Two Women Gaining Power through the October Revolution: Aleksandra Kollontai and Suzanne Girault Sophie Cœuré Aleksandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (1872–1952) and Suzanne Depollier-Girault (1882–1973) are two fgures who were fully engaged in the Bolshevik Revolu- tion and whose biographies vividly illustrate the end of the old order in Eu- rope after 1917. In the wake of this event, which the former had long hoped for, while the later was caught by surprise, they gained political power that had never been exercised at such a high level by women in European and global history. One became a minister in the Soviet state and the other led the French Communist Party. They were ten years apart in age and knew of each other, but were not personally connected. Their two journeys spanned Switerland, France, and Russia, and shared an intercultural dimension, with its risks and advantages in political careers. They deployed their social and linguistic skills in internationalist circles. Both were members of the lost generation of frst revolutionaries who were removed from power during Lenin’s succession and relegated to minor political roles, but neither ever renounced her public loyalty to the October Revolution and the Stalinist regime it birthed. Both atracted the interest of the Soviet state and of the Communist Party in the context of the post-Stalinist “return to Lenin.” After their deaths, Girault returned to an- onymity, while Kollontai once again became a prominent fgure in the USSR and abroad. Kollontai came to embody two antithetical fgures: a hero of So- viet diplomacy and a pioneer of Western left-wing feminism. 1 This chapter argues that Kollontai and Girault led “parallel lives.” The idea is not to present them as heroines (in the manner of Plutarch), antagonists, or mirror images of one another (as Alan Bullock posited in his crossed biography of Hitler and Stalin 2 ), but rather as two women who atained an unprecedented level of 1 See, for example, A. Kollontaï, Marxisme et révolution sexuelle, ed. Judith Stora-Sandor, trans. Claude Ligny (Paris: Maspéro, 1973). 2 Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London: HarperCollins, 1991). Personal Trajectories in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–22: Biographical Itineraries, Individual Experiences, Autobiographical Refections. Korine Amacher, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Anthony J. Heywood, and Adele Lindenmeyr, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2021, 145–66. https://doi.org/10.52500/CORV6026.