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Russian Roulette
The History of Russian Feminism with Julia Ioffe
00:43:48
Max and Maria are joined by journalist and author Julia Ioffe to discuss her recent book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy.
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- [00:07]
A
Welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, director of the Stewart center and Europe Russia Eurasia program at csis.
- [00:12]
B
And I'm Maria Snigavaja, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia.
- [00:16]
A
And you're listening to Russian Roulette, a podcast discussing all things Russia and Eurasia from the center for Strategic and International Studies. Hello everyone and welcome back to Russian Roulette. I'm Max Bergman here with my co host as always, Maria Snagovaya. And today we're joined by Rockstar journalist and author Julia Yaffe. Julia's work has been published in some of the leading outlets of American journalism and she frequently contributes to major television programs as an on air expert. Additionally, she is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck. Today, Julia is here to talk about all things Russia, but really her latest book, a feminist history of Modern, Modern Russia From Revolution to Autocracy. It's out now from HarperCollins. You can order the book today from a link in our show Notes. It is really a fantastic read, really engaging and I think provides a history of the Soviet and Russian experience that frequently gets overlooked too much and provides a really, I think, interesting insight into Russian history. Julia, thanks so much for joining us today.
- [01:27]
C
Thank you for having me, Max and Maria, and thank you for correctly pronouncing my name.
- [01:33]
A
What's interesting is in our other sister podcast, the Europhile, where we have guests from all over Europe. The whole bit is that I can never pronounce anyone's name correctly, particularly if you're French. So, Julia Yoffey, thanks for joining us. And why don't we just start with you maybe giving us an overview of your book. Why did you write this and what is the kind of main thrust of it?
- [01:55]
C
So I should say that I didn't want to write this book. The reason I wrote it is because my, my agent, the legendary Gayle Ross, you know, having known me for a long time and knowing that my mother is a doctor, her mother was a doctor, her mother was a doctor that, you know, one grandmother was a cardiologist, the other was a chemical engineer. Two of my great grandmothers were doctors. One was a PhD in chemistry and ran her own lab in Moscow in the 1930s. My agent kept saying, you have these extraordinary women in your family. You should write a book about them. And I kept saying, there's really nothing extraordinary about them. There were millions and millions of Soviet women just like them. You know, when I lived in Russia and I think Maria has a similar experience, you know, we knew people who were actually quite famous who made Soviet history. Who went out onto, you know, red square in 1968 to protest the Soviet invasion of Prague, who, you know, were best friends with the Solzhenitsyns. My family was not that. They were just regular kind of middle class Soviet middle class people. And I couldn't understand what a book about them would be about. And we went back and forth, back and forth until I kind of realized that what is ordinary for me and for people of my generation from the former Soviet Union is pretty extraordinary for Western and specifically an American audience. When my great grandmothers were doctors and scientists, their American peers weren't getting much education past high school, if that. They weren't allowed to do much without their husband's permission. They got their husband's name when they got married. All my great grandmothers kept their maiden names, you know, and that was also standard practice. So the book became about, on one hand, trying to answer the question, how did the extraordinary become the ordinary in this part of the world? And also for me personally, this book was a long time in the making. And I got the book contract in early 2018, which if you remember, was around the height of the Russian election interference storyline. And all I was doing was writing about and talking about on tv, on the radio, et cetera. What does Vladimir Putin want? What is Vladimir Putin going to do? Who is this person vis a vis Vladimir Putin? And I was just so, so tired of Vladimir Putin. And I wanted to see if I could write a book that was not at all about him. And as I started writing this book, I realized, well, let's see if I can write a book that's about the last 150 years of Soviet and Russian history. Because you have to go all the way back to explain the kind of the history of these ideas and how they became practice in the Soviet Union to create women like my foremothers. And I said, okay, well what if we write a book that's not only not about Putin, but not about Lenin, not about Stalin, not about Khrushchev, not about, not about Goodbye, not about any of these men. Let me see if I can just try to mention them as little as possible. And that became my own little challenge to myself, which meant that it was essentially an exercise and a, you know, because I was like, well, writing about 150 years of Russian history isn't challenge enough. Let me just up the difficulty level for myself for no reason. Let's see if we can, if I can retell the last 150 years of Soviet and Russian History exclusively through the eyes of Soviet and Russian women. And that's why it took so damn long.
