Julia Ioffe on Russian Women, Missing Men, and the Roots of Autocracy

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm very happy to be chatting with, in person, Julia Ioffe. Most of all, we'll be talking about her recent book coming out in paperback. It is called Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia from Revolution to Autocracy. I enjoyed it very much. Julia is also Washington correspondent for Puck, has written just about everywhere else, and appears on TV and radio frequently. Julia, welcome.

Thanks for having me, Tyler.

Now, if I think about feminism in Russian or Soviet history, it's striking to me how many of the top constructivist painters are women. So you have Natalia Goncharova, you have Alexandra Ekster-Popova, others. That must predate the Bolsheviks. What's going on there? What's behind that?

Well, the Russian intelligentsia, the Russian Empire, was a bit different from the Victorian intelligentsia or or the belle époque intelligentsia of the West. On one hand, the law in the Russian Empire was quite stringent. Women weren't allowed to do much of anything without their husband's permission. If you were a peasant woman, your lot in life was just to work and be a draft horse essentially, and to give birth as many times as possible, and sometimes maybe satisfy your father-in-law. If you were part of the intelligentsia or the upper bourgeoisie or the artistically inclined aristocracy, you often traveled to the West, were exposed to Western culture, but also you were very much engaged in the wrestling with the question that they called the woman question and how to emancipate women. There were various directions of thought in the late 19th, early 20th century, and some of them were quite radical. One of the main masterminds of the plot to kill Tsar Alexander II, for instance, was a woman, Sofia Perovskaya, the daughter of a well-known Russian general. A lot of the revolutionaries were women. There were so many, in fact, so many political radicals that were women that the tsars had to build a separate, a second women's prison just to hold all the female radicals. And so when the Bolsheviks took power, and before that when the tsar abdicated in February of 1917, women were ready to go. But the women artists you mentioned fit into this tradition because there was so much intellectual ferment around the time, and women were at the forefront of that, and they were the subjects of the theorizing around that. You know, what is proper role of a woman. Can a woman work the way a man does? Can a woman parent the way a man does? Can a woman opt out of being a parent altogether?

But even before the revolution, as you know, there were many more women doctors in Russia than in Western Europe. Your own sister is a fourth-generation female doctor. Women could own and inherit property, which was unusual for the time. Where does that come from? What's the longer tradition? Because one thinks of the East as being worse with respect to women's rights, but in some ways it's not. What's the correct mental model?

It's just different. But in some ways it was worse than the Western model. In some ways it was better. It was just very different. And like I said, this grew out of, again, a 19th century grappling with what they called the women question. And there were people pushing for legalizing abortion in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, the police and various detectives and so their equivalent of social workers issued a report recommending it, and they were going to legalize abortion in Tsarist Russia well before the revolution. But the tsar overruled it because he was obviously hand in glove with the Russian Orthodox Church, which was quite reactionary. So there was this push and pull constantly in Russia. In some ways, yes, they could inherit property. Well, the medical piece is very interesting, actually. For my family, that medical tradition started after the revolution. It was made possible by the revolution. Without the revolution, it could not have happened. But the tradition of Russian women, or women from the Russian Empire more accurately, going into medicine is also intertwined with the radical tradition. Women who were inclined politically toward socialism, toward revolutionary activity, were banned from these institutions, but they were also drawn to, you know, what is the thing I can do to help people? They could go into nursing, they could go into medicine, and they were lobbying constantly to be allowed into the medical institutes of the Russian Empire instead. And they were kind of toggled back and forth between allowing them, not allowing them, allowing them to audit classes, not allowing them to audit classes. And a lot of women actually went to Switzerland who had the means. Obviously, the women who had the means went to Switzerland to study medicine. It was— they were often women who were politically radical because of that. The Tsar's secret police noticed that there were all these, you know, women going who were radically inclined, going to Switzerland to study medicine. And they said, wait a minute, no, no, no, we need to keep a closer eye on them. Let's force them back to the Russian Empire, open a medical institute for them, and keep a close eye on them here. That's kind of how that started. Once the revolution came in 1917, free higher education was allowed for everybody, including women, including Jews, which affected my family doubly because we were Jewish. And institutions were legally mandated to take any kind of gendered terms out of their names. So they couldn't be the Women's Institute of something, something, or the, you know, Gentleman's Institute of this or that. But for my family, it started with the revolution, but the groundwork had been laid beforehand through this radical tradition.

And intellectually, where does Bolshevik feminism come from? Is it from Tchernyshevsky or August Babel or Clara Zetkin, or why does that win out?

