Russia Through a Feminist Lens

It’s almost as difficult to say something new about Russia as it is to write an original biography of Abraham Lincoln. To her credit, Julia Ioffe comes close with Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, which looks at the country’s turbulent 20th century, and its inauspicious first quarter of the 21st. It does so by employing the novel lens of women’s role in Russian society, which often alights on figures—tragic, heroic, imbued with conviction—largely unknown in the West. Motherland is also a memoir of her family, which emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1980s when she was seven.

In less expert hands, Motherland could have ended up just another clever but vapid conceit of the Manchego: The Cheese that Explains Spain variety. (That’s not a real book; at least, I very much hope it isn’t.) Women really were at the vanguard of Bolshevism, and their elevated role in the workers’ paradise was intended to show how serious communists were about gender equality. 

This isn’t entirely an aberration. Before the Revolution, Russia “had the highest number of female radicals of any country in Europe,” Ioffe writes. Our own Western imaginations tend to default to the Stalinist version of the Soviet Union: sanguinary, hungry, grim. But before that, Vladimir Lenin allowed something of an intellectual and artistic hothouse to flourish in Moscow and the city then known as Petrograd, now St. Petersburg (where I was born and raised when it was called Leningrad). True enough, Lenin may never have been the ferocious yet avuncular leader of official Soviet lore, but until his 1924 death, the Soviet project retained a measure of idealism—in which women were welcome.

To do their part in creating the socialist paradise, women would be liberated from the demands of the family. “I hate marriage. It is an idiotic, meaningless life,” the influential political theorist Alexandra Kollontai wrote (the Soviet Union was one of those rare societies that minted many political theorists whom it actually valued). But as Ioffe points out, Kollontai and other women in the vanguard had little in common with Western feminists, such as American suffragettes, who were agitating in a somewhat different way, and in a somewhat different direction, at least ideologically.

“The paramount distinction for socialists was not gender or nationality or religion; it was class. Everything else was secondary,” Ioffe writes in this, her first book. That made me think of the modern-day socialist thinker Adolph L. Reed Jr. and his seminal No Politics but Class Politics. Today’s left has vociferously rejected such unity of purpose for an intersectional approach, which explains why we have a President Donald Trump to contend with once again.

The breadth of progress for Soviet women was truly remarkable, if ultimately fleeting. “By 1917, Soviet women had the (increasingly irrelevant) right to vote, years before their Western peers,” Ioffe points out. “They had the right to no-fault divorce and child support, paid maternity leave, and free higher education, including in the sciences, by 1918. By 1920, they had the right to abortion, provided by the state for free.” In fact, the USSR was the first nation to legalize abortion.

But it’s not all heady freedom, of course. War, alcoholism, and political violence haunt this book’s heroines from start to finish, often leaving them as household heads and sole providers. This was true during the political repressions of the late 1930s and after the ravages of World War II, the Great Patriotic War that cost the Soviet Union over 20 million lives. And it remained true through the demise of Communism. “By 1991, Russian women were exhausted from all the things that the previous decades of Soviet rule had required of them,” Ioffe observes. “But the collapse of the Soviet Union did not allow women to return to their womanly mission, as [Mikhail] Gorbachev had proposed. Faced with hunger, instability, and salaries that weren’t paid for months, millions of Russian men lay down on the couch and took to drink.” The Russian woman, in these pages, is ambitious but exhausted, idealistic but saddled with grim day-to-day realities. Coming from a family of strong Russian women, I tend to agree with Ioffe’s assessment. 

Ioffe acknowledges that, under the reign of Vladimir Putin, conservative quasi-Christianity dominates, with American evangelicals helping to implement new abortion bans. Ioffe retains a deep love for her native land, but returning to Moscow on a Fulbright scholarship in 2009, she finds that Russia has adopted gender roles that borrow the worst of both the Soviet Union and the West.

