Julia Ioffe is an award-winning Russian-born American journalist and author specialising in Russia-US relations and politics. Her powerful debut book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy, is our December Book of the Month.
Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland tells the story of Russia through its women: from Julia's physician great-grandmothers to feminist revolutionaries, from the single mothers who rebuilt the postwar USSR to the members of Pussy Riot.
We spoke with Julia about the experiences of women in the Soviet feminist experiment, the differences between Western and Russian feminism, the lessons we can learn from the women in Motherland, and more.
You can get 10% off online orders of Motherland until the end of December.
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Why did you decide to write Motherland?
For two reasons. The first reason is that my agent, who's American, kept insisting that the women in my family were really extraordinary because they were doctors and engineers and scientists at a time when American and Western women were not. And I kept saying that in the Soviet context they were quite ordinary. They weren't famous, there wasn't anything kind of cosmically special about them or world-historically special about them. And so to bridge that gap and to explain how something that seemed extraordinary in the West became ordinary in the Soviet Union was the first reason.
The second reason is that I had been wondering myself what had happened, how Russia in the Soviet Union had gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of women's emancipation to a place where women seem to be obsessed with just having babies and becoming trophy wives.
Your book is woven around the stories of women over the past 150 years of Russian history, including generations of your own family. Can you introduce us to some of them?
All four of my great-grandmothers were born around 1900, which made them about 17 or 18 when the revolution happened. They were the first generation to live through the revolution and all its reforms kicked in right as they were reaching adulthood. And they benefited from it tremendously.
They got access to free higher education, which had been closed to them both as women and as Jews, and as some of them being from poor families. And this experiment in emancipating women radically transformed their lives. But it did so alongside all of the chaos and bloodletting and tragedy that the rest of the Soviet experiment also brought in their lives.
So I start with them, and then I go forward chronologically. The frame for the book came from Nina Khrushcheva, who is Nikita Khrushchev's great-granddaughter. She said that if you notice the fate of the women at the top, the women who were married to the leaders of the Soviet Union, that reflects the fate of the country more broadly. So I used the women at the top, the first ladies, if you will, to chronicle the fate of the country, and then my family and other women to show what the kind of non-famous ordinary Soviets lived through.
Motherland begins with the Bolsheviks, with ideas of egalitarianism and powerful progressive women like Alexandra Kollontai. They fought for truly revolutionary rights, and women did achieve a level of liberation unheard of anywhere else for a while. Could you tell us a bit about these rights?
In 1918, Soviet women were granted the right to paid maternity leave. They were allowed to marry and divorce in a civil court, a no-fault civil divorce. They were entitled to seek child support from the father of the child, even if they were not married, and the father of the child would have to start paying child support even before the child was born.
They were no longer required to change their name or move with their husband and follow them around. They were, in 1920, given the right to abortion, and also the state promised that it would provide free child care, that it would collectivise domestic labour by opening collective laundromats and nurseries and cafeterias so that women could focus their energy on labour outside the home the way men did. And a lot of this was just on paper, but it was still more than women in the West had.
In the book you mention a tension or contradiction in Soviet policy over the reasons for women’s emancipation, whether it was for themselves, an innate right to be free, or whether it is for the state. There is the sense that they were only really liberated insofar as it did serve the state. Is that fair to say?
In all fairness, the men existed for the state too. It's a collectivist authoritarian model where the people exist to serve the state rather than vice versa. And would it also be fair to say that the women's experience day-to-day was quite different from these initial ideals? Absolutely.
I mean, on one hand, they were able to marry and divorce more freely, they were granted maternity leave, they were allowed into institutions of higher learning where they made up anywhere from, in the sciences for example, a quarter of physics students to 80% of biology students. 70% of doctors in the Soviet Union were women by the end. In some ways the liberation was real.
On the other hand, the state support didn't often materialise, or when it did materialise, it was incredibly subpar because the state had other priorities like fighting wars and fighting its own population through vast political repressions. And because there were so few men after the first half of the 20th century in the Soviet Union, and because the men in charge never abandoned these old patriarchal ideals, nor were they abandoned in the culture at large, women just ended up getting, instead of emancipation, just an extra thing to do – which was work outside the home.
They were still expected to do all the things that a traditional woman was expected to do. Raise the children by herself, keep home by herself, but also she had to work outside the home the way a man did, even though the man did not help in raising the children or in that domestic way.