All of the above. I think August Babel was the first to really set down some idea of what socialism would look like for the female half of the population. As you know, breaking out people by anything other than class was anathema. To Marxists, right? Class trumped everything and everything else was a red herring used by the owning class or the elite class, the oligarchic class, to divide and conquer the working class, the proletariat. But there were some socialists starting with Babel, with Engels, who said, okay, but we can't have a revolution without women. And women have a specific kind of existence. They have specific issues that need to be addressed, but they still were pretty vague. They talked about emancipating women. They talked about collectivizing family labor, household labor. Mostly though, they were vague. I joke that it's kind of like in Seinfeld, they yada yada the details. They would say, okay, yes, women have specific issues and we can't have a revolution without activating women workers, but basically there'll be a revolution, socialism will come, yada yada yada, and women will be emancipated as part of the emancipated proletariat. I think it was specifically women, women like Alexandra Kollontai and some others, but mostly Kollontai, who really thought deeply about this because it was obviously quite personal to her about how specifically a revolution would emancipate women. And she had some of the most specific and innovative ideas about how it would help women be equal members of a socialist utopian society.

In the 1920s, there are many open marriages amongst the intelligentsia. What do they do for birth control?

Not much except abortion, which was legalized in the Soviet Union in 1920. They legalized birth control only 3 years later in 1923, which set the stage for how things looked at the very end of the Soviet experiment, which was that really the only form of birth control Soviet women had was abortion. And the average Soviet woman, by the time she reached the end of her childbearing years, had on average anywhere between 3 to 12 abortions. And many Soviet women had many, many more.

And was that a popular decision when abortion was legalized in 1920? Because even in autocracies, public opinion matters.

I think, like I said earlier, there was a big push from people who dealt with this to legalize it because women were still, as we know, women have always gotten abortions by hook or by crook. The question was, do Do this in a safe and legal way from trained specialists, or do they do it with the village mystic or the village babas who offer them some special herbs and might have fatal consequences? It was a popular decision in the sense that a lot of women did it. Once it was safe and free and legal, it became popular. In the ruling class, the men who were the ruling class, because women were very quickly You know, the Bolsheviks were quite egalitarian when they were in the underground and the stakes were low. But once they got into power, the top positions were generally not given to women. The men in positions of power were quite worried that if abortion were legalized, women would take a frivolous approach to it and not give birth because, as one of them said, you know, they'd be worried about their figure. They knew they needed women to have babies, to keep having babies. Otherwise, this country wouldn't work. They needed workers, they needed soldiers, they needed people to produce things and defend the country. And so they were worried that if they legalized abortion, women would make too much use of it. And so, you know, when Stalin came to power, he made it illegal in 1936. After he died and—

And that's binding, that it's illegal?

What do you mean?

Well, that abortion is illegal. Under Stalin. Well, is it actually enforced?

It went underground. And we know that Stalin's lieutenants, when they got women pregnant, were able to get them abortions, even though it was illegal at the time. You know, I think in Russia in general, the phrase is the harshness of the law is mitigated by the need to get around it. So people got around it. But I think in general, most things were enforced. Why is it—

in the Soviet Union— so many of these communist societies, they seem to evolve toward an extreme form of prudery. So we know what Beria did with women, Chairman Mao also, but the regimes themselves seem fairly anti-sex. Why does that happen? What's your mental model?

Well, I mentioned Alexandra Kollontai, and what I found so interesting was one of the things she wrote in 1911 about a woman's need for sexual pleasure, sexual satisfaction, was quite revolutionary at the time. She wrote that basically under capitalism, and this, she was not original. A lot of socialist writers, male and female, were saying that, you know, in the capitalist Victorian model, sex is relegated to two institutions, marriage and prostitution. And Colontai was talking about liberating it from those two constraints and saying that a woman should be free to not only work for a living and be free that way, be economically free so that she doesn't have to get married, to live and to go from a father's house to a husband's house, but she should be sexually free in the sense that she can fall in love, find sexual pleasure in this relationship for a few days, a few weeks, a few years. And then she says when she's drunk from cup's love and she is satisfied, she can say, okay, that was great, thank you, and go back to what Khon Thai thought was the most important part of a woman's life, which was her work. She wrote this in 1911. This was quite radical, quite revolutionary. And as soon as she is marginalized and pushed out of power and becomes the Soviet Union's ambassador to Norway, a man comes in, Aron Zalkind, who says, actually, we need to clamp down on the sexual freedom that Soviet young people have discovered. And all we see in the Soviet university and factory dormitories is equality, liberty and maternity. Equality for the sexes, sexual liberty for the men, and maternity for the women. They said we need to clamp down on this, and they instituted basically the commandments, the sexual commandments for any young Bolsheviks. And they were extremely prude, you know, that you should have as few partners as possible, that you shouldn't have too many sexual positions, that thinking too much about sex and having too much sex saps your revolutionary energy. You know, this idea that you have a limited amount of energy. We hear this from Donald Trump sometimes. You have a limited amount of energy and any energy that you use for sex, you're not using for the revolution. So we gotta kind of keep that to a minimum. And as you said, it became so prude. Igor Kohn, who was a very famous, incredible sociologist, sexologist in the Soviet Union and then Russia, he wrote that the Soviet Union became so prudish that it would make Victorian England look, you know, promiscuous. And I think in part that's because these are authoritarian regimes and sexual freedom, sexuality is a kind of freedom and it's a kind of lack of inhibition. And these are regimes that don't allow for any kind of freedom in anything.

