Julia Ioffe Wants You to Know Russia Is Bigger Than Putin

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1:46Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. A quick note that this episode includes a discussion of sexual violence that some listeners might find distressing. Is Motherland part of a response to being asked so much about one man, Putin? God, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm just so sick of talking about him. Julia Yoffy, political journalist, interpreter of Russia, and now author of an epic book on the women of Russia. On one hand, I get it. He is the sole decision maker, effectively, in a dictatorial state. But I know from my own experience that Russia is bigger and more complex than that. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michelle Hussain Show.

2:38I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:46To set out to tell the story of an entire country over more than a century is such an immense undertaking that it's almost hard to imagine, let alone deliver. And I think I got interested in Julia Yoffe, first of all, because of the scale of that ambition and because the country that she's revealing is one that's important for all of us to understand. The Soviet Union was a major part of defeating Nazism in World War Two. And yet today, Russia is engaged in a war of aggression against its neighbor, Ukraine. Julia is a Russian-American journalist. journalist. She's based in Washington now, but she has spent more than a decade reporting from and on Russia.

3:31And in her new book, Motherland, she is telling the story of Russia through its women. Some of them notable, who've been airbrushed by history, others who would have thought their lives completely unremarkable, but whose experiences tell us something about authoritarianism, what it meant and what it means today. Within it, too, are the women of Julia's own family, her mother, her grandmothers, her great-grandmothers, many lives which resonated with me, as I hope they will with you through the course of this conversation, which begins with Julia herself and her early years in 1980s Moscow. I actually was born in a country that no longer exists in many senses of the word.

4:19I was born in the Soviet Union and no longer does that country not exist, but also the emancipatory experiment it embarked on in 1917 vis-a-vis its women also evaporated. Yes. And before we get to the stories within the book, I'm keen to understand more of your own story because you do weave between the big history of Russia and individual stories. When you were living in Russia for those first seven years of your life, what do you remember of that time? The little things that I really liked that were ultra specific, you know how kids like very specific things. So there was never orange gum. I really liked orange gum.

5:00I had it once and then I never saw it again. This was the era of deficits and empty store shelves. I remember a lot of time spent with my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, who was a cardiologist and quite a formidable woman. And she lived four floors down from us. She had a very vibrant social life. On the evenings she was home, I would saunter down to her apartment and we would read and write stories. And I was her Cinderella and she was my prince. I'm going to pick out a few stories of individual or women from the book. And I'm conscious as I do so that this is a very limited choice of the massive tapestry that you have.

5:39But to go back to the foundations of Soviet Russia into 1917 and the revolution, tell us about Alexandra Kollontai, who is at Lenin's side and is the one who lays the framework for women in Soviet Russia and the way that they do have an equality that is unusual for that time. So the Bolsheviks were unusual in that while all the revolutionary parties were grappling with what at the time in the late 19th century was called the woman question, the Bolsheviks were by far the most egalitarian of all the underground opposition parties to the Tsar. And while Karl Marx and most of the kind of the old guard, the Marxist founding fathers, kind of yada-yadded the part of how communism and socialism was to liberate women specifically.

6:33Alexandra Kolontai really fleshed out these ideas about what would be needed for women to be truly emancipated, for them to be truly equal to men in a future utopian, egalitarian, socialist society. And when she is named the Commissar for People's Social Welfare... Which is a cabinet position. Yes, she was the first female cabinet minister. And in 1918, she institutes some incredibly radical reforms. Women are given the right to no-fault divorce. Women get paid maternity leave. In 1918, access to free higher education. Child support that they can claim even from a man who is not their husband, even for a child that is born out of wedlock.

7:24Regulations on maternity care, both medical and in terms of the facilities. In 1920, the Soviet Union legalizes abortion and makes it free and relatively safe for Soviet women. And yet, she would have bristled if we called her a feminist. Really? They were very anti-feminist because they were socialist. For socialists, class comes above everything, right? Everything is subsumed to class. So anything that breaks people out further by gender, nationality, religion, is seen as bourgeois splitterism. And you studied Soviet history here in the U.S., right? You grew up in the U.S., West Beking, here in Washington.

8:07Did you know about her? Is she someone who is sort of noted properly in Soviet? No. Studying Soviet history, you didn't know about her? No, I didn't know about her. What happened? She was written out of the history by the Bolsheviks. She was very quickly banished. The Bolsheviks were radically egalitarian when they were in the underground and the stakes were quite low and they weren't in charge of anything. The second they took power, they were like, OK, the men get the real positions of power. And also, the history was written by men. And they don't take these issues seriously as a rule. I think for male historians, male journalists, war is important.

8:50Economics, you know, like numbers, big factories and pipes and guns are important. And this kind of stuff is seen as soft and not serious. And I think, I don't know if that reflects your experience in the profession, but in my experience, you very much have to write about those topics to be taken seriously. And then you think those are the only serious topics when writing about a country. And that is why I was reluctant to even do a book about Russian women. I had to be talked into it because I was like, that's not serious. I want to bring out another couple of women from motherland. And one of them is really tragic and painful.

