Soon
(In 48 Years' Time)
by Alexandra Kollontai
 

written 1922

in
Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai
edited and translated by Alix Holt

7 January 1970. It's warm and bright, and there is a lively and festive atmosphere in the "House of Rest" where the veterans of the "Great Years" of the world revolution spend their days.

The veterans decided that on the day that had once been Christmas Day they would recall their childhood and youth by decorating a tree. A real fir tree just like in the years before the world upheavals. ...
  

  
Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) was an early agitator for women's rights through socialism and for a general world socialist revolution; she was the only woman member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, Lenin's government, as the Communist revolution in Russia began.

"Soon (In 48 Years' Time)" is a short science-fiction story written in 1922.

Stories of utopias often show children as a primary goal and reason for whatever process brought about the fair world order: these children are ever so strong, bright, cheerful, and productive. While in dysutopian stories, the children are of course stunted, sickly, dull, and woeful. "Soon" is a utopia, and Kollontai shares a glimpse of the not-too-distant Communist future — 48 years forward from 1922, that is in 1970 — when the comfortable and peaceable world has been realized. Communal child-raising has erased traditional failures and sorrows. The defeated and supplanted capitalist dysutopia remains only in museum exhibits and the memories of the old folks, the "red grandmother" and other surviving veterans of the world revolution.

"Soon" works well as a children's story, a complement to her other fiction as well as essays and speeches on personal and familial relations, such as "Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle", "Communism and the Family", and "Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth". The Alexandra Kollontai Archive section of the Marxists Internet Archive has a substantial selection of her writings, but not "Soon".

To readers of today, "Soon" conveys a sense of immediate hopefulness in the early years of the Soviet revolution, with more immediacy that we can now retrieve from speeches or histories. A hopeful vision, in 1922.

I find an interesting contrast in Robert A. Heinlein's fictional portrayal of a libertarian grandmother in the brave and memorable Hazel Stone of The Rolling Stones, who was a girl revolutionary in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein's enterprising young people do not forget where liberty comes from, or that the struggle from time to time must be renewed.

Alexandra Kollontai was spared in Stalin's great purges of Communist leaders, and died the year before Stalin's own death. After the Soviet collapse, the contrast of Kollontai's little vision with the history of Communist reality — utopia in power — may be less heart-breaking. If not in 1922 for the children — while the Communist breeze still felt fresh to many in the Soviet Union — if not at hand right then in 1922, when will the Soviet children's cheerful days arrive?

© 2004 Robert Wilfred Franson