Born Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich into an aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire.
Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born on March 31, 1872 (March 19 in the Old Style Julian calendar then used in Russia), in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire. She was the daughter of a Tsarist general, Mikhail Alekseevich Domontovich, and Alexandra Masalin, a Finnish-born businesswoman of Ukrainian descent.
Her privileged, cosmopolitan upbringing gave her access to private tutors, foreign languages, and travel across Europe, which was unusual for women of her era. Despite the material comfort of her aristocratic household, Kollontai grew increasingly disillusioned with the rigid social hierarchies of Tsarist Russia and the constrained roles available to women of her class.
This early exposure to European liberal and socialist thought, combined with a rebellious streak against her parents' wishes for a conventional marriage, planted the seeds for her later revolutionary career. She would go on to defy her family by marrying for love rather than status, and later abandoning that marriage entirely to pursue political activism and Marxist theory. Her birth into privilege makes her subsequent life as a committed Bolshevik revolutionary and the world's first female government minister and ambassador all the more historically remarkable, illustrating how personal conviction overcame class origin in the turbulent currents of early 20th-century Russia.