To read Julia Ioffe\u2019s new book, \u201cMotherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy\u201d is to take a rambling ride \u2014 or a crash course if this is new territory \u2014 through the last century of Russian history as the ghosts of grandmothers past whisper in your ear.<\/p>\n
Ioffe, a Russian-born journalist, came to America with her family in 1990 at age 7. When she returned in 2009, the country she remembered was long gone. Ioffe\u2019s sister becomes the fourth generation of women doctors in her family. But in Moscow, Ioffe meets women from similar backgrounds \u201cobsessed\u201d with lassoing wealthy men, regardless of their character. Even the educated former wife of an oligarch\u2019s son is defined by her ex, as she grudgingly admires the skills of the young woman who snagged him next. \u201cEveryone makes fun of these women,\u201d the thirtysomething divorc\u00e9e tells Ioffe, but \u201cthey\u2019re geniuses. Absolute geniuses.\u201d<\/p>\n
A 1990 Soviet study found 60% of all schoolgirls wanted to grow up to become prostitutes. Almost 20 years later, upon Ioffe\u2019s return to Moscow, it seemed they all wanted to become housewives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In \u201cMotherland,\u201d Ioffe takes us on a journey to discover what happened to the Bolsheviks\u2019 early promises. After seizing power in 1917 \u2014 when women made up more than 40% of the workforce \u2014 they embarked on a radical \u201ccampaign to erase gender and dismantle the bourgeois family, which, in their view, imprisoned women in marriages based on economics rather than love and mutual respect.\u201d<\/p>\n
In just a couple years, Soviet women gained \u201cfreedoms and rights that their Western counterparts would have to fight for, in most cases, for another several decades.\u201d They included the right to vote, equal marriage, no-fault divorce, child support, paid maternity leave, free higher education and by 1920, the right to state-provided free abortion. It was, Ioffe wrote, \u201cwhat I thought to be the greatest feminist experiment on earth.\u201d Until it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
To tell the story, Ioffe expertly weaves her family\u2019s personal history into a tapestry filled with female figures who loom large and small in the public domain. There\u2019s Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin\u2019s wife and co-revolutionary; Inessa Armand, Lenin\u2019s mistress and dedicated Bolshevik; and Alexandra Kollontai, a daughter of privilege turned Marxist revolutionary, commissar of social welfare and the world\u2019s first female cabinet minister.<\/p>\n
Besides the stories of Soviet leaders\u2019 wives and daughters, from Lenin to Vladimir Putin, we hear of World War II female fighter pilots and snipers, mothers fighting for their sons\u2019 return \u2014 from 1990s Chechnya to 2020s Ukraine \u2014 and a woman who lost her hands but found her voice after Russia decriminalized domestic abuse. The result is a compelling narrative.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ioffe was born into a Jewish family that mostly survived pogroms \u2014 when Cossacks raped and murdered Jews forced to live in the Pale of Settlement, which ran from the Baltics through Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, Catherine the Great created in 1791. The Bolsheviks disbanded the Pale, which is partly why so many Jews joined their ranks, and ended college Jewish quotas. But pogroms continued during the civil war, from 1917 to 1922.<\/p>\n
Vladimir Putin hands flowers to the rumored mother of his children, Alina Kabayeva. AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Soon Jews moved from the Pale to the cities and enrolled in the universities, and life began to improve for some. Until Stalin entered the picture and began to unwind women\u2019s advances, like his 1936 abortion ban \u2014 while his personal crew made advances of their own.<\/p>\n
Ioffe recalls a story her grandmother told on one of their walks, as she pointed out a certain mansion she knew to avoid as a young girl. It had belonged to Stalin\u2019s evil secret-police chief Lavrentiy Beria, who would drive through Moscow streets looking for young girls to bring home to dine, drug and rape. He threatened to harm their families if they ever said a word. (Nikita Khrushchev arrested Beria three months after Stalin\u2019s death in 1953.)<\/p>\n
Stalin continued the purges, show trials and torture of \u201cenemies of the people\u201d Lenin started. The secret police, the NKVD, snatched men, often in black cars in the middle of the night, and sent them to the gulag. Women were snatched as well \u2014 imprisoned in camps for traitors\u2019 wives. Some of them were pregnant, their kids birthed en route to the camps or in them and sent to hellish orphanages that transformed them into the living dead, abused, starved, some too traumatized to speak.<\/p>\n
World War II gave women another stab at equality, when hundreds of thousands of Soviet women served in active combat \u2014 when it was off limits for American women. A women\u2019s machine-gun battalion defended Odesa before its fall; another fought in Kyiv, where the Nazis murdered a large portion of the Jewish population at Babi Yar.<\/p>\n
Some 200,000 Soviet women signed up for the Russian air force, including a night bomber regiment the Germans dubbed the Night Witches. More than 2,000 women trained to become snipers, with 12,000 recorded kills. Their ranks included Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who enrolled in a cr\u00eape de chine dress and white summer heels \u2014 and ended up with 309 recorded kills. Pavlichenko made waves in Los Angeles on a propaganda-style fundraising tour for the Soviet war effort. Charlie Chaplin walked over to her on his hands, carrying Champagne in his teeth; he got down on his knees and kissed every one of her fingers for killing fascists. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her. Yet Pavlichenko was later downgraded to teaching while the far-less-skilled male Soviet sniper she\u2019d toured with was back in the field.<\/p>\n
