Julia Ioffe and Clarissa Ward on Putin, Russia and the Women Fighting For A Better Future (Part One)

Summary

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Intelligence Squared – Julia Ioffe and Clarissa Ward on Putin, Russia, and the Women Fighting For A Better Future (Part One)

Date: January 11, 2026
Host: Clarissa Ward
Guest: Julia Ioffe
Producer: Mia Sorrenti
Location: Kiln Theatre, London

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Episode Overview

This episode features a live conversation between CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward and award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe, discussing Ioffe’s new book, Motherland — a sweeping history of Russia told through the stories of women, from revolutionary feminists to Pussy Riot. The discussion traverses the evolution of women’s roles across 150 years of Russian and Soviet history, exploring emancipation, the complexity of “feminism” in Russia, Soviet policies, and the unique burdens placed on Russian women. The conversation also dissects the erasure of pioneering women from the national narrative and contrasts Western and Russian concepts of female identity and activism.

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Key Points & Insights

The Book’s Genesis and Concept

• Initial Reluctance & Perspective Shift
  • Julia Ioffe began reluctant to write "a women's history," viewing it as less serious—a bias shaped by a male-dominated journalism culture ([04:25]).
  • Her agent questioned the supposed “ordinariness” of Ioffe’s female ancestors, pushing her to explore why their achievements seemed so exceptional to Americans but were typical among Soviet women ([05:10]).
  • Ioffe wanted to get away from writing about Vladimir Putin and instead illuminate Russian history through its women ([06:45]).

Notable Quote:

"I didn't want to write a women's history. I want to write something serious. Because, like you, I spent my career around male journalists with male bosses. And you kind of come to think about what's serious, what's important and what isn't, based on what they think is important and serious and what isn't."
— Julia Ioffe, 04:25

Women’s Emancipation in the Soviet Union

• Early Reforms & Alexandra Kollontai
  • The Bolsheviks addressed "the woman question" with radical policies led by figures like Alexandra Kollontai, who championed issues such as economically motivated marriages, collective childcare, and women’s independence ([08:36]).
  • Soviet policies included the world’s first paid maternity leave, no-fault civil divorce, access to all professions, free higher education for women, and legalized abortion (remarkably early, in 1920) ([11:45], [19:12]).
  • Kollontai’s ideas prioritized work and self-fulfillment for women above marriage or motherhood. Despite her enormous legacy, she was quickly ousted and largely written out of history ([15:44]).

Notable Quote:

"In 1918, she introduces some incredibly revolutionary reforms that are, by the way, I think, revolutionary even now, over 100 years later. Paid maternity leave, no fault civil divorce... The right to claim child support from a man you're not even married to... They went for free. They studied the sciences."
— Julia Ioffe, 11:45

Family Memories & Research Process

• Interweaving Personal and Political
  • Ioffe details her reliance on interviews with elderly relatives, diaries, and family papers to illuminate both personal and national history ([12:52]).
  • Describes the gap between reality and sanitized or idealized family memories, and the surprises of finding documentation corroborating stories ([14:00]).

Notable Moment:

"Luckily, both my grandmothers were still alive when I started this project... At one point, a friend of mine is here who has seen the evolution of this book over the last, what, like 27 years that it took me to write it."
— Julia Ioffe, 12:52

Wartime & Aftermath — Russian Women as Warriors

• Women’s Pervasiveness in War Efforts
  • Soviet girls, shaped by co-ed militarized education, entered WWII ready for combat: tens of thousands became snipers, artillery gunners, and pilots, forming all-female units ([27:07]).
  • Despite their significant role (8% of the forces), their contributions were erased post-war: women were shamed, their memoirs unpublished ([27:46]).

Notable Quote:

"...By the end of the war, they are 8% of the Soviet armed forces. But they're not just nurses and translators and, you know, radio operators. They had all female squadrons of fighter pilots. They had some of their best snipers were women..."
— Julia Ioffe, 27:07

Western vs. Russian Feminism

• Misconceptions, Erasure, and Political Use
  • Russian history’s powerful female figures are little-known domestically; the regime benefits from this absence, painting feminism as a dangerous Western import ([23:58]).
  • Indigenous Russian concepts of female emancipation—rooted in collectivism and revolutionary socialism—differ sharply from individualistic Western feminism ([23:58], [26:00]).
  • Legalized abortion, normalized for a century in Russia, offers a stark contrast to ongoing Western debates ([19:12], [23:18]).

