Julia Ioffe on the Surprising Feminist History of Russia

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, if I were to pose a question about significant figures in Russian history, who would spring to mind? You might think of well-known leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, or President Putin. But how many of you could name the women who stood alongside them? A new book written by our next guest, Russian-American writer Julia Ioffe, confronts the forgotten narratives of these women and places their remarkable stories in the spotlight. Ioffe joins Michel Martin to discuss Russia’s complex history of motherhood, marriage, and much more.

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Christiane. Julia Ioffe, thank you so much for talking with us. 

 

JULIA IOFFE: Thanks for having me, Michel.

 

MARTIN: You, your new book “Motherland” is so interesting. It takes – it looks through modern Russian history, Soviet and Russian history, but through the lens of the women. How did you get the idea to do that?

 

IOFFE: Well, the first germ of the idea was to write a book that wasn’t about Vladimir Putin. I was so tired of talking about him, writing about him, thinking about him. And I wanted to write a book about Russia that wasn’t about him. And then I realized I wanted it to not be about most of the men that we read so much about the Vladimir Lenins, the Joseph Stalins, the Nikita Khrushchevs. And then the other part of the idea came from the fact that I was constantly having to explain to American friends, to western friends, why it was so normal for women like my great-grandmothers to be doctors in the 1930s and scientists, and something that seemed completely extraordinary to them was totally ordinary to me. And so to bridge that gap, I realized I had to tell the story of the whole thing.

 

MARTIN: You write about this extraordinary social revolution that followed 1917. Soviet women were, quote, “given the right to higher education, equal pay, no fault civil divorce, child support, (including for children born out of wedlock), paid maternity leave, and access to free maternity hospitals.” And “In 1920, the Soviet Union legalized abortion.” How did that happen?

 

IOFFE: Well, the new Soviet authorities, the Bolshevik authorities, wanted to emancipate women, and they wanted to destroy the bourgeois family, which they felt imprisoned women. It was part of their project to remake society, starting from the individual. To remake a Soviet person. And for, if you think about where they were coming from in the 19th century women married mostly for economic reasons. Right? They went from their father’s house to their husband’s house. And it was impossible to get out of that divorce – excuse me, out of that marriage, even if there was abuse or cheating or she just didn’t wanna be married to him anymore. There was nowhere to go. Women were expected to, you know, working class women were expected to work through their pregnancies and come right back right after giving birth. Right? I mean, you don’t even have to think about the 19th century, right? We’re still fighting for these rights here today, a hundred years later.

 

MARTIN: I feel sort of embarrassed that I didn’t know some of these names. Everybody knows Lenin, but who was Alexandra? How am I say it correctly? Kollontai? 

 

IOFFE: Yeah. That’s right. 

 

MARTIN: Who, who was she? And tell us why she was such an important figure.

 

IOFFE: So she was, she became an ally of Vladimir Lenin, and she voted with him in the Bolshevik Central Committee to Seize Power in October, 1917, for which she was rewarded with a cabinet ministerial post. So she became the first cabinet, female cabinet minister in history. But she was a writer and a thinker that really fleshed out the ideas of how to emancipate women, specifically. Marxist writers. Most of the men wrote about how to get rid of capitalism, get rid of private property, and how this would just emancipate everyone. And Kollontai said, well, no, women do have specific needs.

She wrote that the most important thing for a woman, the thing that gave her meaning in life and gave her purpose on this earth, wasn’t getting married, wasn’t having children, but her own work, her own creative labor. And she could get married if she wanted to, she could not. She could have an you know, a fling or an affair to drink from the cup of love until she was sated as Kollontai wrote, and then get back to work. She wrote that in 1913. I think that is still a very controversial and radical statement today.

 

MARTIN: So I was fascinated by Raisa Gorbachev, because, you know, a lot of Americans had seen her because she traveled here with her husband. Just talk a little bit about her.

IOFFE: Raisa didn’t really fit in at home. Soviets really hated her. She was, they didn’t like that she was so independent. They didn’t like that she was one of her adv– husband’s closest advisors. She helped him write his speeches. She was with him on foreign trips everywhere. It was really jarring for Soviets to see her when they had been used, for decades, to seeing only old male, male faces at the top. She was stylish at a, and kind of running around the world at a time when Soviets could barely find clothes or, or Soviet women couldn’t find clothes or food to eat. They didn’t have menstrual products. They didn’t have bras. T  hey gave birth in filthy conditions in these maternity hospitals that were just horrific, as I describe in the book.