Lyudmila Pavlichenko enlisted in the military wearing a cr\u00eape de chine dress and white summer heels. UIG via Getty Images<\/p>\n
That was the last time Soviet women saw active combat. Around 21 million Soviet men did not make it home. Surviving women made do with those who returned, no matter how shattered they were by the war, as millions more remained homeless, hungry, sick and in dire need of care.<\/p>\n
While Stalin embraced Jews to fight during the war, that changed when it ended. The Soviet Union supported Israel\u2019s creation, and Kyiv-born Golda Meyerson became Israel\u2019s first ambassador to the Soviet Union \u2014\u00a0and eventually Prime Minister Golda Meir. But Stalin also began to round up Jews as \u201crootless cosmopolitans\u201d and purged them from prestigious jobs. Under the fake doctors\u2019 plot, hundreds of Jewish doctors were captured and tortured, with some dying in jail. Ioffe\u2019s great grandmother Riva lost her job as a doctor, as her patients now feared she was poisoning their children. The doctors\u2019 plot ended only with Stalin\u2019s death in 1953.<\/p>\n
Khrushchev then launched an assault on unmarried single mothers, inadvertently rewarding men for adultery and absolving them of responsibility for their out-of-wedlock offspring. Abortion was legal again in 1955.<\/p>\n
The travails of Olga, Ioffe\u2019s mother, can be particularly difficult to read. Yet Ioffe\u2019s prose \u2014 steady, straightforward and unflinching \u2014 lets the stories tell themselves, no matter how painful. More than 80% of Soviet women had at least one abortion and often between three and seven \u2014 a rate six and a half times higher than America\u2019s. In 1989, the Soviet Union had 6% of the world\u2019s population but 20% of the world\u2019s abortions. Ioffe\u2019s grandmother Emma had several abortions, and Emma\u2019s grandmother Riva had nearly died from complications following one.<\/p>\n
When Olga found out she was pregnant, she was \u201cdesperate\u201d to miscarry, drinking wine, carrying suitcases, even engaging an anesthesiologist who moonlighted in acupuncture. \u201cWhen the doctor stuck the needles in, Olga fainted, so she tried having a specialist tap her sacrum with spiky metal hammers instead. Nothing worked. The pregnancy stuck. In October, I was born. It had not been a pleasant pregnancy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two years after Ioffe and her family left, I landed in Moscow, in January 1992. The Soviet Union had just dissolved with the stroke of a pen. What I discovered and chronicled was a world in turmoil. People had lost their life savings. In the clubs, daughters of diplomats who spoke multiple languages turned into prostitutes. I talked to women who studied the art of sexpionage in spy school.<\/p>\n
Ioffe\u2019s maternal great-grandmother, Riva Weisser (far left), teaching an adult literacy class in the 1920s. Courtesy of Julia Ioffe<\/p>\n
Western nations were flooding Russia with money and brainpower to help it transition to democratic capitalism. But aid was often stolen, advisers were too often corruptible, and Russia\u2019s humiliation on the world stage intensified. In the post-Soviet chaos, Russia had actually amped up its espionage activities \u2014 against foreign countries and corporations. I was there for a brief moment when Russia had cracked open a window to the West, but that window soon slammed shut. The West na\u00efvely thought the ex-Communist countries\u2019 shaky march to liberal democracy was inevitable. But while America was celebrating the Cold War\u2019s end, Russia kept on fighting.<\/p>\n
Like Ioffe\u2019s, my family came from various parts of the Pale of Settlement, but they had left just before and after the revolution. Still, pogrom stories were part of our family lore. There was the woman I thought was my great aunt who was adopted by my grandfather\u2019s family after hers was murdered in a pogrom, my grandfather spared only because he was in the next village over, studying for his bar mitzvah. When my maternal grandmother, who was 10 when she left Odesa with her family, found out I planned to move to Moscow, she laughed so hard she cried. No one she knew ever moved there voluntarily.<\/p>\n
Communism\u2019s collapse had upended so many lives, including generations of men who were drinking themselves to death. The women I knew who left were highly ambitious, motivated and extremely successful.<\/p>\n
When Ioffe decided to study Russian history and literature in college, she said her father warned her Russia is \u201ca country without a future.\u201d She didn\u2019t agree then, but she does now: \u201cRussia\u2019s future would never be different from its present or past.\u201d Save for Catherine the Great, Russia has always been a land of one-man rule, whether czar or Communist. Hope for the future can only come when this equation changes.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To read Julia Ioffe\u2019s new book, \u201cMotherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy\u201d is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":545523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[3444,285,104811,332,105844,727],"class_list":{"0":"post-545522","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-politics","10":"tag-postscript","11":"tag-russia","12":"tag-russians","13":"tag-us-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115483870787475061","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/545523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}