Notable Quote:

"...the fact that these women have been completely written out of the history serves the current regime really, really well. Because then they can say that feminism is a Western import, right? It's an invasive chestnut... If we let it in, it's going to corrode Russian society from within..."
— Julia Ioffe, 23:58

The Post-Soviet “Backlash” and Beauty Culture

• From Amazons to Stepford Wives
  • Both women recount feeling out of place in 2000s Moscow, where women’s lives seemed overtaken by relentless beauty standards and the relentless pursuit of marriage to wealthy men ([29:56]).
  • Ioffe describes “finishing school” rituals for women, including a surreal class on “breathing through your vulva” aimed at marriage market readiness — symbolizing the post-Soviet hyper-feminine ideal ([31:32]).
  • The conversation underscores how, despite decades of “emancipation,” Russian women were left with a double shift: full-time jobs plus all domestic labor, resulting in exhaustion and, eventually, disillusionment with “liberation” ([36:00]).

Notable & Humorous Moment:

"There's this academy that teaches women how to snare husband. And they have classes like the Art of Walking beautifully and the Secrets of the Jade Cave... There's about 30 women lying on their backs on the floor... the instructor is guiding them in an exercise of breathing through their vulvas."
— Julia Ioffe, 31:32

The Double Burden and Devaluation of “Women’s Work”

• Invisible Labor & Occupational Downranking
  • Soviet promises to collectivize housework were never fulfilled. Women ended up with two jobs (paid and unpaid) while men did not share domestic work ([38:00]).
  • The feminization of professions led to their decline in prestige and pay. By late Soviet times, women made up 70% of physicians—but only in low-status or low-paid specialities ([39:00]).

Notable Quote:

"...when a field gets feminized and 70% of its practitioners are women... Do you think that they're at the top of the social prestige hierarchy? Do you think they're getting paid the most? No. They're getting paid the least. Because the more a field becomes feminized, the least prestigious and less remunerative it becomes."
— Julia Ioffe, 39:10

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Noteworthy Quotes and Memorable Moments

• Clarissa Ward on Russian Women’s Post-Soviet Role:

  "Their whole raison d'etre was to look beautiful so that they could snare a rich man... I have never felt, like, so hideous in my life because every woman, A, looks like a supermodel... I would go to dinners with Russian men and women, and the women would, like, sit in silence and, like, push like a lettuce leaf around their plate. And I would be talking a lot and people would be like, oh, she's so loud... she's wearing sweatpants. It's very sad, you know?"
  (Clarissa Ward, 29:56–30:58)

• Julia Ioffe on Historical Unknowing:

  "When I started researching this book... I was like, who is Alexandra Kollontai and why have I never heard of her? ... She was pushed out of government and written out of the history very, very quickly."
  (Julia Ioffe, 15:44)

• On Soviet and Western Experiences of Abortion:

  "They legalized abortion in 1920. First country in the world to do that. So what is completely stupefying for me, for my mother, I think for other women from that part of the world, is the way that... we all took it for granted completely, the right to have an abortion. Because, you know, we grew up with stories of our great grandmothers getting one, and it wasn't a big deal."
  (Julia Ioffe, 19:12)

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Select Segment Timestamps

• [04:25] – Book's origin, Ioffe’s resistance to writing “a women’s history”
• [08:36] – Bolshevik Revolution: the “woman question” and Alexandra Kollontai’s radical ideas
• [11:45] – Specific Soviet policies: paid leave, free education, access to professions
• [15:44] – Kollontai’s erasure from history
• [19:12] – Abortion legalized in 1920 USSR; contrast with Western debates
• [23:58] – The regime’s incentive to erase indigenous Russian feminism
• [27:07] – Young women’s combat roles in WWII
• [31:32] – “Breathing through your vulva” finishing school anecdote
• [34:44] – The double burden and feminization of professions
• [39:00] – Gendered decline in occupational prestige
• [40:08] – Episode wrap-up

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Tone & Style

The conversation is witty, candid, and personal, blending rigorous historical discussion with sharp, sometimes self-deprecating, personal anecdotes. Both speakers balance humor with incisive social critique, offering rare insight into the experience of Russian women and drawing astute contrasts with Western feminist politics.

