A little over a year ago, my thoroughly American elementary schooler used his hard-earned chores money to purchase a small piece of the Berlin wall on eBay. It arrived carefully packaged in bubble-wrap, a certificate of authenticity enclosed.
Back in 1989, as the people of Berlin were tearing the wall down with anything they could get their hands on—including their bare hands—the Velvet Revolution was in progress in (then) Czechoslovakia. I was the same age as my enterprising son. I was living in my motherland, the (then) USSR, in the city of my birth, (then) Leningrad, which no longer exists under that name. I don’t recall the fall of 1989, but I do remember the fall and winter of the year that followed. After spending all of 1990 in preparation for our departure in early 1991, my family left Russia forever. Crossing the border, we were required to surrender our passports. We’ve never returned.
The journalist Julia Ioffe’s new book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy is inspired by her own family’s history, which is not too dissimilar from mine. Ioffe is almost exactly my age, and her family left Russia just a year before mine did. Like many immigrants (myself included), Ioffe has spent her adult years wondering about the country of her birth. After over a century of profound suffering, could something better be afoot for modern Russia?
The history of modern Russia, I remarked to a colleague this past summer, is an unbroken cycle of generational trauma. In reflecting on the fate of Eastern European Jews over the course of the twentieth century, historian Marci Shore had remarked that no one comes out of that history emotionally healthy. But the more closely one looks, the more this seems true of anyone who has lived in Russia or the territories of the former Soviet Union any time in the past century and a half.
First, there was the autocracy of the Tsars, then the autocracy of the Bolsheviks led by Lenin. And then, first under Lenin and then Stalin, there was purge after purge after purge—each time targeting a different group, to the point that no one could ever be fully safe, as it was unclear who would be under suspicion next. Mass starvation in the countryside, the executions in the night, the Gulags, the horrifying losses in WWII—and the extermination of the Jews in parts of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, gave way to other, quieter privations after the war. All of this led inexorably to the denunciations of Stalin, the attempts to westernize Russia, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of Putin to power less than a decade later.
These events are familiar in broad brushstrokes to many. Their cruelty is dizzying, one round of atrocities following another. Yet Ioffe tells this familiar horrifying history in a new and powerful way: through the stories of women. Ioffe introduces us to the mothers who upheld this motherland through all the suffering of the past century, who bore a disproportionately greater cost of the abuses of power by the leaders from Lenin on, and whose stories show especially saliently that when it comes to Russia, there is nothing new afoot. Yet, as I read, a genuinely new insight dawned on me.
This feminist history of Russia reveals the plights of both men and women in a country that does not view any of its citizens, male or female, as persons. The result is a warped sex realism, one with fixed roles for both men and women, which allow neither sex to flourish.
Building the Soviet Woman
“It was the women who started the Russian Revolution,” Ioffe declares at the outset.
In the winter of 1917, in my home city of Leningrad, then known as Petrograd, thousands of hungry women who had been spending hours waiting in lines for bread to feed their children—bread that never came—finally had enough. A week later, the Tsar abdicated. Over the next decade, the Bolsheviks consolidated power, and the Soviet Union was born.
From the beginning, rule was by one man—first Lenin, then Stalin—but the Woman Question occupied Soviet leaders’ thoughts. The project was to build the new Soviet citizen—a creature eager to work ever harder to build the glorious future that is just around the corner. In the process, several prominent women came briefly into positions of influence.
Ioffe introduces Alexandra Kollontai, eager to liberate women (and first of all herself) from domestic servitude. “I hate marriage. It is an idiotic, meaningless life,” she wrote to friends. She had ideas for a better alternative: a new woman free to love whomever she felt like it—and for a time as brief or long as she wanted. “This woman would be free because she worked and made her own money. Liberated from the subjugation of bourgeois marriage, she would be free to love whom and how she chose. If she decided to marry and bear children, she would be supported by the state, which would enable her to work and parent in the way a man did.”
Kollontai was just one of a trio of strong women advisers to Lenin, eager to mold the new Soviet woman into this progressive vision of power and absolute equality with man. The other two were Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his mistress, Inessa Armand. Clearly, Lenin was a progressive man, too. Among their projects to support this new Soviet woman, who would love, parent, and work with the freedom of a Soviet man, was a new women’s education department, Zhenotdel, which attempted to teach literacy to women in a country where the vast majority were still illiterate in the 1920s. Another key project was Kollontai’s Palace of Motherhood, “the first free maternity hospital in Soviet Russia.”
These visionary ideals and others like them—promises of state-sponsored childcare, promises of extra food rations and pay for mothers, access to education, and easy access to abortions—aimed to get as close as possible to erasing all distinctions between men and women.
So what was the fruit of this? What might outside onlookers conclude from this experiment in liberating women from the tyranny of marriage and motherhood?
The result, Ioffe shows, was a country where women, for much of the past century, carried crushing loads both at work and at home, with no choice in the matter. It turned out that most women still wanted marriage and family. But they were expected, regardless, to get an education and work long hours in demanding careers—even as the men still got all the leadership roles. Each day, once the work shift was over, the women’s second shift began—at home, where they were expected to do all of the cooking, cleaning, childcare, and more. Offered abortion as if it were utterly routine birth control, they averaged two abortions for every live birth.
