Nick Perzacki’s Reviews > Red Valkyries: The Revolutionary Women of Eastern Europe > Status Update

I don’t disagree that Lenin was quite a bit of an asshole a lot of the time, but there’s a weird amount of blame and shame thrown on him in the chapter on Armand. By all accounts given she seems like she was really important to him, both personally and professionally, and the feeling was very much mutual, but nearly every page was angled as her being forced against her will do things for him.

When was somebody going to tell me that Engels was in a throuple??

Always love a Paolo Freire shoutout, my goat my king. Very cool he was heavily inspired by Krupskaya, as I read her quotes it was clear where he built from her which made this chapter extra fun.

Nothing makes me feel like more of a dumb dumb than reading about Krupskaya just casually teaching herself several languages in the different countries she was in while in exile with Lenin - she was such a badass

Unfortunately, Kollontai has not grown on me - I just don’t think she was particularly self-aware or critical about her pretty clear petit bourgeois standpoint. She had a lot of sympathy for workers, and was extremely passionate about the emancipation of women and freedom of sexuality for all of society, but her ultimate aims were frequently limited by this standpoint.

No disrespect to Alexandra Kollontai, but her perspective feels very petit bourgeois in its foundation. She clearly has a deep empathy for the proletarian women, but I don’t think her arguments were quite as revolutionary as she presented them - i.e., I don’t think her arguments actually point beyond capitalism, at least in her earlier career, I’ll have to see what the rest of her chapter has to say

This interview Pavlichenko did was wild:
Q: Is that your parade uniform or your everyday uniform?
A: We have no time for parades at the moment.
Q: But the uniform makes you look fat. Or don’t you mind?
A: I am proud to wear the uniform of the legendary Red Army… I wish you could experience a bombing raid. Honestly, you would immediately forget about the cut of your outfit.
Plus telling big tobacco to fuck off

Lyudmila Pavlichenko, “the sniperess”, over the course of about 3 years during WWII killed a Nazi every 3-4 days by my math. That is absolutely fucking ludicrous.

Don’t mind me - just over here reading my *socialist* *feminist* *literature*