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Summary Takeaways

• Russian women’s emancipation was a top-down project; it gave unprecedented rights and responsibilities but ultimately demanded relentless labor without true liberation.
• Female pioneers like Kollontai were sidelined, their legacies nearly erased—allowing today’s Kremlin to brand feminism as “alien.”
• Modern Russian femininity and the post-Soviet beauty obsession are, ironically, products of both Soviet policy failure and global influences.
• The “double burden” (work and home) became the norm, leading to exhaustion and disillusionment with the Soviet feminist project, while feminized professions (e.g., medicine) lost status and pay.

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Transcript

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[Julia Ioffe]

You're about to make a trade. Which u do you listen to? Is it get optioning those options.

[Clarissa Ward]

Or.

[Julia Ioffe]

Let'S do a little research. Learn [e-mail] TradeSmart welcome to Intelligence Squared.

[Mia Sorrenti]

Where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with award winning journalist Julia Yoffe. Yoffe joined us at the Kiln Theatre in London to discuss Putin, Russia and the women fighting for a better future. One of America's most influential voices on Russia, US relations, Yoffie has reported on Putin's regime for over 15 years. Her new book, Motherland, which was long listed for the 2025 National Book Award for Non Fiction, tells the stories of the many women who have shaped modern Russia, from feminist revolutionaries to the fearless members of Pussy Riot. A warning that this episode contains some strong language. Let's join our host, Clarissa Ward, CNN Chief International Correspondent, now with more.

[Clarissa Ward]

Hi everyone and thank you so much for I noticed that the heavens literally opened and it's an absolute deluge. So we appreciate you being here and we will make it well worth your while. I am selfishly, ridiculously excited to be here on stage tonight with Julia Yoffey, who is a journalist who I've been pretty much obsessed with for, I don't know, like 15 years. But we've never actually met in person. I've just sort of fan girl stalked her on social media. So, for those of you who don't know Julia, and I'm assuming most of you do, she has spent well born in Russia, raised in the us, incredible journalism career, working with everyone from the New Yorker to the Atlantic, to being a founding member and Washington correspondent for Puck, which, if you guys don't subscribe, Puck is great. They've got all the good dirt. And she has written this fantastic book, which is original, brilliant, deeply researched, super compelling, and just a really interesting and innovative way to look at a period in history that I think has been the subject of many books. But this will give you a vastly different perspective. Don't just take it from me, take it from the National Book Award people who Julia was shortlisted for the prize, which is an incredible achievement, and without further ado, let's start talking about this incredible book. So I guess the most obvious question is because I feel like you've been writing this book for a long time. Like, every time I would ask what you were up to, it was like, she's writing a book. I'm like, when is this book actually coming out? Was it always conceived of in your mind as sort of recent Soviet and Russian history told through the stories of women, or was that something you landed upon as you began the process of writing this book? What made you decide on this concept?

[Julia Ioffe]

So, first of all, thank you, Clarissa. The fangirling goes in both directions. The book was not intended to be this. In fact, when I was pushed into doing this book and I agreed to do it kicking and screaming, and to my chagrin, I said, I don't want to write a women's history. I want to write something serious. Because. Because, like you, I spent my career around male journalists with male bosses. And you kind of come to think about what's serious, what's important and what isn't, based on what they think is important and serious and what isn't. And I didn't think that there was much there there originally. It was originally trying to answer two questions. The first was for my agent, Gail, who is American and has family from that part of the world, who came over at the turn of the 20th century. And for her, it was crazy that I had not just a mother who was a doctor and a grandmother who was a doctor, but great grandmothers who were doctors. And she kept saying, you have to write about these women. They're extraordinary. And I was like, but they're not. They're totally ordinary. They're not famous, they're not world historical characters. They're just pretty normal, pretty average Soviet women. And then. So then that became, you know, how do you explain to an American or a Western reader how something that is ordinary, extraordinary to them is so ordinary to us?

[Clarissa Ward]

And.