It's a common hypothesis that after World War II, obviously a lot of young men have died off. There's an unfavorable gender balance for women, and that this helps explain why Russian women made themselves so attractive to compete for the limited number of men. Is that true or it's just a fairy tale?

After the war?

After the war. And for a while, right?

I think after the war and well into the present, I think that's definitely true. And a lot of popular culture and just basically the women's whisper network reinforced that. But You know, it was the reality. There were 27 million Soviets that were killed in World War II. About 21 million of them were men. Even going into the war, the gender imbalance was pretty skewed in the Soviet Union because before 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, you had World War I followed by the revolution, followed by the civil war, followed by famine, collectivization, famine, mass political repression, which mostly hit men, and then World War II. So by the time you get to 1945 and over 50 million Soviets were killed in the intervening 3 decades, many of whom were men, you have places that— where the gender imbalance was 100 women to every 19 men. There were villages where all the men left for war and one came back. And the women literally passed him around, or that man's wife passed him around to the other women if they wanted to have a child.

And there's a lot of unmarried mothers after World War II, right?

That's right. Well, and part of this was by design. Part of this was the— Stalin tasked Khrushchev toward the end of the war when it became clear the Soviet Union was going to win, but that it had suffered catastrophic demographic losses. I mean, the Soviet Union lost 15% of its population in just 4 years. That is, I don't know, in American terms it would be what, 45 million people? In 4 years? It's unthinkable.

Unthinkable, right?

Right? They knew they needed to, as they said, replace the dead. And so Khrushchev worked out a policy plan for how to replace the dead. And that was to force men into, you know, Stalin was quite a traditionalist. He believed in a kind of nuclear family. So they forced men into marriages that were harder to get out of. You know, one of the first things the Bolsheviks did in 1918 was to legalize civil divorce, no-fault divorce, and to allow women to seek child support and alimony from men, including when they were pregnant, including for men that they were not legally married to. And so in 1944, Khrushchev rolls out— the Soviet Union rolls out this policy designed by Khrushchev to make divorce very, very difficult, so trapping men in marriages, but encouraging them to impregnate women in addition to their wives and saying basically, don't worry about it. These women were not allowed to put men's name on the birth certificate if they were not legally married to these men. They were not allowed to seek child support from these men. The state said, we'll do it for you. For every child you have, even if it's out of wedlock, we will give you money every month until the child is of a certain age. The more children you have, the more money we'll give you. We'll give you military-style medals the more children you have, which is an idea they took directly from Nazi Germany. And ironically, they said, we'll count children that were killed in World War II. We'll count them toward your total. So basically what it ended up doing was incentivizing and institutionalizing bad male behavior and single motherhood. It created the social and legal category, kind of a protected legal category of the single mother. And the Soviet Union did get its baby boom, there was a kind of bumper crop of babies in the years after World War II, but a third of them were born out of wedlock, which is not what happened in the US, right? And a whole generation of Soviet children grew up not knowing who their fathers were because there was just a blank on their birth certificate where the father's name would go. And it also created, you know, the men who were around, who were fathers, were just kind of slowly made irrelevant. In their own homes. They focused maybe on the workplace, more on the bottle. And parenthood became synonymous with motherhood in the years after World War II. But again, if you think about how you make a baby boom with very few men— Mm-hmm. —is you have women hunting for men, many of whom are probably still married, their wives trying to fend off these women, you know, who are trying to take their man from them. And you still have this, you know, 80 years later in Russian society, this idea, you get it kind of with your mother's milk as a girl and as a young woman that— if I had a dollar for every time one of my grandmothers told me that men don't grow on trees. And my mother told me when I was in college, she said, find a husband in college because before you know it, all the good ones will be taken. Then you hear Russian women talking about how you have to be maximally attractive, otherwise another woman will come and take your husband. And kind of in Russian you say, "Anaevu uvidyut," like, "She'll lead him away." And this amazing Russian sociologist was like, "What is he, a veal calf that you could just take his rope and just move him over here to a different barn?" It's bone deep at this point among Russian women, but it does originate in the post-war years when the pressure was on women to find a man to procreate with. There weren't many around. There was also a whole generation of Soviet women who just were never able to get married or have children because there were no men to do it with, and they didn't want to be single moms. And I think that's also kind of a trauma that everybody has, you know, spinster aunts or spinster great-aunts who were a subject of great pity because they were never able to, as Raisa Gorbacheva said, know the joys of love and motherhood.