“This situation when a woman is strong, and not in a feminine way but a masculine one, and a man is weak, this role reversal is what has led to women’s unhappiness,” one woman lectures Ioffe. “This is what leads to diseases like breast cancer, uterine cancer—because of this lack of acceptance of her own femininity.”

Ioffe is in an unusually strong position to tell this story. Born in Moscow, into an unusually prosperous and accomplished family by the standards of Soviet Jewry, Ioffe lived a comfortable life in the capital—worlds away from my own childhood. The grim postwar apartment blocks of Leningrad, where I was born and raised, may as well have been on Mars. Nor did penury follow her to the United States, as was the case for so many of us diasporists. Her family settled in Maryland; Ioffe eventually made her way to Princeton and, after graduation, moved to New York and became a writer for some of the country’s most prestigious media outlets, including The New Republic, where she spent several years, and Politico, which she left after a brief stint and an off-color joke about Donald and Ivanka. The extent to which her family has apparently chronicled its manifold peregrinations is unusual, for Soviet Jewish families in particular. Sometimes, it could seem that little was worth remembering other than survival itself. It was oddly refreshing to step into this richer, happier world. 

When her sister became an oncologist, Ioffe writes, she extended the lineage of female doctors in the family to a fourth generation. Yet Americans wanting to celebrate this as a #GirlBoss triumph are quickly checked by the author. “Measured against the history of their own country, the Soviet Union, the women from whom I descend were perfectly average people,” Ioffe argues. “They were ordinary women who happened to be the subjects—and products—of one of the most radical social experiments in history: the attempt to emancipate women and build a new Soviet person.” 

The dream was never realized, but even the fleeting experiment with true gender equality comes off here as impossibly enticing, a plangent hint of what could have been. I’m glad that Ioffe has the intellectual nuance to see the Soviet Union as more than just a failed experiment that ought to be forgotten, like the cinematic oeuvre of Pauly Shore. We had free health care! But that, truly, is another story…

Soviet women fought in World War II, becoming some of the Red Army’s finest fighter pilots (Polina Gelman) and snipers (Lyudmila Pavlichenko). To read of their exploits while the bilious Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth prattles on about lax fitness standards (which do not, in fact, vary by gender in the American military, his embittered assertions notwithstanding) is a sobering experience.

A founding partner at Puck, the journal of politics and culture, Ioffe continues to show vestiges of The New Yorker’s understated writing style and its comfort with power and its handmaidens. “I was leaving a cocktail reception at the Munich Security Conference,” one sentence goes. There, she happens to run into Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of late dissident Alexei Navalny. Ioffe reported extensively on Navalny’s rise to political stardom; though she describes Yulia as lacking her husband’s charisma, the 49-year-old widow is yet another Russian woman who has been forced into carrying out her fallen husband’s work. Ioffe also chronicles the plight of the female punk group Pussy Riot, whose persecution by the Kremlin was, in retrospect, a warning the West should have taken more seriously.

Ioffe’s own family history acts like a tributary to the main narrative, constantly nourishing it with a personal quality. Family members were hounded during the Stalinist terrors, perished in the Holocaust, and made the difficult decision to emigrate. It’s easy to forget that history is more than just a procession of great and terrible men. Their vanities and cruelties inevitably take their toll on ordinary people wanting to lead ordinary lives.

Motherland ends on an unsettled note, in an unsettled world, with Russia a pariah state that has traded closeness with the West for ties with North Korea and Iran. “I dream of Moscow almost every night,” Ioffe writes in the conclusion of Motherland. Now that, thanks to its barbaric invasion of Ukraine, Russia is essentially in a proxy war with much of Europe and the United States, Ioffe, who showed extraordinary physical bravery in covering the 2014 Russian assault on Crimea, isn’t able to go home again or even visit. She has turned her homesickness into an original and impassioned work. I imagine that the women in her family would be proud, even if she didn’t become a doctor. 

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