[Julia Ioffe]

And for myself, it was trying to answer the question that you and I were talking about backstage, which is, where did these Russian women come from that you see on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg in every Russian city, right? These women carrying, as you said, six heavy shopping bags and six inch heels on a random Tuesday afternoon, full face of makeup, perfectly done hair. Everything is about finding and keeping a man and having children and becoming a trophy wife. And I was like, what. Who. What happened? And how did. Like, this is not what I grew up with 30 years, 20, 30 years before. So where did this come from? And I was trying to answer that question for myself, and I realized quickly that the two were intimately connected. The way we got to. Or the way I got to telling 150 years of history through the women was I realized I had to tell kind of what was happening in the background. What were the kind of larger historical events happening? What was the historical context to this social experiment of emancipating women from the top down and working them to death to the point where all they want to do is just relax and be trophy wives? And I realized that to do that in keeping with the book and. And with my original, like, all I wanted to do in writing a book in 2018 was just to not write about Vladimir Putin. I was so fucking sick of him. And so I was like, okay, well, let's see if I can tell other parts of Russian history without Lenin or without Stalin or without them playing as significant a part as they do in other narratives.

[Clarissa Ward]

You know, it's so fascinating. You talk about, like, you know, the fact that your grandmother and your great grandmother were all doctors, and my grandmother didn't go to college on the US Side. Neither of my grandmothers went to college. And I think that a lot of people's grandmothers didn't go to college, not because they weren't smart, not because they wouldn't have liked to, but just it wasn't really done for women in that time period. So let's talk a little bit about that sort of post Bolshevik revolution paradigm shift that enabled women like your great grandmother and your grandmother to become doctors while our grandmothers were doing other stuff, let's say.

[Julia Ioffe]

So Basically, since the 19th century, Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries had been grappling with what they called the woman question and the Socialists had their own take on it, which was, you know, in order to emancipate everybody, you also had to emancipate women. The male Marxist theories, kind of yada yada it for any Seinfeld fans or I, I realized I'm like, I. I'm like, wait, no, wrong, wrong country. But there were some female theorists, like Alexander Colon Ty and others who wrote about it more extensively and said, hey, no, you actually have to. You can't just subsume everything into class, right? Because for socialists, gender isn't as important as class, religion is, isn't as important as class ethn, etc. So. But Colant High wrote about how no women do have specific sets of needs and we have to get them out of economically motivated marriages, which are actually not that different from prostitution because they're both, they both tie sex and money and property. And we have to treat childbearing as a collective good and support women in having children. And we should also let them work. It's great for the state to have more people working, but it's also great for women. It gives them a sense of identity and purpose and freedom. They have their own money and they are their own power. They're no longer dependent on men. They don't have to. If they choose to marry someone, they do it for love, as opposed to they need somebody other than their father to keep a roof over their head. And she becomes this woman. Alexandra Colontai becomes the first cabinet female cabinet minister in the world and pushes all these policies to the world in the world. And in 1918, she introduces some incredibly revolutionary reforms that are, by the way, I think, revolutionary even now, over 100 years later. Paid maternity leave, no fault civil divorce that does not differentiate between legitimate children or children born inside wedlock and out of it. The right to claim child support from a man you're not even married to, and then he has to pay it starting from when you're pregnant. That women should have access to free higher education, that they should have access to all the professions, that there should be nurseries and kindergartens and cafeterias and laundries. That female labor should also be collectivized so that women can work and parent the way men can. She's doing this in 1918, and this happens to be when my great grandmothers are turning 17, 18 years old. And they're all coming from the pale of settlement, from these deep provincial Jewish religious places where their fathers did not want them to be educated or didn't want to waste money on a girl's education. Because she was just supposed to get married and have kids, which is what your grandmothers were doing, Right?

[Clarissa Ward]

Right.

[Julia Ioffe]

So my great grandmothers, most of them picked up and went to the big cities and went to universities which were open to them for the first time as women and as Jews. They went for free. They studied the sciences. One great grandmother became a, excuse me, a PhD in chemistry, had her own lab. Two great grandmothers were doctors, pediatricians, I think. Yeah, I have to go all the way back to great grandmothers to get a homemaker. But here's the thing is they were all still doing the. That your grandmothers were doing the housework, the child rearing, and they were doing it without all the conveniences and appliances that made this stuff a little easier for your grandmothers.

[Clarissa Ward]

I think the fact that you sort of interweave these biographies of some of these women who are central to the history of Russia with your own family history is super fascinating. And I just wondered, how much of this did you have to research versus how much of it did you already know about your own family? I don't think I even know my great grandmother's name.

