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when after a visit to a textile factory, she left her
husband and joined the Social Democratic revo-
lutionary movement. A Menshevik until 1915,
Kollontai spent the decade from 1908 to 1917 in
exile, attending various socialist congresses, trav-
eling through western Europe and the United
States, and advancing the message that the liber-
ation of women was possible only through Marx-
ism. During World War I she was arrested and
expelled from a number of countries because of
her antiwar propaganda activities. During these
years she joined the
BOLSHEVIK
cause and met her
future close friend and collaborator, Aleksandr
Shliapnikov. Back in Russia after the February
Revolution, she was an excellent orator who
spoke extensively at meetings of soldiers and
sailors. At the Sixth Party Congress, she was
elected to the Central Committee, and after the
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
, she was appointed com-
missar of social welfare in the first Soviet govern-
ment. In 1919, she joined Inessa
ARMAND
in
establishing the Party's Section for Women's
Work (
ZHENOTDEL
), becoming its director after
Armand's death in 1920. Always independent-
minded, she joined the various internal party
oppositions that flourished during the civil war:
the Left Opposition in 1918 against the
BREST
-
LITOVSK
treaty and, with Shliapnikov, the Work-
ers' Opposition in 1920-21, resisting what she
saw as growing Bolshevik authoritarianism. Her
influence within the party diminished after 1921;
she was appointed Soviet representative to Nor-
way in 1923 and ambassador to Mexico in 1926,
the first Russian woman to be given such rank.
From 1927 to 1930 she served again as ambas-
sador to Norway and from 1930 to 1945, ambas-
sador to Sweden. She thus escaped the ravages of
the Great Purge at home. In the 1960s and
1970s, Kollontai's work and writings, especially
her views on free love, much criticized at the
time, received renewed attention from Western
scholars as an early exemplar of Soviet feminism.
known as the
GULAG
, that developed under
Joseph
STALIN
's rule in the Soviet Union. The
Kolyma labor camps were built around the sub-
stantial gold deposits found in the upper region
of the Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia,
which rises in the Kolyma Mountains and flows
northeast into the Arctic Ocean. In 1931, three
years after the first gold mines in the Kolyma
region were established, the Soviet government
founded the Dalstroi (General Industry and
Highway Construction), centered in the town of
Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk, to promote
mining in the region and develop its industrial
infrastructure. The following year, in October
1932, the Dalstroi region was designated an
autonomous territory. The first shipment of 10
prisoners had already arrived in February 1932;
by the winter of 1932-33, the prison population
had swollen to 11,000 of which it is estimated
that only 25 percent survived the winter. Over
the next two decades the prison population grew
inexorably, surpassing 100,000 in the winter of
1939 and reaching 190,000 in 1941, before
declining to 84,000 in 1944. The territorial scope
of Dalstroi grew accordingly, reaching 700,000
sq km in 1936 and 2.3 million sq km in 1941.
Working and living conditions were notoriously
brutal, leading to high mortality rates that were
offset by the large numbers of new arrivals. Pris-
oners of war, from Poland at the beginning of
World War II and Japan at the end, were also
sent to Kolyma. The final years of the Stalin era
saw a renewed increase in the number of pris-
oners from a headcount of 108,000 in 1949 to
almost 200,000 in January 1952. In March 1953,
following Stalin's death, jurisdiction over Dal-
stroi was transferred to the Ministry of Metal-
lurgy, while the labor camps themselves
remained a part of the gulag, now a part of the
Ministry of Justice. Over the next year the harsh
labor regime relaxed slightly, and beginning in
1954 large numbers of camp inmates were
released, as the camps were gradually closed
down. According to some estimates, over 1 mil-
lion prisoners died in the Kolyma labor camps
from 1932 to 1954, and to successive genera-
tions of Soviet and Russian citizens, the name
Kolyma labor camps
One of the main and most infamous compo-
nents of the system of enforced labor, better
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