- [05:45]
A
Yeah, well, I really empathize. Actually. We have the same, same book agent, Gail Ross, and I'm engaged in a book project 2 which hopefully doesn't take me as long as it took you. It's supposed to be out next year. We'll see. But maybe we could go back to the beginning and the big transition that happens from czarist Russia to the Soviet period, where obviously everyone knows there's this big revolution that happens in 1917, but that also creates a revolution in gender roles and the role of women. And maybe you could start there and sort of talk about how much of a change was this and how revolutionary was it, at least when it came to the lives of women during the Soviet period, especially in the early period,
- [06:27]
C
it was both massively revolutionary and not revolutionary at all. On one side of the, of the ledger we have the fact that in one fell swoop, starting in 1918, the Soviet Union gave women the right to no fault civil divorce, allowed them to keep their names when they got married, got rid of the old tsarist laws that said that a woman had to have her husband's permission to travel, to work, to basically do anything. It gave women the right to a free higher education. It gave women the right to child support, to free paid maternity leave, which by the way, over 100 years later in the U.S. we still don't have. And in 1920, women got the right to a free abortion. Abortion was legalized in the Soviet Union in 1920, was the first country in the world to do so. And also women were required to work. This completely transformed the lives of Soviet women. On one hand also there was a massive literacy push to stamp out illiteracy, which was in some ways a largely female problem in the Russian empire. So by the time my mother started medical school in the late 1970s, pretty much all Soviet women were literate. They were more educated than their male peers. They made up more than half the workforce and 70% of Soviet doctors, that very male field, traditionally in the west, over 70% of Soviet doctors were women. And women were everywhere in the, in the sciences and engineering. Again these in the west, these fields that are seen as very male. On the other hand, it didn't change much at all. This was a top down revolution. And for many reasons it did not change how men and women saw each other. This kind of patriarchal, essentialist view of gender roles continued throughout. Women are like this, men are like that. And for Example, that figure I gave you of 70% of Soviet doctors being women. Well, if you. That sounds incredible. And American audiences always gasp in admiration. But if you drill down into those numbers a little bit, you see that most of those female physicians were in the primary care specialties that were the most drudgerous, the least well compensated. So pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine, things like that, the tertiary care special specialt, oncology, surgery, et cetera, research, heading up hospitals or research labs. Those were all male positions. And the more that women flooded into medicine, the more medicine lost its prestige and became a poorly compensated field because it was seen as having become feminized. And I mean, there's a lot more to say on this, but basically women became professionals. They were engineers, they were factory workers, they were doctors, they were astronauts, they were fighter pilots, they were machine gunners. But they were also, nobody gave them a pass on doing the housework and the child rearing. And nobody helped them with that either, neither their husbands, if they had them, nor the state.
- [10:10]
B
Thank you so much, Julia. And one of the great parts of your book is that you go around talking about the women through which you sort of tell for whose biographies and stories you tell the story of, of the Soviet Union and Russia, including wives of the leaders like Nadezhda Grupskaya, Khrushcheva, Victoria Brezhneva, Lyudmila Putina, but also your own personal family stories. Could you tell us a little bit about how you went about choosing those female characters in your book? Also, I was wondering to what extent essentially this is unique to Russia. Can you essentially say, tell a story of China in the same way, or is there something unique to Russian story that needs to be told specifically through these lenses? And lastly, you do go, you do mention a couple of occasions, the predominantly male historians who did not do justice essentially to the role of women in Russian history. Perhaps you can comment on essentially how you correct that injustice.