[Julia Ioffe]

So I had heard. I was always the dweeby grandkid who wanted to know these family stories. I was always drawn to history because for me it was always just really good stories about people who were just like us, but just living in a different time. I always liked hearing my grandparents stories and I would just kind of remember them. Luckily, both my grandmothers were still alive when I started this project. I'm amazed that anyone is alive now that the project is done. It took so long, I feel like. And at one point, you know, when the pandemic hit, I was like, wow, no one will be around to read this book when it's done. At some point, a friend of mine is here who has seen the evolution of this book over the last, what, like 27 years that it took me to write it. And somebody was joking like, oh, that predates the book, right? I'm like, everything predates the book. I mean, rather, the book predates everything. Yeah. So my grandmothers were still around and tolerated me interviewing them for long periods of time. And you know, and then as you dig, other stuff turns up. And you know, my aunt, God bless her, was like, oh, you know, I have my grandmother's diary. Is that something you'd be interested in? I'm like, yeah, hello, of course. Or like, oh, you know, I have her son's letters home from the front before he was killed. Do you think that'd be interesting to you. I'm like, woman, you know? So I was lucky also that one of my grandmothers, my maternal grandmother, kept a lot of her mother's papers, her mother in law's papers. She was very close with her as well, and that she was kind of the keeper of the family history. And I was able to get a lot of stuff from her. And what was interesting was she was. She struck me as such an unreliable narrator because she was such a difficult interview. It was just all about how wonderful everything was and how everyone loved her and how living in Novosibirsk during the war when her mother had to work in the Gulag wasn't so bad, actually, you know, because she had this great teacher who recognized her musical talents. And I'm like, come on. But she, you know. But then I would find out she has this document and that document, and things actually lined up. And I was like, oh, you're not full of shit. Okay.

[Clarissa Ward]

So, you know, you mentioned Alexandra Kollontai, and I wonder how well known is she in Russia today? Is she celebrated in Russia today for this pivotal role that she had in kind of ushering in women's rights before women's rights was even a thing?

[Julia Ioffe]

No, I mean, when I started researching this book, so I studied Soviet history in college. I continue to be obsessed with it. I read about it for fun. I've written about Russia for 20 years. When I started researching this book, I was like, who is Alexandra Colontai and why have I never heard of her? And I realized in researching this book, well, that's because she was pushed out of government and written out of the history very, very quickly. Because even though Lenin was on board with some of her or most of her reforms, he was much more truly egalitarian, for all his other faults and sins, than the other Bolshevik leadership. The Bolsheviks were by far the most egalitarian. The underground revolutionary parties before 1917, they had women in unprecedented roles of power throughout the party apparatus. The second they come into power, they're like, okay, now that things are real, ladies take a back seat, right? And she very quickly gets pushed out, gets pushed into exile, and a lot of her ideas and theories get turned on their head to discredit her. So, for example, at the turn of the 20th century, she wrote very movingly, and I would say again, revolutionarily, about sex and women's pleasure. I mean, these are things that were not discussed in the Victorian kind of Bella book. And she wrote about how love of a man, love of sex, love of pleasure, doesn't have to be the central point of a woman's life, that the most important thing about her life is her work. And if she falls in love, great. And she can drink from the cup, love's joy, as she said, for a few weeks or a few months or a few years, however long she wants to. And then when she's done, she's done. And she can go back to what truly matters in her life, which is work. Within four years of the Bolsheviks taking power, Kollontai was out of power. And this idea was turned onto its head by a male theorist who called it the glass of water theory, which said Colantai was promiscuous and all about casual sex. And that she said that sex was nothing more than taking a sip from a glass of water. That you take a sip, you're done, you don't care. Which is not at all what she was saying. And she was, you know, and even when she was in power, the men in Bolshevik circles constantly gossiped about her, constantly slut shamed her. Because she had several husbands. Her last husband was like 17 years her junior. She was fabulous. First cougar. Cougar, commissariat. And as soon as they were able to push her out and just completely ridicule her, turn her ideas on their head and discredit them, on their heads and discredit them, they did.

[Clarissa Ward]

So where does it all start to go, really? As we would say in the uk, pear shaped, like, where does it all start to go? Because, you know, even though she was pushed out, a lot of what she had put into play, and there were others as well, Inessa Armand Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Kroposkaya, who were kind of part of this movement. And I should add, one thing we haven't talked about, but I found fascinating was abortion was legal.

