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

25:35Then 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 three 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.

26:21Then 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 a repair, what socks need darning, what poles 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 Roblova. He'd take the bus home. He would get off a couple stops early because there were beautiful forests in this area.

26:54And 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.

27:39On 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.

27:58Tyler Cowen: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. 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.

28:33And 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, 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.

29:29And 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.

30:18He drinks a lot. He smokes a lot. He's reckless. He's careless and takes a lot of risk, and that usually means an early death. So if you have fewer men to begin with, and 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 going to be a beautiful, super competent woman to take him if you don't want him?

30:51Tyler Cowen: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, and culturally came from a very kind of family-centric tradition. and Russian women actually, you know, for all the intense anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, in Russia, Jewish men were actually a prized commodity for Russian women.

31:34Tyler Cowen:With ethnic Russian women. Yes. Ethnic Ukrainian women, you name it. Because the cultural stereotype was that Jewish men don't drink, they don't hit you, they are family-focused, family-oriented, their 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.

32:16Tyler Cowen: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. I've been to Russia. Okay. When did she come over? 1991, I believe. Right before the Soviet Union fell. Okay. Was she an adult? Jewish refugee. Was she an adult or a kid? An adult. An adult, yeah. With a daughter, one quarter Armenian. Oh, wow. The rest Jewish, pal of 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.

32:53Tyler Cowen: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 that 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.

33:25And you got to give flowers to women on their birthday on March 8th, which is International Women's Day, which is ironically when...

33:34Tyler Cowen: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. I'm not ready. Place your order now. Yes. Because what? We have six days. That's right. 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 this is the tradition I come from. You did the work of and of course, you don't give something to the father.

34:10Give it to the mother in recognition of the fact that let's be real. She's the one who raised the kid.

34:15Tyler Cowen: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 Simanian, the head of RT. He gives her flowers with the medal. I know that when Toria Newland 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.

34:59and 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?

35:16Tyler Cowen:Something about the 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. Yeah. 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.

35:53I 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 cartoonish. And women were cartoonishly feminized. I remember when I lived in Russia, a Westerner made a joke that all Russian women look like Jessica Rabbit. Right. And what do all women want? They want jewelry. They want flowers.

36:37They 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.

37:16They 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.

37:35Tyler Cowen:The question has long puzzled me, but why do so many Soviet and or Russian women? They seem to have about five names. And my short list is Masha, Natasha, Lena, Katya, and Yulia. My wife is a Natasha. You're Yulia, right? Yeah. You missed Olga? Maybe the six, yeah. Oh my God, there's a lot of Olgas. There's a lot of Olgas, yeah. You did Mila, 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 Michael.

38:17You know Michael. And she was like, Julia, everybody here is named Michael. You know, Michael. 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 Yulias, so many other Olias. Natasha. Yeah. Natasha, Masha, Svetlana, Людmila, Katia.

38:37Tyler Cowen:Yeah. And with the men, it's Michael, Sergei. Peter, right? Peter, yeah. Yeah. Let's see who else. Vолодya. Vladimir, right? Yeah. Andrei. Sure. I know so many. Yeah. 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. Your parents might not have been weirdos. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's just a very conformist place. And these are girls' names and these are boys' names.

39:16I 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, Zakhar and Seva for boys. And for girls, you see Aleftina or Agronia, 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.

39:53Tyler Cowen: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 ugly and manhating. 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 believe 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?

40:42And why do you put down men? Why do you hate men when they 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 like, 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.

41:20And 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?

41:53you want to look good. You never know.

41:56Tyler Cowen:And the attitudes toward the Me Too 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, four years ago. And there were different attitudes toward the Me Too movement. There was a very strong kind of indigenous Me Too movement that actually started in Ukraine in 2016 and then crossed over into Russia called Yanyabayuskazay, I'm Not Afraid to Say. It was a hashtag years before Me Too where Ukrainian women and then Russian women took to social media and said, I'm not afraid to talk about my experience.

42:38My 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 Me Too 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.

43:21There 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, etc. 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. 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.

44:09They should have not done that. They're stupid and the state should let them out because they need to be with their little kids.

44:16Tyler Cowen: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 inform 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? 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, special effects, and you see him morphed into lying in a dugout with a gun.

45:04Or a man standing there bored as a security guard at a supermarket and he's, you know, standing guard at a checkpoint in Ukraine. And various other images transforming a kind of emasculated, pathetic, 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.

45:53He has the windows open in January and there's all these girls running around in bikinis in 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 cover of the war, Russia has pushed, Putin has pushed even more pronatalist measures, even more restrictions on abortion. They've criminalized the child-free 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.

46:31That 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 children. And ironically, Vladimir Putin announced that 2024 was to be the year of the family.

47:09In 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 also very critically, six years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia decriminalized 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 is, you know, the traditionalist way that husbands behaved.

47:55They 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.

48:34Tyler Cowen: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 volunteer to fight.

49:17And some of the best snipers the Soviet 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.

49:59Tyler Cowen: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 Zulekha by Kuzel Yajina. 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 Huladamor, the Ukrainian famine, but it also hit the Central Asian Republics really hard, and it hit the enclaves like Tatarstan very, very hard.

50:52And this novel is long, like a lot of Russian novels, but it's pretty extraordinary, and

50:59Tyler Cowen: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 the 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.

51:50If 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.

52:30and 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, 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?

53:10It's a really poignant, beautiful, heartbreaking book.

53:14Tyler Cowen: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 Erica Kirks, about the Trad Wives, 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.

54:05and because so much of what I was writing about at the end of Motherland, my American readers, first my editors, my agent, and then 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 U.S. And is this where we're going to end up in the U.S.? 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.

54:37Tyler Cowen:Julia Yaffe, 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 at Tyler Cowen and the show is at Cow and Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.