- [11:08]
C
So starting with the first question I wasn't sure how to go about when I started on this book project. I wasn't sure how to tell the story, you know, to tell the story of my great grandmothers and grandmothers and mothers, mother and myself. I needed to situate all of them, all of us, in a historical context and tell the story of this, for lack of a better term, Bolshevik feminist experiment, its hopes, its promises, its abject failures. And I didn't know how to do that in a way that wouldn't be boring. And one of the first people I interviewed for the book was Nina Khrushcheva, who is the great granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev and who is now a professor at the New School and is just. Has become a wonderful friend. But I was interviewing her about her family, about her grandmother and her mother, and she said something so interesting, and it's now in the book, but she said, have you ever noticed that if you look at the women at the top, the wives of the leaders, for lack of a better term, the first ladies, their fate always mirrors the fate of the country at large. And it was this kind of light bulb moment for me where I thought, oh, that's how I'm going to do it. That's how I'm going to tell the story of the larger historical context and do it in a way without centering Stalin, without centering Lenin, without centering Putin. I'm going to tell the story of the broader historical context through the women at the top. Nadezhda Krupska, Lenin's wife, and then also his women comrades in arms, Alexander Kollontai and S. Armand, Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Aloyeva, Khrushchev's wife, Nina Petrovna Khrushcheva, et cetera, et cetera, and use them and their story to tell the story of what was happening in the country at large. And that would be kind of one narrative track. And then kind of down here would be the narrative track about the women in my family who were kind of just everyday people and kind of interweave them. So that's how I. That's how I picked then. There were. There were certain people that didn't quite traditionally fit that narrative. So Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda luliva, died in 1932. Stalin, as we know, ruled for another 21 years after that. So how is that going to tell that story after him? Well, one of the people I stumbled on in my research was his only daughter, Svetlana, who is not a first lady, but he almost treated her as one. He called her his khazayushka, his little mistress of the house. And the way he treated her, the way her fate was reflective in my mind's eye of Russia, of how Soviet society, Russian society would kind of shuttle from one extreme to the other. You know, we hate the system. We hate the Soviet system. The west is incredible. The west is perfect. We love everything about the West. Okay, we're going all the way that way. Oh, God. The west is deeply disappointing. They're actually. They have no soul. They're so greedy. They're so terrible. We're going back the other way. And to me, that was also very reflective of Russian society in the way that Nina Khrushcheva described it. So that was how I went about choosing who to tell the stories to and then who to tell the stories through. And then there were other people who, you know, to your question about male historians, as I did my research, I became pretty angry because I studied Soviet history in college, and after that, I read obsessively about it. I wrote about Russia for, like, 15 years by the time I started this book. And I knew who, like, Nadia Grupskay was, and I knew that Stalin had the second wife who died young, but I didn't know about Alexander Colontide, this Bolshevik revolutionary who was the. The kind of author of a lot of these feminist reforms. I didn't know about so much of this, despite having been a kind of Soviet history obsessive. And I was like, how were these people just totally written out of this history? And who else was written out? And that's when I got into, you know, thinking about Beria. He was the head of the Soviet nuclear program and much more infamously, was the head of the gulag system and the nkvd, the. Which became the kgb, the kind of the Soviet secret police. He oversaw this massive infrastructure of torture, killing, disappearance, that through which, you know, tens of millions of Soviet citizens cycled and which deeply traumatized Soviet and then Russian society. He had these other victims. He was a serial rapist. And this was kind of talked about in whispers. You know, my grandmother mentioned it. I know my parents knew about it. You know, he snatched girls off the street or off the silver screen or off the stages of the Soviet Union. And he drugged and raped them and then cowed them in silence by saying, you know, I'm going to have your family arrested and sent to the Gulag or executed. And, like, when I decided I wanted to have a chapter about that, it was so hard to find stuff about this. It was always a footnote or an endnote in these big tomes of Soviet history written mostly by men. And the way they treated this was like, well, you know, he said, she said. Or it's this kind of salacious stuff that we don't want to kind of even touch because it's so dirty and undignified and because it's sex, as opposed to. This is yet another way in which the men at the top terrorized the population into silence and submission. And that was when I decided to center One of Barry's victims, Liala Drazdovo, who was, I think, 16 when Beria first spotted her on the street and made her into essentially a slave and a concubine. So the goal was not just not center the men, but also to center the women. That had been written out of the history by the male historians.
- [17:41]
B
Very important. Thank you, Julia, and thank you for bringing these stories to light because indeed they do add an important dimension that's often missed. But also this interesting paradox that I wanted to flag, right, that the first part of the book talks a lot about the early achievements of the Soviet feminism with Alexander, Kolantai, Krupsko and Srman. You really beautifully described the stories, but at the same time, 10 years later, we have like the situations like what you describe with Birya, there is complete lack of any ability for women to defend themselves. So how can you characterize then this feminist paradise of the early Soviet Union? Why was it so short lived and was there really a paradise to speak of? Or maybe it was just a couple of years short lived, you know, infatuations with some utopian ideals that did not really stick. How do you see it?