There's a pattern I've noticed in many Soviet women, I guess of my generation or a bit younger, that they have their first kid at age 20 or 21. Married, but then they divorce the guy and then have a great career. Is that just another form of single motherhood in a way where the marriage becomes irrelevant pretty quickly because there's a divorce and the guy's a lout?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think furthermore, you know, I also know, I know a lot of women like that of my generation, but I also know a lot of Russian men of my generation who, when Russia banned homosexual propaganda and banned adoption of Russian children by gay couples, and then when they vilified the single-sex family, right, of let's say two men adopting a child or two women adopting a child, so many Russian men I knew of my age said, what do you mean? We all grew up in a single-sex family. We were raised by a mom and a grandmother, and there was just no man around. There were so, so many Soviets and Russians raised like that. And to what I was saying before is that men became so irrelevant as fathers that they're just— women kind of came to see them on one hand, they're competing for men, and it's like a blood sport among Russian women. On the other hand, they're treated with quite a bit of condescension, and they're seen as kind of glorified sperm donors. It's great to get married, but mostly what you need them for is insemination and money. Like he's certainly not going to be a friend, he's certainly not going to be a real partner.

He's not going to do household chores either, right? Oh God, no, no.

And he's not going to change diapers and he's really not going to be around to help raise the kid. I think that started to change in the last decade or two among an educated urban elite where fathers wanted to be present at the birth. They wanted to be very active, involved parents, but that's a tiny sliver of the kind of educated white-collar class.

So the woman has to be very, very strong, and she has to wait in line to get foodstuffs, right? And be pushy and make barter deals. And this reads this class of Russian or Soviet women who are just like superwomen. Is that a good simple model of it?

Yes, I think so. And those are the women I grew up with, where you do everything and you make it look easy. This Soviet historian said women had to do these jobs, you know, her work outside the home, household work, and raising the children as if each of them were her only job. And I would add, as if it were her job alone. Pretty much all women worked outside the home. That was also mandated in 1920, that women had to work. When they implemented the policy to try to get a baby boom after the war, they They tried to make sure that women wouldn't just be stay-at-home moms by tying food, places in daycare, nurseries to a woman's workplace to keep them in the workforce, 'cause they could not, given the catastrophic losses they suffered in World War II and the years preceding it, they couldn't afford to have women stay at home the way they could in the West. So women worked outside the home. They did all the household chores. They did all the cooking. They did all the child rearing. Let me give you an example. So my grandmother, who died about a year ago this time last year at 96, she was a chemical engineer who ran the lab at a water filtration plant outside of Moscow in a little suburb called Rublyovo. It provided drinking water for a lot of Moscow and the Kremlin. She oversaw a team of about about a dozen people. She had to be at work at about 8 in the morning, having dropped off my father and his sister at school or daycare. Then she would work. Then at her lunch break, she would go into the surrounding forests and forage for mushrooms and berries. Mushrooms, I don't know if you know, are pretty dirty. So you have to then, when you come home, you have to wash them, you have to dry them, then you have to marinate them or preserve them in some way, cook them. Very labor intensive. She'd go back to work. Then at the end of the workday, We'd race to pick up my father and my aunt from school or from daycare, from kindergarten. Then they'd go to the store, the first store, right? The, let's say the bread store, the bakery. They'd have to wait in line to order. Then they'd have to wait in a second line to pay. Then they'd have to pay in a third line to pick it up. Then they'd go to a different store to get the milk and wait in 3 lines. Then they'd go to a different store to get meat if they could find any scraps or vegetables. Once they did that, they'd stop by their little cellar to get the potatoes or cabbage they had been growing in the brief growing season, come home. My grandmother would make dinner, feed the kids, try to help them with their schoolwork and wash the dishes, get them to bed, then do the laundry. And she didn't have a washing machine, so she was doing it by hand boiling pots of laundry on the stove, using a, you know, a washboard, then drying it all. Then, because then, you know, if you've ever done that, it gets pretty stiff. So you have to iron every piece of laundry. Then you have to figure out what needs repair, what socks need darning, what holes need sewing, because you couldn't just go and get a new pair of socks, of kid socks in the store, right? And she said she was just always so tired. All she thought about was how she wanted a little bit more sleep. My grandfather, meantime, who was an engineer and worked in the city, he'd be coming back from Moscow to Rublyovo, he'd take the bus home. He would get off a couple stops early because there were beautiful forests in this area, and he would walk home through the forest because he wanted, you know, to clear his head and breathe some fresh air. And he'd come home, have dinner, lie on the couch, read the paper, watch the TV once they got one, while my grandmother was doing all of this. This was not out of the ordinary. By the end of the Soviet period, the average Soviet woman spent, after her working hours outside the home, spent about 40 hours a week doing domestic labor, which was pretty good because if you were a woman in the countryside and you had even fewer modern conveniences and you had, you know, farm animals and a garden to tend to or plot of land to tend to, they did about 55 hours of domestic labor in addition to the work they did outside the home. On top of that, as we said, you have to look good. You have to make it look easy and you don't want to be a nag and, you know, because you don't want to drive your husband away or you want to be able to catch a man. So by the end of the Soviet period, as one woman who wrote into a Moscow newspaper said, Soviet women can do it all. We just don't want to anymore.

