Scarlet Diplomat

Mexicans still speak knowingly of how Comrade Alexandra Kollontay, first Soviet female envoy, met onetime Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles in Berlin, crossed the Atlantic "on the same boat," remained in Mexico as Minister "until they quarreled" (TIME, Dec. 19, 1927). Last week this scarlet diplomat, wearing a black taffeta gown, drew about her shoulders a soft chinchilla wrap upon which blazed the Soviet Order of the Red Star, stepped into a Royal Coach. The equipage was that of Gustaf V, King of the Swedes. At a merry clip Comrade Kollontay whirled through the streets of Stockholm, alighted at the Palace, tripped in and handed to gangling, venerable King Gustaf her credentials as Soviet Minister to Sweden. Before and after her appointment as Minister to Mex ico, she was Minister to Norway. She rates as one of the keenest, most beguiling diplomats on earth.

Married at 17 to her cousin, an engineer, Alexandra Kollontay bore one child, now an electrical engineer in Sweden. She then went alone to Zurich, hotbed of radicalism. Returning to Russia she founded the first working women's club at St. Petersburg in 1907, wrote The Social Basis of the Woman Question. Her next book was the monumental, 600-page Motherhood and Society, points from this last being later embodied into the laws of Norway. She speaks 15 languages, writes warm novel ettes which prudes have called "too realistic." Present age: 58.

Soon after the Red Revolution, Comrade Kollontay appeared in the world spotlight as Soviet Commissar of Public Welfare. Upon her was palmed the lie that Russian women had been "nationalized," that she had issued the decree. "Frequently at that time," Comrade Kollontay has said, "I was obliged to leap out of tramway cars when people [Russians] recognized me. I was often forced to listen to the most unbelievable calumnies, the grossest insults."

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