[Julia Ioffe]

Yeah, they legalized abortion in 1920. First country in the world to do that. So what is completely stupefying for me, for my mother, I think for other women from that part of the world, is the, the way that, I mean, we all took it for granted completely, the right to have an abortion. Because, you know, we grew up with stories of our great grandmothers getting one, and it wasn't a big deal.

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[Julia Ioffe]

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[Clarissa Ward]

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[Julia Ioffe]

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[Clarissa Ward]

And you have this incredible moment in the book where you're talking about you're doing a profile on, you know, Nadia from Pussy Riot for gq, I believe. Glamour, sorry, Glamour. And your editor is obsessed with all these kind of very like Western feminist tropes. Like, what are her views on abortion? You're like, I don't know what's talking about abortion.

[Julia Ioffe]

It's like, yeah, they've had it for 100 years. Who gives a shit?

[Mia Sorrenti]

Yeah.

[Clarissa Ward]

And I just found that really fascinating, the idea of the difference. And I'm kind of fast forwarding a.

[Julia Ioffe]

Little bit here, but.

[Clarissa Ward]

But we're here, so let's do it. The difference between like Western feminism and Russian feminism and what that looks like.

[Julia Ioffe]

So I think that's actually very connected to the previous question you asked about Colin Tai and her place in Russian history and whether Russians know her. And this is something that Nadya of Pussywright and I talked about quite a bit, which was it's very convenient for Russians not to know about any of these figures about Krupska, who was Lenin, but also basically held the party together during the underground. She was the nerve operational center during the underground year. She was a very important theorist on education. Lenin's one time mistress, comrade at arms in a Sarmond, very important thinker. At one point she said, in justifying the legalization of abortion, she said, in a socialist society, we cannot have for we cannot force women to give birth. We cannot have that as a form of labor conscription because they were making everybody work. The fact that these women have been completely written out of the history serves the current regime really, really well. Because then they can say that feminism is a Western import, right? It's an invasive chestnut. It's an invasive species and if we let it in, it's going to corrode Russian society from within. And make it collapse. It represents values that are contrary to an alien to traditional Russian values. And that's what they've been saying. And maybe western feminism is. But it completely ignores the fact that there is an indigenous form of feminism that would have never called itself feminism because feminism was bourgeois splitterism and you know, bite your tongue. But in ignoring that, Russia had its own very powerful history that, you know, we only got up to 1920, but this, you know, my, so my great grandmothers were 17, 18 when the revolution hit and it completely transformed their lives for better and for worse. But when the, not when Nazi Germany invades In June of 1941, there's already a generation of girls who was born after 1917. They're young women, they're in their early 20s, late teens, and this is all they know. And because of Krupskaya, they've gone to co ed schools. And in these co ed schools they're, they're learning to shoot rifles from like third grade. And they're doing it next to the boys, right? They're learning how to read topographical maps. They're learning how to, you know, in order to get into college, you have to learn how to jump from a parachute stand and work with a tractor or a plane or a truck engine. You have to know your civil war, you know, military history. The state opens up all these clubs for kids that are open to both boys and girls. By the way, Home EC gets tossed out of the curriculum completely.

[Clarissa Ward]

Cooking classes just translated for you. Home EC is not.

[Julia Ioffe]

Oh, sorry. Yes. So all that stuff falls by the wayside. Girls and boys are educated together. And all these clubs that train boys and girls in marksmanship, in aviation, which is the hot new thing in all kinds of things. When the war starts, when the invasion happens, all these girls are ready to go. They know how to do this. They know how to be soldiers. They've had this paramilitary training their whole lives. And so tens and tens and tens of thousands of them swarm the recruitment post that summer. And they're like 16 year olds, 17, 18 year old girls who are like, I have my government sniper certificate, or like, hi, I know how to fly a plane. And by the end of the war, they are 8% of the Soviet armed forces. But they're not just nurses and translators and, you know, radio operators. They had all female squadrons of fighter pilots. They had some of their best snipers were women. They were sappers and artillery gunners, and they actually had all female battalions of machine gunners that were fought outside of Odessa and in other parts of Ukraine. They. And if you read their memoirs, they didn't see it as anything like, oh, here I am now, doing a boy's job or doing a male job. They were just. This was also something they did. They just didn't. It didn't occur to them that this couldn't. Wasn't something that they could do. Right. And they too, they come home from their front, from the front in 1945, and they're told to shut up. Men, women, who weren't at the front are like, what were you doing in the trenches with all those men? And that's all they wanted to know about. So the men's, the male veterans, all their memoirs are published. This becomes this kind of small cottage industry in the Soviet Union of publishing World War II veterans memoirs. But the women's don't get published and it becomes this taboo topic. But again, this never happened in the West. Western feminism is only, like now, fighting over women in combat roles. This is indigenous to Russia. And so Putin writing all, not just Putin, but the Soviets did it for him before him writing this out and saying, oh, this is just a Western import. We Russians, we're traditional, naturally. We're just traditional. We don't fuck with this stuff. It would destroy us from within if we let it in. Serves the regime very well to ignore the fact that they have their own history. I'm just that most Russians do not know that.