I'm sure you've noticed that quite a few American men will marry Russian or Soviet women, but not so many American women want to marry Russian or Soviet men. It's a kind of market test, right? Why exactly are the men so bad? Why are they such louts? Maybe that's a rude way to put it. Put it. But surely in one's mind, one asks that question, right?

You know, it's a question that a lot of us who were living in Moscow in the teens were asking that all the time. I remember a friend of mine, a male Western TV correspondent, saying, "You know, the women are so gorgeous here, but the men are so ugly and unfashionable." Like, and he had lived all over the place and worked all over the place. He's like, "I've never seen such disparity." And it was true. I mean, the Women like me, Western women who were living and working in Moscow at the time were like, "Mm, okay, we'll just wait till we get home." I think it's because of what you and I talked about before, which is that so many men were killed in the first half of the 20th century. So few demands were placed on them because they were seen as an endangered species in general. And they, were a resource to be fought over and protected. You know, in 1968, when the West was undergoing a sexual revolution and women were fighting for more rights, more equality, the Soviets were talking about saving the men, protecting the men, and saying, okay, we've done enough for the women, but our men die young. And that's after a lifetime of alcohol abuse, smoking, being largely irrelevant in the home and obviously politically because it's a totalitarian system. So let's work on protecting them. And Soviet men and then Russian men became these coddled, spoiled children, essentially, where, you know, on one hand, so little was asked of them that, I don't know, it's the bigotry of low expectations. So little was asked of them. That very little was expected of them, and they rose to meet those very low expectations, right? Then on top of that, the idea of what made a man a manly man in Russia are he's physically strong, but he dies a young death, or he dies an early death. He drinks a lot, he smokes a lot, he's reckless, he's careless, and takes a lot of risk. Usually means an early death. So if you have fewer men to begin with, and you, as a Russian woman, you see them dying early and you're fighting over them, what is the impetus for men to take care of themselves, to act better, be better, if there's always gonna be a beautiful, super competent woman to take him if you don't want him?

And these points you're raising, I mean, historically, do you feel it's been quite different for Soviet and Russian Jews or the same?

I think it's a little bit different. I mean, the caveat is, and I hate that I have to say it, is Jews are people too and subject to the same social forces that everybody else is. But culturally, Soviet Jews were more educated as a rule, more urban. Culturally came from a very kind of family-centric tradition. And Russian women actually, you know, for all the intense antisemitism in the Soviet Union, in Russia, Jewish men were actually a prized commodity for Russian women.

With ethnic Russian women? Yes. Yeah.

Ethnic Ukrainian women, you name it. Because the cultural stereotype was that Jewish men men don't drink, they don't hit you, they are family-focused, family-oriented, they're involved fathers, they bring their money home, they don't waste it at the bar or on bottles of vodka with their buddies. And so that's the kind of man you would want as a husband. Ironically, the same polls that will tell you that Russians would want their daughters to marry a Jew will tell you that they don't want their president to be a Jew.

I have some simple common sense questions about Russian women, say compared to American women. How does the role of flowers differ for Russian and Soviet women?

So have you spent time in Russia?

My wife was born in Moscow. Let me say that. Oh, okay.

I've been to Russia, but— Okay. When did she come over?

1991, I believe, right before the Soviet Union fell. Okay. Yeah. Was she—

Jewish refugee. Was she an adult or a kid? An adult. An adult.

With a daughter, one-quarter Armenian. Arabian, the rest Jewish, Palestine settlement. Okay. Reasonably common background.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very. I mean, the reason I ask is you're clearly asking these questions from a place of deep personal experience. But also I'm host.

I'm supposed to know things, right?

I know, I know, but—

The other day we recorded about Mexico.

No, sure. But what I mean is like the questions seem like they come from a place of personal experience. Oh, of course.

They're what I want to know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's also, it feels like you're drawing on some personal knowledge. Absolutely. Yeah, sorry. So what was the question?

The role of flowers is different for Soviet slash and/or Russian women. How different and why? It's a really good question.

I noticed that a lot when I lived there, that you can't go half a block, not a block, half a block without encountering at least one or two flower shops. And you got to give flowers to women on their birthday, on March 8th, which is International Women's Day, Which is ironically—

I never get that one right, to be clear. I never know when it is. It's March 8th. I know you can say it, but when March 8th rolls around. It's coming up. Yes. It's coming up. I'm not ready.

Place your order now. Yes. Because what, we have 6 days. That's right. If we're taping this in March. So March 8th, Women's Day. When else? Her child's birthday. If you're coming over.

That one I know. Yeah. Yeah.

