Madame Ambassador

When the Finns sent old Juho Kusti Paasikivi to Stockholm to ask the price of peace, a little old lady of 71, skilled in muting the harsh truths of power politics, gave him the Russian terms.*

Urbane, luxury-loving Alexandra Mihailovna Kollontay (rhymes with O-lone-tie) had known Paasikivi for years, knew the views and fears of Finns as well as Paasikivi understood the fears and foibles of Russians. Mme. Kollontay's father was a Czarist general, her mother a farming Finn; her childhood summers were spent among the birch-crowded lakes of southeastern Finland. Her first book was on the Finnish proletariat. In her quiet study in the Soviet legation, the two old diplomats could talk of peace in tranquil tones.

Woman of Talents. Stockholm society knows Mme. Kollontay as a slightly reconstructed aristocrat, an unusual linguist, a superb hostess. Her chinchilla cape makes women's eyes dilate; her little dinners make gourmets' eyes contract. As Soviet Ambassador to Sweden, where she has been stationed since 1930, she practices diplomacy with patience, wit and sagacity.

Kollontay has had to spend most of the past year in Mosseberg sanatorium, gaining strength after a stroke. Last Nov. 7, when the Russian Revolution which she helped to make was 26 years old, a river of people took 45 minutes to flow up the legation's broad stairway and pass Her Excellency in her wheelchair. About once a year a rumor spreads that Kollontay has been summoned home to answer for her sumptuous way of life. Just as often she has returned to her villa in the Villagatan. A lovely holiday, she blandly reports.

Woman of Faith. Alexandra Mihailovna (as Russians call her) grew up in a setting lifted straight from Turgenev. She married a cousin, Vladimir Kollontay, bore him a son and left him, all within three years. She rebelled against the brittle brilliance of St. Petersburg society, dove into the pinkish dawn of social revolution. At 24 the police nabbed her, pink-handed, in an attempt to start a strike among girl textile workers. Her father whisked her abroad. That was in 1896.

She roamed Europe, sudying political economy, writing political tracts, making political friends, deepening her political color sense. She met Lenin in London, Trotsky in New York City. She joined the old Russian Social Democratic Party before there was a Communist (Bolshevik) Party. When the split came, she spurned the Bolsheviki (the majority), embraced the Mensheviki (the minority), and went back to St. Petersburg to take a small hand in the 1905 uprisings. In 1911 she was fighting capitalism in Paris, in 1912, militarism in Stockholm, in 1913, anti-Semitism in London.

In those years Alexandra Mihailovna was a heartbreaker, with grave, grey eyes, a swift smile and an unquenchable faith in the wisdom of wide love.

Woman of Fire. Early in World War I, Kollontay turned up in Sweden again, was promptly deported as an undesirable alien. She sought refuge in the U.S., toured the country lecturing against war. helped Trotsky edit Novy Mir (New World).

When Czardom went to the wolves in the early spring of 1917, and Kerensky tiptoed onto the stage, Kollontay and her friends streamed back to Petrograd. Kerensky had her arrested, later released her. Now she was ready for Bolshevism and the November Revolution. She was made the first People's Commissar for Social Welfare. Then the "Red Rose of the Recolution" fell in love with a huge, illiterate, black-bearded sailor named Dybenko, who had led the revolt of the Baltic Fleet. In the midst of revolutionary history, the two made a counterrevolution of their own, went off to the lush and lazy Crimea for a prolonged weekend. Alexandra Mihailovna was almost 50.

Dybenko was purged in 1938 but not the redoubtable Kollontay. She survived "deviations" which would have doomed another Russian. Twice in the Revolution's early years she quit the party. Once she started a "workers' opposition"; Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin joined forces to destroy it but did not destroy her. An old hand at Bolshevik ways said recently: "When you think of the political company Kollontay kept and the casual way she treated the party line, you realize she must have been a hell of a beautiful something to by-pass liquidation."

*Finland must: break relations with Germany, intern Nazi troops and ships, calling for Russian help if necessary (as it probably would be); restore the 1940 frontier and agreement with Russia; release all Russian and Allied prisoners and internees. Reparations due Russia, demobilization of the Finnish Army and the future of the port of Petsamo on the Arctic may be discussed in Moscow later. At week's end, the Finns were still thinking it over.

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