In 1927, four years after its original publication in the Soviet Union, the English title Red love was given to Alexandra Kollontai's newly translated novel Vasilisa malygina, one of several early works the Bolshevik woman wrote about the relationship between men and women in the wake of the Russian revolution. Before the year had ended, Matsuo Saburō would finish translating the English version of Kollontai's book into Japanese, resulting in a work reprinted fifteen times within its first seven months in Japan, as well as multiple translations into Korean and Chinese directly from Matsuo's version.

Kollontai's novel was not meant to be representative of romantic life in the Soviet Union or its sexual morality, as Kollontai herself writes in the preface to the English and subsequent East Asian versions. Nor is her book about a failed romance or much of a page-turner. But this did not stop Red love from becoming a bestseller throughout East Asia and North America, and becoming more than anything a ubiquitous epithet for a much broader debate throughout the world about the familial, sexual, and affective bonds that might—could and should—evolve under the economic alternative to capitalist modernity being put into practice for the first time in the Soviet Union. A collection of twelve scholarly essays, preceded by the editors’ introduction, Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century breathes new life into this discussion almost a century after Kollontai's eponymous work was first published.

How could romantic love be marshaled as a tool of revolution? What would marriage, even sex, look like under the conditions of socialism? In what ways was the revolutionary movement itself patriarchal, demanding that activists be attentive to how forms of class oppression affected men and women differently? Wide-ranging questions such as these were among the first to capture the imagination of revolutionary-oriented men and women in the mid-1920s, and eventually evolved to animate discussions about the relationships between intimacy and revolutionary politics, love and labor, and gender and class in cultural formations throughout the world.

Encompassing a panoply of disciplinary perspectives, historical periods, and critical approaches, the essays in Red Love Across the Pacific explore the contours of these formations from the mid-1920s up to the present day—from the experience of American women travelers in the Soviet Union to the state censorship of women's leftist novels in Australia, and from the representation of working-class women in film under South Korea's dictatorship to the nature of forms of affect that work to sustain solidarity among factory workers in Mexico today. Throughout the anthology, we learn about early discussions of the “woman question,” about gender and sexuality in Cold War America, and about the forgotten histories of female activists, colonial communists, biracial movie stars, sex workers, and queer writers. There is indeed much to be recovered in the tradition of red love—“a way of naming the various possibilities beyond or provocations to bourgeois sexual morality,” write the editors—that neither revolutionary nor national histories have sought fit to remember, but continues to be deeply relevant today.

Queer desire has, for example, remained stubbornly absent from discussions of red love, and one of the refreshing aspects of this particular anthology is that many of the essays take serious measure of both economics and same-sex love in their analyses. The editors begin their introduction to the volume discussing an image of two soldiers holding hands, one Chinese and one North Korean, as a way of illustrating the “overt romance of revolutionary movements” (p. xi), and almost half of the essays in the volume refer to queer writers or activists in one way or another. In a sustained reading of black, queer author Willard Motely's Let Noon Be Fair (1966), for instance, Aaron Lecklider shows how Motely's last novel, set in Mexico, positions female and gay sexuality as “a site of resistance” to modernist development and a “model for sex outside the hierarchies of class and race stratification” (p. 150). In other essays, Heather Bowen-Struyk shows how “intimacy between comrades” in Kobayashi Takiji's The Crab Cannery serves to strengthen revolutionary solidarity in the canonical proletarian novel, while Tomoko Aoyama examines how the lives of intrepid revolutionary Miyamoto Yuriko and her former lesbian partner Yuasa Yoshiko have provided rich documentary evidence for new queer and feminist scholarship and film in Japan.

Besides its sharp analyses and broad translational scope, the anthology also offers a wealth of new biographical information about leftist women in particular. At this moment of profound skepticism in the possibilities of revolutionary transformation, Red Love Across the Pacific is a deeply satisfying book, reminding us of the rich histories of comradely love, solidarity, and speculation that Kollontai's novel left in its wake.