- [18:31]
C
Well, as I show in the book, the ideas that were championed by people like Alexander Contai and even by Lenin, who was quite progressive on these issues, didn't have much buy in with the men at the top. They were happy to have the extra hands, you know, a whole other half of the labor pool being activated when they're trying to industrialize a rural agrarian country and try to do in four to five years what the west did over 100 years in terms of industrialization. But they were not happy to have women actually be free, be liberated, be equal. They did not see women as such. They also needed women to have lots of babies because a growing, powerful country needs more citizens. And so, as I show in the book, the ideas sounded great on paper, but they also didn't have much buy in from the population. And even when the Communist Party, in the first years of the experiment, as I call it, even when the men at the top finally give permission to create the. The women's section of the Communist Parties Central Committee and they go out, their representatives go out into the countryside to proselytize these emancipatory ideals, they're met with skepticism, with resistance, often with violence, and not just by men, but by women in the countryside. They don't want this. Things have been done a certain way, and that's fine by us. And as I chronicle in the book, what these emancipatory ideals become is essentially more and more responsibility for the women with no extra rights or privileges. And by the end of the Soviet era, women are just so exhausted by having to do everything, being asked to do everything, that they want out. And as soon as Gorbachev and then the capitalist system gives them a possibility of opting out of at least one of the many burdens they're asked to carry, they happily take it if they can. And in modern Russia, it starts to look like women just wanting to be trophy wives, because then, because that's a life of leisure compared to the one that they and their mothers and their grandmothers had led. There's a part where Alexandra Colontai writes a pamphlet in the in 1922, she writes a pamphlet that goes out to other kind of socialist chapters around the world. And she talks about all the reforms, all the feminist, egalitarian, emancipatory reforms she's instituted in the Soviet Union. And the brochure says that the Soviet Union has become a fairy tale country for women. Well, it's a fairy tale country. In the book, I quote it ironically because it. It remained a fairy tale through its very end. It never really came true for Soviet women.
- [21:44]
B
Can I just ask one follow up here? You seem to postulate that a lot of the developments that are happening to women's part of the society are sort of imposed by the men on top. But you also flag repeatedly throughout the book that some things just do not catch up with the society that to large extent inherited much of the traditionalist element of it. Then why shall we add this extra variable, like women, or opted to become sugar, you know, to opt for sugar daddies because they were exhausted? Isn't it perhaps more simple to explain the current situation that we see? And you correctly flag with essentially, unfortunately, traditional gender norm sort of being rebuilt within the state, definitely with Putin's hope, but also because the society, to a large extent, preserve many traditional expectations about a role of a woman and a man. So, like, shall we really even talk as much about the role of the. What has been imposed on top when ultimately underlying structures have to large extent preserved this traditionalist orientation. And what we're seeing today in Russia to a large extent, is explained, I believe, by the fact that it is a society that preserved a lot of traditional elements to it.
- [22:53]
C
Again, I don't think it's an either or. I think it's both. And again, as I chronicle in the book, a lot of these traditional views stuck even as others were shifted. If you look at, for example, the generation that fought In World War II, the young women who, all of whom were born right after the revolution and were the first and really only generation to really grow up in this new educational framework created by Krupska Kalantai, et cetera. They all joined as teenage girls in 1941, and they signed up for active combat. You know, they were machine.
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B
My grandmother also did just jump in.
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C
What did she do, by the way?
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B
Just a regular soldier.
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C
I mean, that's still. This was a real. You know, as this one of these women veterans tells the historian Anna Kurilova, we're a generation not from this universe. They were all female squadrons in the Soviet Air Force. They, you know, they were paratroopers. They did things that.
- [23:55]
A
They were snipers. Yeah. No, you look at the German military, and they were incredibly short of labor. Right. They were desperate for manpower to send into the meat grinder. And they just never really. They never went there because of the gender roles. And the US Was not much different. I mean, on the home front, yes, but not serving on the front lines. And in some ways, when we think about World War II, at least from the kind of American perspective, we sort of underestimate what, in all of society, war, this was for. For the Soviets, for the. For the Russians, and despite the general still sort of existing, creating, you know, bringing women into the military. I mean, it comes out in the book so starkly that how much women were relied on for the Soviet war effort and how critical it was.
