Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy

And so, despite her early successes, Kollontai quickly receded from the front lines of party politics. The party men were not her only impediment. One January night in 1918, coming home after a long day, she got a call. The Palace of Motherhood, the first free maternity hospital in Soviet Russia and her cherished pilot project, was on fire—the work of an arsonist. Kollontai rushed to the site, but it was too late. As she watched the palace burn, the old nurses from the hospital shouted at her that the fire was the manifestation of God’s wrath against her, the Antichrist.

Still, upper-class Russian women had more latitude than their Western counterparts. They could inherit and own property; they ran their family estates and could manage their own inheritances. Moreover, if they belonged to the urban intelligentsia, as Inessa did, they were part of a milieu that had, since the mid-nineteenth century, become increasingly egalitarian when it came to questions of gender. In the salons and journals of the era, progressives grappled with “the woman question.” What was to be done about the ways in which the patriarchal order of the day, enforced by the tsars and the Orthodox Church, constricted and punished women?