And they couldn’t, certainly couldn’t travel abroad the way she did. And she enchanted a lot of people in the west including American feminists who said, oh, look at her. She’s this amazing working woman who, who can, who has it all. She’s a, a, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, as well as a college professor, a PhD. And she’s still so feminine, you know, how does she do it? Whereas Soviets were like, our lives, look, Soviet women were like, our lives look nothing like hers. And we hate her for rubbing it in our faces.

 

MARTIN: So then we get to Putin. And I know you said you didn’t want the book to be about Putin. It’s not, but it’s about hi– Because he does take up a lot of space, that was one of the most depressing chapters where you about poor this, this why – he, they dated for years before they actually married, which is unusual at the time. And he kind of made it clear that, you know, she was there to kind of be his administrative officer and raise the kids and do whatever, but didn’t, didn’t give her any kind of support or affection from what we see at, at all. Well, why don’t just tell me a little bit about her.

 

IOFFE: Yeah. So Lyudmila Putina – who is now Lyudmila Ocheretnaya, because she’s done okay. She’s married a man 10 years her junior, for her silence. She has gotten lots and lots of money. She has mansions all over Europe, including ____. She’s doing fine. But Lyudmila Putina was born in Kaliningrad which is kind of this outcropping of Russia in the middle of Europe. And she had an alcoholic father. She dropped out of, she lived in a communal apartment. She dropped out of technical college and became a flight attendant. And she met Vladimir Putin when they were in their early twenties. And she, at first thought he was quite unremarkable, but then she came to really admire him because he was so unlike other men their age.

He didn’t drink. He was physically fit, he was disciplined, he was focused, he was decisive. And in a generation that was born after World War II, when there weren’t a lot of men around, and the men that were around were kind of broken, psychologically, alcoholic – I mean, alcoholism took off like crazy after World War II because of all the trauma people suffered – and he just struck such a contrast that she was like, this is a real man, and I want to cede some of the responsibilities that Russian women have.

So when he starts making every single decision for them, and she has absolutely no agency in the relationship, she really finds it comforting and reassuring because she doesn’t feel like she’s carrying everything. But then, of course, quickly, you know, once they actually do get married after he strings her along for three years, once they do have kids, she realizes it’s all completely on her. 

 

MARTIN:  In fact, in fact, the most disturbing story is then she was in a car accident and wakes up in the hospital and –

 

IOFFE: Sure. Vladimir Putin is called, he’s now the second man in the city, this is now post-Communist St. Petersburg, he races over to the hospital. They’re like, oh, she’s gonna be fine. And he says, okay. And leaves without seeing her, which is just incredible in the worst way.

But it was — to me, it was so him. It was before he was really in the public eye. And the kind of the coldness, the cruelness, the, the withhold, withholding of warmth and affection, the little things we see him do these little power plays. Like when he made the Pope wait 45 minutes. With Lyudmila, he was late to every single date by about an hour and a half. And she still came back for more.

 

MARTIN: Why did she put up with this?   

IOFFE: Well, because men were so scarce after the war and this really traumatized Russian women who were also being told that they have to get married young and have children young, because the Soviet, the Soviet government started telling them this ’cause they needed to replace all the people they had killed. About 50 million people that were killed in just what, 30 years? So there was this obvious absence of men, of eligible men to marry. And it was just like… I’ll take him.

MARTIN: So, so then let’s go to the present day. You write, “100 years after Kollontai and Lenin railed against traditional, economically motivated marriage as a prison for Russian women, it had become their ultimate fantasy.” And the evidence of that is in other chapters in the book where you talk about these wives of oligarchs, these former wives of oligarchs, and this mad, I don’t know what to call it, like hunger games match for, for these men. How did that happen?

 

IOFFE: So, what happened is the Soviet government in fighting, well, fighting part of one world war and all of a second world war, a civil war, having mass famines and putting down peasant rebellions and having mass political repressions, killed a lot, a lot of men. By the end of 1945, there were so few men in some places that there would be 19 of them for every 100 women. And at the same time, the Soviet Union really wanted a baby boom, the kind that the US was having ’cause they needed to, as they said, replace the dead. And there were villages in Russia where only one man came back from the war, and his wife would pass her husband around so that the other women in the village could become mothers as well. So this combination of the state telling women they need to become mothers, that this is their, unlike what Kollontai was saying, that their main role in life, their sole purpose in life was to become mothers when there were so few men around. How do you do that? So it creates this mismatch between supply and demand.