- [24:42]
C
Yeah. But to Maria's point, as you can see in the book, they were just this very strange stratum of society that existed. Existed in Soviet society, but was very different from Soviet society. So then when they, in 1941, flooded the recruitment posts with their government sniper certificates or their government flying certificates, and they said, we're ready to go. You know, I'm 16, I'm 18. I'm ready to go. The men at the recruitment post said, what? Go home, little girl. But also when they came home from war as decorated veterans, women, other Soviet women, their compatriots said they were sluts. They did not, you know, they did not respect their roles. But at the same time, this thing was created like it was a government run by men, and it was a totalitarian society run by men. So they created things like the 1944 family code that created the legal and social category of the single mother. They created these incentives and imperatives for women to work or to do this or not do that. And that exists at the same Time as society is both changing and not changing. For me, those young women and girls who fought in World War II are. And this is also why I tell their story is to your exact point, Maria, that on one hand, there were the directives coming from the top, mostly created by men to say, hey, do this, do this, do this. And then there was society below them dragging its feet. And so these girls go and sign up and, you know, they're heroes. But neither the men or the women back home who are not with them in the trenches don't accept them, because that's not what women do. These girls think. Yeah, that's. They. It's interesting when you. When you look at their memoirs, they're not. They don't see themselves as doing something male. They're not like, oh, I'm a girl doing a boy's job. They're like, I'm just doing me. And I have these secret talents as a. As a person, as a woman, whatever. But they're the only ones who believe that neither the men nor the women at home accept this when they come home.
- [26:59]
B
You beautifully flagged this contradiction. I think I just want to flag to our audiences, it comes across not just in. When it comes to general relations, right. The impulse, modernization forced by totalitarian state, the society, and underlying traditional structures that consistently clash. And then after the end of the Soviet system, I think we see that a lot of traditionalist leanings reemerging because ultimately it's a societal underlying structure.
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A
I want to pivot to talk about Putin in a second, because I want to. I think one of the more fascinating parts of the book is the discussion of abortion during the Soviet period in particular. But what really comes out is that. That women all have, and this remains the case today throughout the world, have two jobs, right? They are still expected to do all the traditional household running, raising the children, preparing dinners, but yet they're the elite doctors now. And then my question is about abortion. Right Here you have the Soviets wanting to expand their population, wanting to grow the population, and yet that abortion becomes, as you describe, incredibly commonplace. It's a routine procedure, and yet also despite the Soviets wanting people to have children, I mean, the birthing stories that you describe and what the, you know, the top hospital in Moscow for women to give birth seems like a form of torture, where you're sort of secluded away from your loved ones during the whole process. So maybe you could talk a little bit about both abortion, about birthing, about why the state wasn't able to either lower abortions or Incentivize more children.
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C
Well, I think this gets kind of at our discussion about what a totalitarian state force its population to do. The family code of 1944, which is drafted obviously in the waning days of World War II, when the Soviet leadership understands the catastrophic losses that they've suffered in World War II and that they're emerging as one of the main power players on the world stage and they need a growing population to do that. And they try to incentivize women to have more children by paying them, by giving them medals, by discouraging abortions. I mean, Stalin banned abortions for nearly 20 years from 1936 to 1955. Women still had them and died from them because they were now back alley abortions instead of abortions performed in, you know, in hospitals by professionals. But they also needed women to work because so many men died in World War II. And most of the fighting in World War II happened on Soviet territory. So many farms and towns and cities and factories were destroyed. They all needed to be rebuilt. So the leadership needed women to have babies and rebuild factories at the same time. So will pay you to have children, but will also make sure that your food allotment or your daycare allotment is tied to your workplace, you know, and there's no men to have children with. So you get one third of the, you know, post war baby boom in the Soviet Union born out of wedlock. And how many kids can you realistically have as a single mother? Right. At the same time, you know, women will figure out a way to not have more kids than they can realistically handle. The Soviet Union legalized abortion in 1920, but it didn't legalize birth control until 1923. Moreover, through repeated policy decisions at the top, the Soviet economy, its resources, the budget were all directed toward