9:31It's Valentina Drozdova, who was raped by Stalin's henchman, Beria, one of many girls and women who he abducted and assaulted. How hard was it to uncover a story of someone like that who was abused and it affected the rest of her life? Very, very, very hard. Because, so on one hand, people knew anecdotally that this was happening. People even knew where it was happening. People knew where Beria lived. They knew what went on in that house, that he cruised the streets of Moscow looking for pretty young girls, that he brought them back to his mansion and raped them, that he hunted for Soviet actresses on the silver screen.

10:15And if they had husbands, you know, if they hid behind, you know, I can't sleep with you because I'm married, he would take care of that so they were no longer married. Get rid of the husband. Yeah. And your grandmother told you about this. Yeah. She pointed out the house to you. She did. She did. but then I found out my father had heard about it as a kid. His father had told him. So even the men knew. But when I went to find this in the kind of historical canon in the West, it really wasn't written about. It was usually relegated to a footnote or a kind of parenthetical as something salacious and prurient and unserious, that it's about sex and so it's not serious and it's kind of gross and let's not dig into it.

11:01And when I asked very prominent American historians of the Soviet Union, they waved me off the topic and were like, we don't really know. You know, it's a he said, she said. What was the most devastating for me though? I mean, it was very hard to research. I was able to find a collection of documents from Beria's arrest and secret trial and execution. women would write to him on behalf of their fathers, their husbands, and say, I know he's innocent, can you let him go? And his lieutenants would go and find out if the woman writing was pretty. And if she was, she'd be called in on the pretense of Barry helping with her family's case, only for the, you know, tragic inevitable to happen.

11:49But the most devastating aspect in researching this was, I pretty easily found one of Valentina Drozdova's boyfriends, one of her lovers from later in life. She was married again and then had a series of paramours. And this man told me a lot about her life and about how broken she was and how because Beria was shot and killed and then her second husband, who was a black marketeer, was arrested, shot and killed. People called her Liala the coffin as if it were her fault, as if she was the one bringing bad luck to these men. He told me that, so Beria eventually impregnated her and she had the baby at 17.

12:33And this man told me that when Laleh was her nickname, when she was in labor, Beria called her at the hospital and said, you know, whatever you want, I'll give you whatever you want. And because she was just a child herself, she asked for a bicycle. And this man told me that she died in 2014. That means she was alive when I was living in Moscow. She was alive when I was traveling back and forth. After I moved back to Washington, I could have found her. I could have interviewed her. But I was so busy writing about Putin and what Putin wants and what Putin thinks and not thinking about the quote unquote quote, unserious things, like women and sexual violence as a tool of the state, that I totally missed it.

13:23And I massively regret it to this day. Is Motherland part of a response to being asked so much about one man, Putin? God, yeah. Absolutely. And what he wants. Yeah. I'm just so sick of talking about him. On one hand, I get it. He is the sole decision maker, effectively, in a dictatorial state. But I know from my own experience that Russia is bigger and more complex than that. And even a dictatorship is multifaceted when you start looking closely at it. And even a country like the Soviet Union, which was a totalitarian dictatorship, dictator to dictator, the periods were different. And I just, I, on one hand, wanted to write a book where he was a bit player.

14:12And this was one of the reasons I wrote the book, not the main one, but I, the original impetus for wanting to kind of take a time out in 2017, when all of Washington was obsessed with Donald Trump and his relationship to Vladimir Putin, that I was like, I just never want to talk about Vladimir Putin again. We're there again, though, with Trump and Putin, which we may come back to. I hope you'll forgive me if you come back to that. But Putin does feature in Lyudmila Putin, his now ex-wife, is one of the characters. Tell us about finding this one interview that she once gave about him. It's quite a feat that you managed to track it down.

14:50So she sat for a number of interviews when Putin was named interim president. He had three months to get elected, you know, quote-unquote legitimately. And his spin doctors put together this campaign memoir in the American style, and she sat for interviews for that. So that's widely available. But then in 2002, there was an authorized biography that came out, and it was supposed to be the first of several volumes. That first volume featured hours of interviews with Lyudmila, his first wife. And clearly she She was resentful and unhappy, and the resentments had piled up over the course of their marriage, over the first two years of his presidency, and the fact that he didn't even tell her that he was going to become president.

15:38She didn't even find out when her countryman did on TV because she didn't even know to turn on the TV to watch Boris Yeltsin hand over the presidency to her husband. And she pours her heart out to this interviewer and tells him all about what a horrible boyfriend Vladimir Putin was, what a terrible fiance he was, what an even worse husband he was. And after that book is published, I have no idea what happened to that author. I can't find him. And I couldn't find, I had seen people refer to this book, but I could, you know, trying to find the original source was almost impossible because the book was out of print.