Ioffe interweaves the stories of women from her own family—grandmothers and great-grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts, and more. She emphasizes not only the heavy load each woman carried, but also the expectation that the women would carry this load alone. When Ioffe’s great-grandmother learned that her married son was helping his wife a little bit with the housework after the birth of their child, she threatened the wife. Gender roles in the home, especially after WWII, were absolute.
Still, these strict gender roles at home did not negate the high work expectations outside the home. Ioffe, who grew up around these powerful and talented career women, sees this as the chief accomplishment of the Soviet experiment. Women in her family have been professionals and researchers and movers and shakers since the early days of USSR, managing to overcome even the rampant antisemitism all around. When, after immigrating to America, Ioffe’s younger sister became a doctor, she became the fourth generation of women doctors in the family. And yet, the cost of this professionalization on women’s bodies, spirits, and lives seems undeniably high. Still, the motherland gets what she demands.
But what about the Soviet men? Where have they been in all this?
The Missing Soviet Man
Telling the story of the Soviet man involves, in large part, narrating absence.
First it was the Gulags. While women too could be arrested and sent there in the vicious purges of the 1930s, it was more often the men. Gone from home, they left their wives, mothers, and sisters to manage the household alone, caring for everything and everyone without any support, and wondering if they too might be arrested next—as sometimes they were.
Next came WWII, during which men were drafted and killed at astonishing rates. After the war, in some villages there were no men left, and an entire generation of Russian women had no prospects for marriage. Tolerance arose for extramarital affairs that might allow some of these unmarried women to experience motherhood.
Then there was the alcoholism of Russian men, which took off after the war. Ioffe speculates that this is because
it was the only antidepressant available. After the trauma of a horrific war, with few constructive opportunities or responsibilities, men turned to drink. Paradoxically, in an increasingly patriarchal society, men had become nearly irrelevant. This became the overwhelming worry in the government papers: women would manage—they always did—but what was to be done about the men?
If the men were not doing well in the 1960s, they are doing worse now. Life expectancy for Russian men has been steadily declining. The difference between life expectancy for Russian men and women keeps growing. Alcoholism is part of it. Violence is another. But this violence affects the women too, and the decriminalization of domestic violence under Putin’s rule has only made matters worse.
Today, matters may be coming full circle: with the ongoing war in Ukraine, Putin has been drafting more and more men into this war. As one young mother mused to Ioffe in despair, explaining why she would not have any more children, every generation of Russian history has a war to wipe out all the men.
Only one man in contemporary Russia has achieved some measure of success, at least if measured largely in terms of amassing power. He has continued to present himself as the quintessential ideal of the true Russian man: Vladimir Putin.
Is This Feminism?
So, is this feminism? And if so, what sort of feminism is it? Ioffe is surprised by the feminism of American women, whose
feminism seemed to encompass only sex and reproduction. If they wanted to be seen as more than human incubators, I wondered, why did they talk only about reproductive rights? My mother had always been open with me about her abortions. I knew that she had tried unsuccessfully to trigger a miscarriage when she was pregnant with me, and even at a relatively young age I fully understood why she had been so scared to have a child.
For Ioffe, the Russian reproductive policies are simply a given, an obvious reality, and thus barely deserving of comment. A crucial part of feminism for her, rather, lies in women’s access to education and career. For her, these are the things that truly matter. And yet, Ioffe too mourns the difficult lives of the women of her family, who shouldered demanding careers alongside all other life’s demands. Ioffe rightly criticizes the unwavering expectation in Russia—modeled now in Putin’s own domestic relationships—that women will take care of all housework and childrearing, and men will not assist with any. Something crucial is clearly missing in such a societal picture of gender roles—and it’s not just functional men.
This missing ingredient is never found in the book, because it has yet to be found in any modern period of Russian society. Instead, what we see is the shortcomings of a system that treats all people as cogs in a machine rather than persons. It took a feminist history of Russia to show clearly just how badly the country’s leaders have failed both men and women.
In this way, what Putin now advocates could be construed as sex-realism, but without a regard for the human goods of either women or men: women’s maternal role is idealized and abortion is newly frowned upon (albeit not outlawed outright), while men are drafted for the war in Ukraine. Russian casualties in this war are now approaching a million.
What kind of feminism is this if, as Ioffe documents, maternal hospitals are dystopian, domestic violence against women is rampant and decriminalized under Putin’s rule, and young men—these sons mothers work so hard to nurture and raise—are reduced to cannon fodder? In this feminist history of Russia, we see a feminism (if we can call it that—and by the book’s end, perhaps we cannot) that is proudly anti-woman to its core, even as it officially promotes motherhood as a woman’s most important service to the state. If feminism involves, at its most basic level, the active support of women’s flourishing as women, modern Russia demonstrates that autocracy and feminism are incompatible.
Ioffe’s writing is exquisite, and the stories she weaves together, both historical and personal, are powerful. But at the end, we are left with despair—a goodbye:
I dream of Moscow almost every night. The city I loved so much, the place where my grandmother, my mother, my sister, and I were born, where my great-grandmothers reinvented their post-revolutionary selves, where my grandmothers toiled and loved, where my mother snipped tonsils and listened to symphonies, is closed to all of us.
But then, Russia has never been a kind motherland to its children.