So I give my mother-in-law flowers every year on my partner's birthday. And she's very American. And the first time I did that, she was completely blown away. But I was like, this is the tradition I come from. You did the work of— and of course, you don't give something to the father. You give it to the mother in recognition of the fact that, let's be real, she's the one who raised the kid. When else? New Year's, if you're coming over for just for dinner, right? You give the woman of the house flowers. You see Putin doing it all the time, right? If he gives a medal, any kind of state medal to a woman, like Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT. He gives her flowers with the medal. I know that when Toria Nuland and Celeste Wallander were negotiating with the Russians in the Minsk negotiations over Ukraine during the end of the Obama administration, after Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time in 2014, Surkov, at the time who was in charge of this stuff, arrived each time with a big bouquet of flowers, the national flower for the Donetsk People's Republic, and a bouquet of the national flower of the Lugansk People's Republic for each of the two women, kind of signifying, trolling them, saying, "You're women first, and then you're maybe the negotiators." I think the role is— I'm not sure. How would you articulate it?

Something about it's a lower trust society, and one has to signal certain things repeatedly and frequently. It's similar to holding open the door.

Yes, but what are you signaling with the flowers to a woman?

Ongoing loyalty. And there's the old joke, I think it's Romanian rather than Russian, but what's the Romanian word for friend? Future enemy, right? So groups are very tight, but people get purged all the time. And to keep on signaling so you don't get purged or that you're not a purger is I think what's going on with the flowers opening the door. But it's still somewhat of a mystery to me.

I don't think it's that. I think it's about on the surface level, you had all this rhetoric and policy about women being equal to men. But really, Soviet society remained a pretty essentialist place. People saw women— women are this and men are that. And post-Soviet Russia leaned into that a lot. Like the stereotypes of what a woman is and what a man is became so exaggerated, so so cartoonish, and women were cartoonishly feminized. I remember when I lived in Russia, a Westerner made a joke that all Russian women looked like Jessica Rabbit, right? And what do all women want? They want jewelry, they want flowers, they want chocolate, they want manicures. Like, it's just, I think, part of this gender essentialism that you see. And what do men want? Men want alcohol, they want cars, they want cigarettes, they want prostitutes in the banya, they want hunting and fishing trips, when I was able to travel to Russia when I lived there, all I heard was, "In Russia, men are men and women are women, as opposed to you androgynous weirdos in the West." And I think flowers are very much a part of that, that this is what you do for women. I had, by the way, people I would interview for work, like, we'd meet for clearly a work lunch, they would bring me flowers because I was a woman first. And that's why I told the story of, you know, Surkov bringing bouquets of flowers for two of the most senior American diplomats in the Obama administration. And he knew that he was trolling them with that by saying like, yeah, you think you're a diplomat, but you're a woman.

Question has long puzzled me, but why do so many Soviet and/or Russian women, they seem to have about 5 names. And my shortlist is Masha, Natasha, Lena, Katya, and Yulia. My wife is a Natasha.

You're Yulia, right? You missed Olga.

Maybe there's 6. Yeah. Oh my God.

There's a lot of Olgas. There's a lot of Olgas. Yeah. Lyudmila, Svetlana. I would say 10. And the same for men. Yeah. This is something we used to joke about all the time. And I mentioned my grandmother dying. I mentioned my mother-in-law who's American. My in-laws came to my grandmother's funeral, and at one point I leaned over to my mother-in-law and I said, you know, oh, that's That's Michael. You know Michael. And she was like, Julia, everybody here is named Michael. You know, Mikhail. Yeah, sure. She said when they were naming the pallbearers, they said Michael, Michael, Michael. And I think it's true. I know so many other Yulas, so many other Oyas, Natasha. Yeah, Natasha, Masha, Svetlana, Lyudmila, Katya. Yeah. And with the men, it's Mikhail, Sergei.

Piotr, right?

Piotr, da. Yeah. Let's see who else. Volodya. Blezhimir, right? Andrey. I know so many. I think because it's just a very conformist society.

But it's also a society where there's a lot of room for weirdos, right? The great Russian mathematicians or authors or the holy men. There's a certain space in which you can be a weirdo in Russian culture and be accepted.

Yeah, but that's after you're named already. Like, your parents might not have been weirdos. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just a very conformist place. And like, these are girls' names and these are boys' names. I think you see people getting a little bit more creative with names now, but I think what they're reaching for is these old Slavic names. And you see a lot more, you know, Zachar and Seva for boys. And for girls, you see Aliftina or Agronya, you know, like these old, old kind of peasant biblical names. And I think that's how this kind of bougie, educated upper middle class in Russia wants to differentiate itself by reaching back to the Russian, deeply Slavic past.

Why do so many Russian women seem to think that American feminists, they're somehow weak or misguided or off?

