Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe, following the lives and careers of five prominent women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the aristocratic Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan turned scientist turned global women's activist Elena Lagadinova. In brief conversational chapters, Kristen Ghodsee renders the big ideas of socialist feminism accessible to those newly inspired by the emancipatory politics of insurgent left feminist movements around the globe.
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Kristen R. Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the graduate groups in anthropology and history at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She is the author of twelve books and she has written for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Jacobin, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Die Tageszeitung. Her critically acclaimed 2018 book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, has appeared in 15 languages. Her latest book is Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Bold Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, with Simon & Schuster in 2023. Ghodsee is currently a senior honorary fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany.
Susan Neiman has been director of the Einstein Forum since 2000, after working as an associate professor of philosophy at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Neiman is the author of ten books, translated into 15 languages, including The Unity of Reason (1994), Evil in Modern Thought (2002), Moral Clarity (2008), Why Grow Up? (2014) Learning from the Germans (2019) Left is not Woke (2023) and Call it Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (2026). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and other publications.
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