You wrote concerning Madame Kollontai
>
>When K was removed from her position as head of the women's commission
>(a post she was given only after Inessa Armand, who had been active on
>women's issues for less time but was personally and politically close
>to Lenin, died) during retaliation against *Workers' Opposition*, wasn't
>she also put on probation which would have meant expulsion had she ever
>again actively opposed party line?
Yup. The BSE (3d edition) in its "Workers Opposition" article says: "In 1922 the Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B) adopted a resolution in which it...expelled several members of the opposition from the party, and issued a *final warning* [my emphasis] to Shliapnikov, Medvedev and Kollontai..."
>
>Following unsuccessful attempt to prevent restoration of conservative
>family policy (1926), weren't some of K's public expressions such as
>assertion that Soviet state had emancipated women & reference to woman's
>'natural duty as mother' inconsistent with earlier views?
Sure. Her very survival and her continuing utility (e.g. the 1944 Finnish negotiations) were inconsistent with expressing her pre-1926 views. My take is that like many other excellent people who did their duty in Stalin's USSR she acted as best she could under conditions not of her own making nor still less of her desire.
Her pre-1926 views became yet more important after she died. In 1970 Paul Sweezy with perfect clarity and accuracy wrote (and was - as late as 1986 - ridiculed by Alec Nove for writing!):
"When the bureaucratically administered economy runs into difficulties, as it certainly must, there are two politically opposite ways in which a solution must be sought. One is to weaken the bureaucracy, politicize the masses, and ensure increasing initiative and responsibility to the workers themselves. This is the road toward socialist relations of production. The other way is to put increasing reliance on the market, not as a temporary retreat (like Lenin's NEP) but as an ostensible step toward a more efficient "socialist" economy....It is, I submit, the road back to class domination and ultimately the restoration of capitalism."
Pure *Workers Opposition* stuff, & add to that a feminist view that insists on fun = many of the basic elements of an outline of a programmatic alternative to the nightmare. Go Madame K
john mage