What's going on there? Ugly and man-hating. That too, yes. Because I think that's the right-wing caricature of them in the West as well. I think the Bolsheviks were very anti-feminist, even though they codified or they introduced reforms that were actually quite feminist. They believed feminism was anathema to socialism, right? Because it's splitting people out by gender, not class. So there was always this kind of deep antipathy to feminism. Then after the war, it ran into— after the war, and I would say after the Soviet collapse, why do you want to add more things for a woman to do? And why do you put down men? Why do you hate men when there are so few and so precious? We need to lift the man. One Russian feminist scholar put it this way. She said, Western feminism comes in and says, we need to take care of the women, we need to protect the women and not the men. The men have too much. We need to give women more. And in the Russian reality, it's But it's the men who are pathetic. The women are doing just fine. The women will always be fine because they're strong, resourceful. We need to worry about the men. So it's seen as kind of having the wrong priorities for the place. And yeah, there's this idea that Western women aren't feminine enough, that they don't take care of themselves. So many Russian women would ask me this, how come American women, how come European women don't take care of themselves? Meaning how come they don't always have their nails done? How come they always don't have a full face of makeup on. They don't have their hair done. They don't— they're not always kind of perfectly dressed, put together. And the joke I heard living in Russia was you have to be dressed to the nines all the time, even when you take out the garbage, because what if you run into a single oligarch when you take out the garbage? You want to look good. You never know.

And the attitudes toward the MeToo movement are different also, right? Very different.

And again, there are Russian feminists, and there were more and more and more up to, I would say, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, 4 years ago. And there were different attitudes toward the MeToo movement. There was a very strong kind of indigenous MeToo movement that actually started in Ukraine in 2016 and then crossed over into Russia called #ЯНЕБАЮСКАЗАТЬ, "I'm not afraid to say." It was a hashtag hashtag years before MeToo, where Ukrainian women and then Russian women took to social media and said, "I'm not afraid to talk about my experience. My mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers whispered about this, but I'm going to speak honestly about the harassment I encountered, the sexism I encountered, the rape, the assault that I encountered." So there was that. But when the MeToo movement came from the West, There was also a class of people, including in the Western-oriented intelligentsia, that saw this as this kind of prudishness that they saw in the Soviet Union, which you and I spoke about. And they saw it as a kind of lack of due process that they saw not just in the Soviet period, but under Putin. So they were conflicted between, yes, women should be speaking out. There were Russian women who were saying, yes, this is great, and we've been trying to push this for years. And in this, some Western-leaning liberals and pro-Kremlin people were in alignment, which is, this is a lack of due process. And these are beloved cultural figures, like Woody Allen or even Kevin Spacey, et cetera. Like, these people that they loved because of House of Cards, because of all the Woody Allen films, that were taken down without the due process that they had come to respect the West for. So. And also, the Russian opposition was quite sexist and quite essentialist too. You saw when Pussy Riot was first jailed in 2012, Alexei Navalny, who had already become the kind of standard bearer for the Russian opposition, said these were stupid girls. They should have not done that. They're stupid, and the state should let them out because they need to be with their little kids. You know, they're mothers first. They're not activists first. They're not opposition figures first. They're mothers first and foremost. They're women first and foremost. That also informed things.

And all these gender attitudes taken as a whole, how do they feed into Russian politics today with Putin and autocracy and militarism and nationalism? Is that a close connection in your mind or somewhat contingent or?

Oh no, I think they reinforce each other. I mean, the fact that you saw so many, just looking at the ads around the war, I'm thinking of one specifically that the Ministry of Defense put out where they show, you know, a man lying on the couch drinking, and then it's like, "Boop," special effects, and you see him morphed into lying in a dugout with a gun. Or a man standing there bored as a security guard at a supermarket, and "Bloop," he's, you know, standing guard at a checkpoint in Ukraine. And various other images transforming a kind of emasculated, pathetic, big, loudish Russian man into a soldier. And the tagline was, "Be a real man. Go fight in Ukraine." When Russia also put out an ad aimed at Western Europe and portrayed Western women on dating sites huddled by their phone in the cold with no light because there was no Russian energy coming into Europe, matching with Russian men in Russia who are like, "Oh, look, it's so warm here." And then they fly over And the man is in this apartment that's so warm, he has the windows open in January. And there's all these girls running around in bikinis and their underwear because it's so warm in his apartment. And how all these frigid Western women, in both senses of the word, would be flocking to Russia because the men there are so masculine and have all the heat and electricity. Under the COVID of the war, Russia has pushed— Putin has pushed even more pronatalist measures, even more restrictions on abortion. They've criminalized the childfree movement. The LGBT movement. The government is pushing messages that the most important thing for a young girl to learn is how to cook borscht and take care of her man. That was the Speaker of the Duma saying that. One of Putin's cabinet ministers is going around saying, "Hey, young girls, you don't need a college education. What you do need is to get married young and start having kids as early as possible." She herself, meanwhile, has no children and is on her second marriage. The state is upping payments for women, you know, per child. They're even incentivizing women in their teens to have— I mean, they're literally financially incentivizing teen pregnancy because they want women to have more, more children. And ironically, Vladimir Putin announced that 2024 was to be the year of the family. In September of 2024, Russia hit its lowest birth rate since Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999. So I think this is all part and parcel. I think But also very critically, 6 years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia decriminalized domestic violence. And when I was reporting on this for the book, I just couldn't wrap my head around it. And I kept asking lawyers, activists, victims, or survivors, what was the point of this? Why decriminalize domestic violence? And some said, oh, you know, it's to reinforce the traditional family order that the man is the head of the household, that he's allowed anything, and that this this is, you know, the traditionalist way that husbands behave. They beat their children, they beat their wives, and that's how they enforced order in the home. But some of them said something. One said something really terrifying, which was that it was to be a kind of steam valve, that in an increasingly stagnant economy, in an increasingly authoritarian system, men who were being told to be more and more macho and more masculine weren't able to actualize themselves economically Weren't able to make themselves heard politically. And where was all that aggressive masculine energy supposed to go? Well, here was a steam valve. You could beat your wife. That women now, in addition to everything else they were doing for society, could also be society's whipping boy.

