There was order in everything: to tidy up toys myself, to lay my underwear on a little chair at night, to wash neatly, to study my lessons on time, to treat the servants with respect." A family friend, Victor Ostrogorsky, the literary historian, gave her private lessons, and told her she had literary talent and suggested she became a writer. In 1893 Alexandra married the engineer Vladimir Kollontai. In her autobiography Alexandra admitted that she "married early, partly as a protest against the will of my parents". Alexandra had a son but left her husband after three years of marriage. She later claimed that this was mainly motivated by her growing interest in politics: "We separated although we were in love because I felt trapped. I was detached, (from Vladimir), because of the revolutionary upsettings rooted in Russia". Kollontai worked for a number of educational charities. This involved her visiting people living in extreme poverty. It was at that this time she began studying Marxism. This included reading radical journals such as Nachalo and Novoye Slovo . During the 1896 strike of textile-workers in St. Petersburg, Kollontai organized collections for the strikers. She also began writing articles for political journals about the plight of industrial workers in Russia.