the military industrial complex, toward heavy industry, rather to than toward consumer goods. And anybody who grew up in the Soviet period will tell you there were no shoes, there were no cars, there were no, there was no shampoo. There was, you know, there were no bras, there were no feminine hygiene products. And there certainly weren't birth control methods. You know, the, the Soviet Union made condoms, but it only made enough for Soviet men to have about three or four per year. And they were thick and unlubricated. So even if you got 50 of them, men didn't want to use them. Soviet made IUDs, regularly perforated uteruses. The Soviet made oral contraceptive had so many side effects that Soviet gynecologists tried not to prescribe it. The Soviet Union made diaphragms, but they were metal. So inevitably, the only reliable form of birth control that women had was abortion. And these were not medication abortions. These were DNC abortions. When I interviewed my mother about them, she said, well, I was lucky. I had a hookup, so I had anesthesia for mine. So these were incredibly bloody, painful procedures. But as my mom said to me, she said, you know, if you didn't want to have eight kids, you had eight, you know, eight abortions. It was, there was just no way around it. There were no, there was no other form, no other foolproof form of family planning. And so kind of the last generation of Soviet women, they had anywhere on average from 3 to 12 abortions during their reproductive years, because that was just not a priority. They also, the Soviet leadership didn't want to prioritize making contraception because again, they wanted women to have kids. So again, this is the tension between policy and culture, right? Culture eats policy for breakfast. So you can incentivize all the pronatalism you want, but if the conditions on the ground aren't right for it, if, if your women are too busy having to work full time jobs and raising the kids they do have while scavenging for food, what food there is in the stores, and having to make clothes at home because they can't find clothes for their kids in the stores, they're just not going to do it. And you see it in the modern day. Vladimir Putin has resurrected a lot of the measures from the 1944 Family Code down to the medals of motherhood. And in 2024, which Putin had declared the year of the family when he was trying to encourage women to have three, five, seven kids. So Russian birth rates dropped to their lowest point since Putin became president in 2000, essentially because there's only so much you can force people to do by policy prescription.
- [33:42]
A
I think that's a great pivot to talk about the sort of present day, or I guess the 21st century, which is the era of Putin. And it seems that Putin has sort of tried to go back to this pre Soviet period, you know, his gallivanting shirtless on horses and sort of the image of masculinity returning traditional gender roles. Russia becoming seen, at least globally, as this sort of fountain of historic norms, of cultural conservatism, of religiosity. How has that shifted the dynamic inside of Russia and for gender roles? And has this resulted in any sort of sort of policy shifts or outcomes or substantial impacts on kind of Russian society?
- [34:33]
C
Well, the more a government tries to legislate something repeatedly, the more you think that that's probably not what's happening. Right. Russia continues to have very high rates of abortion, very high rates of divorce, very high rates of single motherhood. That doesn't really speak to conservative, traditional family values. Right. Which is why, I think, in part, the Kremlin keeps insisting on it, because it's not getting much traction. I also think that there is a real appetite for this kind of masculinity among Soviet women. Putin is, for a lot of Russian women, the man they never had. He's a man who doesn't drink, he is disciplined, he's decisive, he works out, he takes care of himself. He's alive at 73, when a lot of Russian men have dropped dead of heart disease. And I think for a lot of Russian women, there's this. The Soviets. And the Russians have been talking about a crisis of masculinity since the 60s, the epidemic of male loneliness and male failure. And that feminism has gone too far and that it's emasculated the men is a conversation that the Soviets and Russians have been having since the 60s. And I think Putin, really, he's. It's not the only explanation for Putin, but I think it's one of the reasons he remains very popular, especially among Russian women.
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B
Julia, so thank you so much. And on that note, in your book, you talk a lot about the contemporary women you met in Russia when you lived there, and they were at the same time quite successful, but also, paradoxically, somewhat rejecting the ideals of Western feminism in pursuit of wealthy men. You also talk about more recent, unfortunate developments, essentially decriminalization of domestic violence and really rural cases of some of the women who got their literally arms chopped off by their jealous husbands. So how do you make sense of it? Essentially, what I'm trying to say here, do you see this pattern and something broader? Is this a radical change of the Soviet Union, essentially, of Russia reverting back to more archaic visions of. Of gender relations? Is it imposed from the top? And to what extent do you think society. Society is perceptive to this trend? And essentially, how can we make sense of what's going on in today's Russia?
