Frida & Tina: Vestidos y Desnudos /abstract

Frida y Tina: Vestidos y Desnudos
/ On Aleksandra Kollontai's influence on women in the Americas (on her friendship with Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti)
This was the tile of my MA Dissertation in Mexico D.F. (1992)
'Tina & Frida' is an essay from my own compilation on The Arts & the Communists: Dziga Vertov, Isadora Duncan, Dmitri Shostakovich, Tina Modotti, Konstantin Stanislavski, Pablo Picasso, Oscar Niemeyer, Frida Kahlo, Jose Saramago and the rest.
By Vladimir Alexander Smith Mesa


For communist women, organised feminism, as it existed in Russia before 1917 and elsewhere in Europe, only represented the personal needs of privileged, educated and wealthy women. From the very beginning, pro- Soviet female activists in the Americas focused more on questioning the performance of the state and on the struggle for political rights. Aleksandra Kollontai (1872–1952) was one of the best-known Bolshevik leaders. Her writings are testimony to the Soviet initiatives and contradictions on the 'woman question', women's liberation and sexual freedom. Kollantai was also a Soviet ambassador to Mexico, where she developed strong links with Mexicans and other Latin American artists and intellectuals, living in exile for their communist activities. They fought for social emancipation and for a better society for all. Sexual liberation as it was understood in Western Europe was seen as a frivolous demand rather than a political statement.
According to pro-Soviet women in Latin America, this was strictly a personal matter, as the life of Frida Khalo and Tina Modotti demonstrated. For these women artists, their "place, in a political demonstration, was beside the man of my class, not necessarily beside the women of other classes". Many pictures expose this position. Feminism was understood as the 'woman question.' The gender question did not take the form of a separate suffragette movement, as occurred in the West. For the Soviets, western feminism was negative because it meant the separation of women from the historical role of the larger working class, in rejection of men and in recognition of bonds only among women.