You think Ukraine is diverging from these norms at all? I know it's hard to tell at this point, but—

You know, I'll be honest, I don't know Ukraine very well. But what you do see is that Ukraine is reaching back to a different set of norms. From the Soviet era, which is women fighting in the military. In some ways, it's because Ukraine needs all hands on deck and it has a manpower crisis. And they haven't been able to fix the manpower shortage in the Ukrainian military. But from the very beginning, you saw women volunteering to fight on the front lines, kind of like you saw at the beginning of World War II when tens and tens of thousands of Soviet girls, essentially teenage girls, went and volunteered to fight. And some of the best snipers the Soviet Union Union had were women. They were tank drivers, they were fighter pilots, they were all-female squadrons of fighter pilots in the Soviet military. You know, they did everything. They were sappers, machine gunners, spies, paratroopers. Over 800,000 Soviet women fought in active combat in World War II. You see Ukraine doing that. So in some ways, that's a historical norm, whereas Russia is not doing that. Russia is sticking to that kind of very reactionary essentialism, that essentialism we talked about. Men are men and men do man things like fight wars, and women are women and they do women things like have babies back at the home front.

What's an underrated Russian novel you would recommend to our listeners?

There's a few. Is that okay? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. The first I would recommend is Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina. It's a novel about a Tatar woman in the 1920s and '30s when her village is collectivized and people are forced into collective farms. It tells a story that you don't often hear about, definitely not in Russia. When you hear about collectivization and the horrors that it led, the famine and people being sent to prison camps in the Gulag, you mostly hear about Russian farmers, Ukrainian farmers. You hear about the— Hloodomor, the Ukrainian famine, but it also hit the Central Asian republics really hard, and it hit the enclaves like Tatarstan very, very hard. And this novel is long, like a lot of Russian novels, but it's pretty extraordinary, and I, I could not put it down. I would also recommend, even though the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, Svetlana Alexievich— people may know her as the author of The Chernobyl Diaries, which was basically pillaged by makers of the HBO show Chernobyl. The book Secondhand Time completely turned my head around and made me realize that I had been writing about Russia all wrong. But specifically, I would recommend her book The Unwomanly Face of War, which is about these teenage Soviet girls joining the fight in World War II as machine gunners, as fighter pilots, as— paratroopers. And what's amazing about it is it shows these young girls, I mean, they're 16, 17, they're girls doing these very male things. If you're talking about gender essentialism, what more male thing than being a soldier, right? And here you have these teenage girls doing all these things, and they don't see it at all as, "Here I am doing a boy thing. I'm just doing 'my thing.' And they don't see it because of how they were raised, because they were the first generation born after 1917, after the revolution, after all these radical reforms. They don't see it as anything out of the ordinary, that this is something girls do too. And I think it's an absolutely extraordinary book. And then the third that I would recommend is Mary by Vladimir Nabokov. And it's a book I've been discussing a lot with my friends from Russia, so many of whom are in exile and who miss home and want to go home. I think it's also a book that I'm sure a lot of my friends who are Iranian exiles would appreciate. But it's a book about— it's, I think it's one of the first novels Nabokov wrote in exile when he was still in Berlin. And it's about living with your head turned. And wanting to go back to a place that doesn't exist anymore, going back to a place, a person, a time that exists in your memory that just doesn't exist anymore. What does that mean for being happy, for living your life? It's a really poignant, beautiful, heartbreaking book.

Before my last question, just to plug your book again, which I enjoyed very much, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia: From Revolution to Autocracy, coming in paperback. And finally, what else would you like to write about?

Ooh, I would love to write about what's happening on the American right with women, about the Erika Kirks, about the tradwives, about how there are some American women, but I suspect more American men than women, who want to embrace this traditionalism, these traditional gender norms. We're seeing this implemented at the policy level under the Trump administration, people championing this new traditionalism, this return to men are men and women are women. And because so much of what I was writing about at the end of Motherland, my American readers, first my editors and my agent, and then And people who read the book once it was released into the wild were saying, "Oh my God, this is so scarily prescient. It seems like this is the path we're on in the US. And is this where we're going to end up in the US?" And I said, "I don't know, but it's not looking good." And so I would love to write about that from the American perspective. But I'm doing kind of other things now.

Julia Offey, thank you very much.

Thank you, Tyler. Thanks for having me. And thanks for reading my book.

Great. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen, and the show is @CowenConvo. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.