- [37:09]
C
I think in both cases, you know what's happening now and what happened a century ago. You have Russian society, on one hand, chasing a utopian ideal that can never really be fully implemented because of the reality on the ground and the resistance on the ground, and society responding to the changes that are being implemented at the top. You know, in the Soviet Union, on one hand, they never achieved their egalitarian feminist utopia, but most women did work. In the end, women were educated. Women did go into these professions that had always been exclusively male. Even if certain kind of core thing like how women imagine themselves in their position in society, you know, they still saw themselves, okay, I'm an engineer, but my first and foremost and most important role in society is as a mother and a wife, even if I'm an. Also an engineer or a doctor. And then on this other side is like, yes, I would love to catch an oligarch and be a trophy wife and not do anything with my days except go to yoga and have a interior design business and get my nails done and get beauty procedures done at the same time. The economic reality and demographic reality is such that if I can get a husband, he is not going to be very successful economically, and I'm still going to have to work and do everything. And even though the government is telling me to have lots and lots of kids, there's no way in hell that I can afford to do that. And so I'm still going to get abortions. I'm still going to use contraception, which now is much more widely available and much more sophisticated to control this because I can't have five kids when vice is in and out of work and an alcoholic and beats me. So there's always this tension between what the. And I'm so glad, Maria, that you brought this up. There's always this tension between what the government wants its women to do, it wants Soviet and Russian women to do, and what Soviet and Russian women want for themselves. And there's always a kind of quiet resistance. And that I think we know generally from Russian culture is how Russia rolls is, you know, this quiet, quiet resistance. Quiet skirting of the laws, doing the bare minimum, or just avoiding the system as much as possible. Do things your own way.
- [39:46]
A
I want to maybe turn to the current war and how that's impacting women. You know, early on in the war, Maria and I had kind of a difference of perspective. I think Maria's turned out to be much more correct. Where I was like, you know, all these wives are losing their husbands. The average age of the people being sent to the war. You know, mothers are losing their husbands and children are losing their fathers. And Maria's response was, well, they're. The women are losing their drunk, abusive husband who hasn't really provided for them, and they're getting all this money from the state. And so Actually, this is sort of working out quite well. I'm curious how you see the war impacting life at the home front.
- [40:24]
C
So I heard this narrative mostly from Westerners at the beginning of the war, and I wrote about this in the book, that there was this trope in the west that, okay, well, once the coffins start coming home from Ukraine, then the women will stop the war. And I thought, God damn, why is it up to the women to stop? They didn't start the war. They have zero political power. Nobody asked them. The men started the war, but it's up to the women to finish it. Which is also kind of the story of the book is the men making disastrous decisions for the country and then asking the women to rebuild it and repopulate it and clean up the men's mess. Which is also why Soviet and Russian women are so goddamn exhausted all the time. And cynical. Also, the assumption underlying that hope is that women are not people. That women are these kind of super moral, super peaceful beings that somehow exist outside of their social, political context. That women aren't naturally aggressive, that women don't like war, naturally. That women are peacemakers and that are impervious to propaganda, impervious to social and political pressures. That they just want peace because they're peaceful, maternal, nurturing beings. But women, as we know, are just people. And they respond to the same political economic incentives that men do. And they run the gamut. There are some women in Russia who have fought tooth and nail to bring their loved ones home from the front and have paid the price for it. There are some women who are more than happy to send their drunk, abusive husbands to the front and at least get some money for it for a change. And then there are women who are deeply indifferent. And as long as the war doesn't touch them and their families, they don't care. You know women, they're just like us.
- [42:30]
A
I think that's a great way to end this podcast. Julia, thanks so much for joining us. Been an absolute pleasure to have you on Russian Roulette and to all our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in and be sure to go and order a copy of Motherland by Julia Yoffe from your favorite bookstore or online at the link in our show notes. It's a great read and a fascinating story and we will see you all next time.
- [42:59]
B
You've been listening to Russian Roulette. We hope you've enjoyed this episode and tune in again soon.
- [43:05]
A
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- [43:25]
B
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