[Clarissa Ward]

They don't even know it as well. And I'm so fascinated about, you know, you and I were talking before we came on stage, having lived in Moscow at a similar time and, like, really struggling as women who I'd like to think are not unattractive, but living in Moscow, I have never felt, like, so hideous in my life because every woman, A, looks like a supermodel, but B, and at this time, particularly, like, their whole raison d' etre was to look beautiful, right?

[Julia Ioffe]

And the whole raison d' etre was to look beautiful so that they could snare a rich man.

[Clarissa Ward]

Right? And for me, I found that I didn't really know how to, like, you know, you described it as feeling like a third gender, and I think I kind of felt like that too. And I would go to dinners with Russian men and women, and the women would, like, sit in silence and, like, push like a lettuce leaf around their plate. And I would be talking a lot and people would be like, oh, she's so loud, you know, and she's wearing sweatpants. It's very sad, you know?

[Julia Ioffe]

Yeah. Why don't Wh. Why don't Western women take care of themselves?

[Clarissa Ward]

I. I mean, and I just, I, I like. So just help me understand how we get from, like, trailblazers and, you know, abortions rights and machine gunners to this completely bizarre Stepfordian kind of vision of femininity. And please also can you tell everyone about that crazy finishing school where they had to breathe through their vulvas? She'll explain.

[Julia Ioffe]

So that anecdote didn't make it into the book, but.

[Clarissa Ward]

It's a crying shame.

[Julia Ioffe]

But there's this academy that teaches women how to snare husband. And they have classes like the Art of Walking beautifully and the Secrets of the Jade Cave and how to play the magic Flute, you know, like, and how not to be a mother to your man. And it was incredible. You see these women who come in after the end of a working day. And I remember there was one class I sat in on, it was in a totally dark room and they had this kind of shamanistic drum track playing on the stereo. It was pitch black in the room. There's about 30 women lying on their backs on the floor, and the instructor is guiding them in an exercise of breathing through their vulvas. And then this, like, they're all making these kind of orgasmic sounds and it gets so loud and so crazy. And I'm just sitting in the corner with my little notepad and I'm like.

[Clarissa Ward]

And I should add, and I think this is relevant, you know, for me, I'm an outsider.

[Julia Ioffe]

Sorry. But also, that was important. And, you know, as much as I make fun of this academy, that was also important.

[Clarissa Ward]

Because you learned how to breathe through your vulva.

[Blinds.com Advertiser]

No.

[Julia Ioffe]

I mean, my mom is a breast and gyn pathologist. I don't, you know, the, like, women's pleasure was not important. Right. And I don't know how many Western male friends you had in Moscow at the time and whether you talked to them about any of the Russian women they were dating and what they would say about taking these girls to bed, how these were all. They were all very sexy. And they would do these weird, like, stripper moves on the dance floor, but then they would get them into bed and they were like, they're like a cold fish. I'm like, well, yeah, they don't. Nobody teaches them that part. Nobody teaches them that it's okay and that it's good because what Colin Thai wrote has been for a century, right? And so it was good that they were learning how to breathe through their vulvas. I mean, God bless Yeah, because that wasn't their goal. Their goal was, like, there were so many. I mean, your story of feeling hideous in Moscow. I remember living in Moscow and going to. We talked about this, too, about going to the gym in Moscow. And I was like, 30 pounds lighter. And I remember just, like, doing. I don't know, what are these called? The. Like, the tricep exercise. And I just. And there are all these girls around me. And then I look at myself in the mirror doing this. I'm like, I have the shortest fucking arms.

