Surely you do not know the name of the first female ambassador in history, and the truth is that it would go unnoticed if it weren’t for the fact that all kinds of extremely interesting data emerge around this figure. So let’s talk about who Aleksandra Mikhailovna was.
Of course, its history is not without a context, a context that begins in Russia, more specifically at the origin of the Soviet Union with the October Revolution and its social changes . Changes that, according to what was happening in the rest of the planet, hardly saved a place for women. Well, Mikhailovna came close to breaking that paradigm.
Who was Aleksandra Mikhailovna?
Born as Alexandra Mikháilovna Domontóvich, this woman was born on March 31, 1872 in Saint Petersburg, in the then tsarist empire that would derive in the Soviet Union and later in Russia, in the bosom of an aristocratic family.
Of Ukrainian ancestors, his father was Mikhail Domontóvich, a general who served the tsar , while from his mother he inherited a logging empire, the same one that allowed him to have an education much higher than the average of the time, taking an interest in various social issues.
Despite the prejudices of the time, and his own mother, he developed as an intellectual, even when he married and had a child at a very young age. It was precisely her disillusionment with married life that led her to join the socialist and military party.
Following the ideas of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, she began to write articles and publish books, quickly becoming one of the favorites of the revolutionary sectors.
During the First World War , Kollontai was openly against the war and, of course, would be the protagonist of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in his country.
Lenin’s personal assistant and first woman elected as a member of the Party Central Committee, she later served as the People’s Commissar for Social Welfare and a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and headed the Soviet Women’s Organization.
Over the years, the presence of the opinions of Aleksandra Mikhailovna ceased to be so well seen by Russian leaders, so diplomatic functions were delegated to her to remove her from the core of power, sending her as ambassador of the Soviet Union to countries like Sweden, Norway and Mexico, which would mark a milestone for modern societies.
