Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary. A Soviet diplomat from 1923, she was appointed USSR Ambassador to Mexico in 1926, becoming one of the earliest female ambassadors. She was born in St. Petersburg in 1872 to Imperial Army General Mikhail Domontovich and Alexandra Masalin-Mravinsky, the daughter of a wealthy Finnish timber merchant. By the turn of the twentieth century, Kollontai had become a revolutionary, but was sent to exile in Scandinavia and America for her political activities. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, she became the People's Commissar for Social Welfare. She was the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration and was strongly interested in the welfare of women. She is best known for founding the Zhenotdel, or "Women’s Department," in 1919. The organization worked to improve the lives of Soviet women, including fighting illiteracy and educating women about the new marriage, education and working laws put in place by the Revolution.

Kollontai became increasingly critical of the Communist Party and helped to form a left-wing faction known as the Workers' Opposition. Lenin managed to dissolve the organization and afterwards Kollontai was shunned politically. Her personal life was equally complex. Her first marriage was with a Tsarist general, and she left her husband and child in 1898 to become a Bolshevik. She raised many eyebrows with her promotion of free love. She did not advocate casual sexual encounters, but believed that social norms encouraged inequality between the sexes. She viewed marriage and traditional families as legacies of the oppressive, property-rights-based, egoist past. Kollontai is an unusual figure in the history of the Soviet Union, as she was an "Old Bolshevik" and a major public critic of the Communist Party who was neither purged nor executed by the Stalin regime, though in her capacity of serving abroad in Mexico she was effectively exiled. She died in 1952.

Image: Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai.