Kollontai came to a dinner with Queen Maud of Norway without gloves in 1928
The Soviet plenipotentiary Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai gravely offended the Queen of Norway on 7 March 1928 by turning up at a reception without gloves. She mentions this incident, and her strained relations with Nicholas II's cousin, Queen Maud of Great Britain, in her diary:
"At the dinner at the palace I committed a 'protocol crime'. 'Ladies' are required to wear long white gloves. I was without them. The Queen, who barely conceals her hatred of me as a representative of dreadful Bolshevism and, what is more, the author of 'The Love of Worker Bees', kept her eyes fixed throughout dinner on my bare arms. The King, on the contrary, was markedly amiable and talkative."