[Clarissa Ward]

Oh, my God.

[Julia Ioffe]

Like. Because they all just, you know, they're all. They all look like that. You know, the gas station, you know, And.

[Clarissa Ward]

And I find it. I find it so interesting because for me, you know, I'm an actual outsider. I'm just there for a few years or whatever. But what was this like for you as a Russian woman? You are a woman.

[Julia Ioffe]

Well, Russian woman would never. Or Russians would never. They'd be like, no, you're Jewish. Thank you. It was bewildering. And again, so there was the part that I was answering for my agent Gail, and then there was the part that I was answering for myself, which was, what the fuck happened? And I didn't know about Colantine. I didn't know about the all female squadrons of fighter pilots. Then I learned that, and I was like, okay, no, what re I now I really don't understand what the fuck happened. And the more I dug, the more to come back to what you really asked me about. I realized that women were emancipated, but really they were just asked to do more. They were asked to work in factories and work in hospitals and work in universities and on farms the way they had. But nobody absolved them of being the primary homemaker, the primary childcare person. That was not at all the men's responsibility. That was all on the women. And all the states promises to collectivize that and collectivize laundry and collectivize dishwashing and cooking so that, as Lennon said, you wouldn't have a million women in a million stinky kitchens, which was, in his view, very inefficient. The state never came through for them because the state was busy doing important things, right? It was busy fighting wars and waging political repressions and creating famines out of nowhere. Very important. But they were not. There weren't enough nurseries, and there weren't enough. And there wasn't enough food and there wasn't enough clothing. And so if your grandmothers weren't working or going to college, but they were primarily responsible for the home and the children. They at least had refrigerators, they had stores where they could go and buy food reliably. My grandmother, my dad's mom, who was a chemical engineer and oversaw the lab that at the water purification plant that fed drinking water into parts of Moscow and the Kremlin. Sounds super fancy. And she had, I don't know, 10 or 12 people working under her. Very educated woman. During her lunch breaks, she would go into the forest and forage for mushrooms because there wasn't enough food in the stores. And then it was her leaving work to go pick up my dad and my aunt and then going to this store and waiting in three different lines to get whatever they happen to have and then coming home and cooking from scratch every night. But you don't have a dishwasher and you don't have a washing machine and you don't have a vacuum cleaner and you don't have a microwave and oh, you can't just go to the store and get your kid a new pair of socks because he torm. Once you help them with their homework and feed them and put them to bed, then you're going to darn the socks. You're going to wash oak, since you don't have a washing machine, you're going to boil the clothes in a pot on the stove, then you're going to line dry them. And because you don't have a dryer, you're going to iron both sides of every piece of laundry while your husband lies on the couch. If you have a husband, if you're lucky enough to have a husband that lies on the couch, then you're going to sit there and darn the socks or you're going to make clothes from old clothes for your kids, for your husband, for yourself. And so by the end of this grand social experiment, Soviet sociologists found that women were doing 40 hours of domestic labor per week. So it's a second full time job. And then also in their careers they weren't doing it all. Sounds amazing. So when I tell people that by the end of the Soviet era, 70% of doctors were women, everybody says, wow, that's so cool. But if you dig into the numbers, you find that they were the ones doing the grunt work. They were the primary care specialists. They did, I don't know what you call it in the uk, you know, family medicine, gynecology, pediatrics, basically the primary point of care. It was the least paid, least glamorous work. The men were the tertiary care specialists. They were the oncologists and the surgeons and the researchers and the hospital administrators and earned commensurately more. And the other thing that's not so, oh, cool, about 70% of Soviet doctors being women is what does that mean for the profession in the, in the US in the UK it is considered in the US Especially a very elite profession. Right. If you're a doctor, you are very, I mean, maybe before revered as a person of science. You make a lot of money. You are kind of toward the top of the social hierarchy. But what happens when a field gets feminized and 70% of its practitioners are women? Do you think that they're at the top of the social prestige hierarchy? Do you think they're getting paid the most now? They're getting paid the least. Because the more a field becomes feminized, the least prestigious and less remunerative it becomes.

[Mia Sorrenti]

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a [e-mail] membership and to join us at future live events, just head over over to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.