Kristen Ghodsee reads the final section of Alexandra Kollontai's 1915/1916 essay about World War I–"Who Needs the War?"–and looks for lessons applicable to the present day. This is especially salient today because the United States is on the eve of a trade war with Mexico and Canada.
This translation is from a 1984 collection of Kollontai's writing published by Progress Publishers in the Soviet Union, which claims that the essay was written while Kollontai was in exile in Norway. She sent it to Vladimir Lenin (then in exile in Switzerland) who also edited it before publication. The final pamphlet was first published in 1916. It went into multiple editions and was distributed widely across Europe and Russia.
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Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and a professor and chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
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