In this episode, Kristen Ghodsee reads the “Decree on Social Welfare” from January 31, 1918, written by Alexandra Kollontai when she was the Commissar for Social Welfare in the first Bolshevik government. There are quite a few external sources mentioned in this episode and they are detailed below.

Biographies of Kollontai in English (please note the alternative spellings of her name, which are an artifact of different traditions of the transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet into Latin letters.)

• Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai, Indiana University Press, 1979
• Isabel de Palencia, Alexandra Kollontaj: Ambassadress of Russia, 1947
• Beatrice Farnsworth, Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford University Press, 1980
• Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography (Updated Edition) Haymarket Books, (1980) 2014

 Other books about early Soviet policies about women and the family: 

• Wendy Goldman: Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936, Cambridge University Press, 1993
• Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Indiana University Press, 1997
• Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Bold Type Books, 2018

 Drafts of the Communist Manifesto: 

• Friedrich Engels: Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith (first draft)
• Friedrich Engels: The Principles of Communism (second draft)
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:

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• Second World, Second Sex

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Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.