What were the professions of the women in your family?
My mum is a doctor. Her mum was a doctor as well, a cardiologist. My other grandmother was a chemical engineer, and she oversaw a lab at a water filtration plant just outside of Moscow, which provided drinking water to parts of Moscow as well as the Kremlin.
On my father's side, her mother was a homemaker. My paternal great-grandmother was a paediatrician, a doctor. Then my maternal great-grandmothers were a paediatrician and a chemist, a PhD, who had her own lab in the 1930s and wrote scientific papers and books.
By the end of 80 years of Soviet rule, many women just wanted nothing more to do with the feminist experiment. What happened? Could we say that Soviet “feminism” was a myth?
In the corporate world (or at least in the American corporate world), people say that culture eats policy for lunch, and I think that's part of it. The culture in the Soviet Union, when it came to gender roles, didn't change enough. The leadership at the top, which was almost exclusively male, did not want to change it because they were quite traditional themselves when it came to gender roles. Lenin, I would say, was an outlier, but he died in 1924 and was incapacitated for a couple of years before that, so he was out of the game very quickly. Stalin hated all these ideas and he didn't believe in anyone's emancipation, but he especially had pretty traditional parochial and patriarchal views of women, and that kind of set the tone.
And in part, because it wasn't like in the West where women were fighting for it for decades from the ground up. These rights were granted to them. There were a lot of women who also resisted this, and when I read in my great-grandmother's letters, the one who was a chemist, that she didn't want all this responsibility, that she just wanted to be a little woman in her parlance, it gave me an inkling that not everybody – even the women – wanted this.
Given how the experiment played out, how little women were supported, how much the experiment became about adding more responsibility to women's lives rather than spreading it and getting help and helping women manage being mothers and wives as well as labourers outside the home, in comparison, being a stay-at-home wife and mother sounds like a vacation for most Russian women.
In post-Soviet Russia there was a pushback against the have-it-all career-and-family ideal, and a movement towards traditional gender roles at an individual level. Your chapter about the Life Academy [a programme that teaches a philosophy of "feminine power” to help women find economically secure marriages], and its entrepreneurial take on traditional values and lifestyle, made me think of aspirational tradwife content. Can we draw any comparisons between this female enterprise of the early 2000s with the tradwife movement 20 years later?
I think the similarities are that it's a yearning and an aspiration for something simpler and more “natural”, right? That men are just naturally hunters, and women are naturally keepers of the hearth, and so let's not overburden women with male tasks, it's unnatural to them, and exhausting because it's unnatural. And, in this telling, it's why men are lonely, it's why women are lonely.
But I think the divergence is that given the kind of pre-industrial, unmechanised households that Soviet women came from, I think the tradwife thing – where you make cereal or bread from scratch or you are a homesteader on some farm, and you gather eggs from your chickens every morning – that sounds horrible to a lot of Russian women. That's what they came from – if not in their lifetimes, then certainly in their mothers’ or grandmothers’ lifetimes. And I think they want to be a trophy wife, rather than a tradwife.
They want to be the kind of elite luxury wife who spends her time and her husband's money on beauty procedures, on relaxation, on shopping, on playing with her kids. The kind of wife they want to be still has domestic help and supermarkets, but they just want to relax, to rest. They don't want to do more things, which is what the tradwife is doing.
In your chapter about Pussy Riot, you highlight the “chasm” between American and Russian feminism. Could you tell us about some of those differences, and what are the problems with applying Western feminism to Russia?
Soviet feminism (though they would have never called it feminism) and American feminism are kind of inversions of each other. Soviet women had the right to work outside the home and higher education. Being a working mother, they'd been doing that for generations by the time second wave feminism came about in the West and Western women started talking about having it all, balancing home and life. As American women were starting to discuss that, Soviet and Russian women wanted to retreat from that, because they were tired.
Following on from your earlier question, I think both the American and Russian, Western and Russian, share a return to traditionalism. They share the sense that modernity is confusing and overwhelming and hard, let's get back to something simpler and more natural.
Also, in terms of reproductive rights, Soviet women and Russian women take abortion and reproductive choice for granted, because they've had it for over a century. Even now, as the Kremlin is curbing abortion access in Russia, it's still afraid to get rid of it, because such large majorities of Russian women and men are so against it. So while American and Western women were fighting for this, women in the Soviet Union had had it for generations and largely took it for granted.