 

MARTIN: But you also write about the connection to the way wealth is achieved. In Russia and just the whole, this tremendous sort of economic dislocations that have occurred since the fall of communism. Right. Would you talk, which, which are two different stories, but they’re kind of related. So would you talk a little bit about that? Sure. Like the drinking, right? The drinking, it doesn’t come from nowhere.

 

IOFFE: That’s right. So basically in, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 with, it collapsed, the teetering Soviet economy, factories closed, mines closed. And parts of the Soviet government closed. And men and women responded very differently. Men said, you know, I was a factory foreman, or I was an an engineer. I will not do lower status work. I’m going to sit around and be sad and complain and wait for work of my status, of my station to come back online. And the women didn’t have that option. And they took to drink ’cause they were depressed. And, you know, stressed out. The women didn’t have that option because for the last 50 years, parenthood had become motherhood. They were, or motherhood became, all of parenthood. Fathers weren’t expected to father their children and parent them in any way.

So women didn’t have this option. And they had to work really hard wash floors schlep rags from Turkey to sell in markets, you know chop chicken parts to keep their families fed while the men just lay down, took to drink and drank themselves to death, which again, exacerbated this perceived shortage of men. And at the same time, there was this new oligarchic class coming, coming into being, and they were all men, and they had such fantastical wealth. That plus all the imagery coming in from the west. There was this idea of like, wouldn’t it be wild and amazing to be a stay-at-home wife and a mom? So instead of being a Soviet woman who has to work full-time, and then do seven hours of housework per day and take care of the kids full time while the man just maybe works, the idea was, well, can I just be a mom? 

 

MARTIN: You know, these pictures of Putin, you know, bare chested, you know, shirtless on horseback or Putin, you know you know, spear fishing or, you know, play playing hockey where magically he scores all the goals. In the West, we think this is hilarious. You know, we are like, what is this? Like, what’s this guy? You were saying that in Russia, this is actually part of his allure and that it’s actually directed at the women. Because the women find this, what, comforting in a way? Like, say more about that.

 

IOFFE: Yeah. So because Russian men are seen as so useless as these kind of overgrown man children that the women have to take care of in addition to their actual children, you know, they can’t be trusted with the money. They, they earn more than the women. But, you know, can they be trusted to bring it home? Can they be trusted not to drink through everything, not to get into a crazy car accident or, or just drop dead at work? Men die, Russian men die so much younger than Russian women. They’re in such terrible health and in such terrible shape. They smoke, they drink, they eat a lot of mayonnaise salads. And Putin is so not that he doesn’t drink, he exercises regularly and on camera, he makes sure people see it. They, he makes sure to show people how disciplined he is, how, how much longer he’s lived than the Russ– average Russian man. And for a lot of Russian women, he is the man they never had, and the, the man they wished they had, which also goes back to your question about why did Lyudmila Putina stick with him for as long as she did? Because yeah, he was maybe not the nicest partner, but at least he was there and he had this kind of traditional virile, energetic image, whereas the kind of, the average Russian man is seen as this drunken childish slob.

 

MARTIN: I doubt that “Motherland” is gonna be, you know, a bestseller in Russia. If – I don’t know, I don’t know that we’ll be seeing too many copies in the, in the airport bookstore, but I’m wondering what, what are people saying about it? 

 

IOFFE: But the reaction I’m getting from Russians is very, actually, very positive. A lot of them, the ones that were able to read it in English didn’t know a lot of this history. I didn’t know most of this history. And it’s just not taught. What we’re, what Russians are taught, what I was taught studying Soviet and Russian history here in the US is a very male-centric history. And I didn’t know about Alexandra Kollontai, for example, until I started researching this book. A lot of, you know, I, I kept giving chapters to my parents to read, to ask them or to other friends from the kind of Russia sphere to read, like, did you know any of this?  Or am I just repeating something everybody else has said? And most people didn’t know any of this. 

 

So people are pleasantly surprised and find, have found it illuminating. But yeah, it’s we’re working on getting it translated into Russian, so at least it can get into the country digitally. But, you know, I, I have a friend who runs a publishing house in Russia, and she said there’s no way with the word feminist, and it’s not because of what the way Putin is portrayed, but because it has feminist on the cover. And she said, you know, at a time when Susan Sontag’s books are being seized by police from stores, there’s no way.

 

MARTIN: Julia Ioffe, thank you so much for talking with us.

 

IOFFE: Thank you, Michel.