The other thing is that portraying all feminism as Western or American, as something that is imported into Russia, actually really helps Putin a lot. If feminism is seen as an invasive species from America that destroys the local values ecosystem, as opposed to an indigenous species that has its own deep roots and history, this helps Putin stamp it out. Then, it's just a harmful Western concept that is at odds with Russian history (which it's obviously not).
Could we say that Putin is afraid of feminists? I understand feminism can be labelled as a nefarious Western import, but it feels deeper than that. Why is he so averse to feminism, or so averse to giving women rights that oppose his narrow worldview of who women should be?
I think it's just part of his general worldview that society has to look a certain way and be a certain way. It’s a traditional worldview and in this sense he is like Stalin – this is just how things are and how they should be: that men have certain roles, and women have certain roles, and it needs to be this way for families to function, for societies to function, and therefore for the Russian government to function. It is, in some ways, just a very standard, right-wing view of the world.
I don't think that he would see it as taking away women's rights; it would be about restoring a natural order to things. And that it's us who are perverting nature, asking women to be something they're not, asking men to accept women as something they're not, and therefore to be themselves something they're not. And building this upside down world where nothing is as it should be. I think that in this he's very similar to Trump, to Orban, and to right-wing figures all over the world and throughout modern history.
If we look at women in Russia since the outbreak of the full scale invasion, we see female-led protests, which is also an occurrence in Russian history. There are movements like the Feminist Anti-War Resistance, but one of your chapters in the book addresses a completely different movement of women opposing the mobilisation of their men to fight in Ukraine – but very notably, not opposing the war itself. Why have they not had the same impact in comparison to, for example, the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers against the Chechen War?
Because they're dealing with a fundamentally different Russian state, one that is stronger and much more repressive and committed to tipping out any dissent. The Committee for Soldiers' Mothers, when it was founded in the late 1980s, was operating in an environment where the Soviet leadership itself was asking people to form informal associations to build civil society from the ground up. It was asking for this kind of feedback from civil society. And then in the 1990s, during the first Chechen War, Russia was still a democracy and the state wasn't strong enough to go after them full force. And neither of those things apply to the current regime.
This is something that people ask me about all the time, which rubs me the wrong way for the same reasons as when people say “surely when the body bags start coming home and more and more Russian soldiers are killed, their wives and mothers will protest and end the war and fix it?” – but they didn't start the war. They have no political power. It was not their decision. Why is it on them to clean up yet another mess that they didn't make?
I think the other aspect of it is that it asks women to be exceptional and kind of superhuman and different from the society that they live in. Most Russians support the war, even if they didn't like that it started now that they're in it. They feel like it would be bad for Russia to lose because nobody wants to lose. And some Russian women actually do support the war, or they don't support the war, but they're too scared because people are being sent to jail, including kids, for such minor things as comments or likes on Facebook. We're not asking the men to come out and protest in these conditions. We're not asking them to be totally different from the society that they're a product of. We're not asking them to face these superhuman dangers.
But for some reason, we expect women to be these superheroes just because they're women. We believe that women are inherently peacemakers, because they're just more gentle and empathetic. And also, there are women who profit from the war – there're so many stories of women happily parting with their drunken husbands who have been lying on the couch for the last few years, shipping them off to war and suddenly getting his huge military pay cheque or his end of life bonus.
Motherland is a difficult read. There are many harrowing episodes, including some very personal to your family, and sometimes it feels hopeless. There isn’t a happy ending. But regardless, it is a book about strong women. Is there any hope? Can we learn any lessons from the women in your book?
I think one of my goals with the book was to make people stare into the abyss. To make them confront what history actually looked like for the women and the families who lived this insane century in that part of the world.
The first lesson is that progress is not – for example when it comes to gender equality or equality of opportunity – progress is not inevitable. It's not irreversible. And it needs to be fought for and protected all the time.
The second lesson is the need to reclaim not just our own political power, but to reclaim our narrative and historical power. We’re seeing this backlash against, at least in the US, against DEI and wokeism etc, and I think that's absolutely the wrong approach to take. There are so many important, dangerous things we leave out and we leave unsaid because of who gets to write the narrative and the history.
And the third lesson is that it's not on women to clean up men's messes. It's not on women to be superhuman saviours for men who somehow get to have it both ways – to have all the power and all the resources, but then pretend that they're super vulnerable and need saving.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