16:19And even though you can get any Russian book pirated 75 different ways online for free, this one was nowhere. It had clearly been purged from the web. I found one copy on Amazon for about$200 when it was originally about$3, I think. And it was a treasure trove of information about, pardon my French, what an a**hole Vladimir Putin was at home. What a tyrant he was at home before he became a tyrant to the rest of the world.

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19:44Let's go to your return to Russia. I know after emigrating with your parents, you went back once as a visitor, but then you returned in 2009 in your own right. And you end up living back in the same apartment block that you lived in when you were growing up with your parents? Yeah, I lived on a fold-out couch in my grandmother's apartment. We had been on the seventh floor. She was on the third in what had originally been her mother-in-law, my great-grandmother's apartment. And I lived on a fold-out couch in the living room for three years and had a blast. Some of the best years of my life watching a Russia that now in retrospect, we know was in a temporary thaw under Medvedev when media outlets were sprouting up and there was this freedom to speak, to think.

20:31And there was a sense that maybe some of the powers and the freedoms and the liberties that Putin had taken away during his first two terms in office between 2000 and 2008 could be returned. Free elections, free press, an independent judiciary, a releasing of political prisoners. And it was this moment of incredible ferment and excitement and people getting rich. The riches are insane. I mean, I had never seen wealth like this, not even living in New York, because Westerners don't flaunt their wealth quite the same way. And I also noticed that women had changed. They weren't like the women in my family.

21:13It was like, Like we left 20 years beforehand and were this weird extinct species preserved in amber back in the U.S. where post-Soviet women had evolved to be these oligarch hunters, essentially. Wanting husbands rather than... Wanting rich husbands. Do you see parallels to today and the trad wives? Mm-hmm. Except the trad wife thing here in the U.S. is much more intense and kind of has this kind of homesteader aspect to it. the women in Russia who wanted to marry rich and who wanted to stay home didn't want to have eight kids and cook all their meals from scratch, you know, and make their kids cereal from scratch because, you know, I woke up this morning and my husband was craving gum.

21:59So I decided to make it from scratch kind of, you know, I think people will know which influencer I'm talking about. They wanted to not have to cook to maybe have one kid or two kids, but they wanted to just live for themselves and get their nails done and get massages and travel. And how did you fit into that? Because you're a young woman at that time. You're dating in Moscow in the 2000s. You didn't date? Not really. I mean, I was, I felt in this environment coming from the West, coming with my parents' ideas about what it meant to be a woman. You know, in my family, it was just assume that you go to college.

22:38When I was just starting out in journalism and in media, my father, who as a Soviet didn't understand what being a journalist was, said something to me that only in retrospect I realized was incredibly feminist of him without him even realizing it. He said, sure, it's fun now to be a journalist and have this bohemian lifestyle, but when you're 30 and you have a family, how are you going to support them? How are you going to make money to support them. The underlying assumption being that I would be the main breadwinner. And that didn't even, that was just the natural assumption, both for me and for my sister.

23:15Add to that Western feminism that was everywhere. I get to Russia and it's women just want to wear crazy heels and are made up all the time and are kind of cosplaying femininity and are just constantly hunting for men. That's just what they wake up thinking about, what they go to bed thinking about. And in that context, I felt like a third asexual gender or like a talking dog that didn't fit in at all. And I think Russian men found me bewildering. Do they see you as Russian in that period? I don't mean Russian men. No, they saw me as very American and as a feminist, which was a bad word, still is a bad word.

23:59I've been told that by a friend who runs a publishing house in Moscow that they can't translate my book because feminist is now essentially a banned word and it's in the feminist history. And Western men, that was the most disappointing part is Western men who are highly educated, who had gone to the Harvards and the Stanfords and the Cambridges, went to Russia and were so happy to throw feminism overboard because they had these women who were like, oh, I'll just be the traditional, very pliant, subservient, ultra feminine woman for you. And you're in charge. And I'll do anything you say. And they love it.

24:38They loved it. Plus, these women look like supermodels. And they loved it. And then, of course, they would wake up to realize, I think I'm paying my girlfriend an allowance, but I'm not sure. What did your parents make of you coming back to Russia and immersing yourself in the study of the Soviet Union, because when they emigrated in 1990, they do it, don't they? Because they fear that pogroms are going to come again. Yeah. That's why my mother gave my father the green light, is she, in 1988, had heard the widespread rumor at the time that to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of Russia becoming Christian, that there would be pogroms and that the police were handing out names and addresses of Jews.

25:21And she realized that even though nothing ultimately happened, that it was believable. And she gave my father the green light to start the emigration process, but he had wanted to leave forever. He hated the system. He hated the totalitarianism, the lying, the, you know, war is peace, the lies, the truth, kind of logic twisting. So when I went to college, a college they could not afford, as refugees who had only been in the country for a few years, they took out massive loans for me to go to this prestigious university, and I decided to study Soviet history, and I'm like, oh, I just read about Marxism, Leninism, and all the stuff that they had been forced to learn and hated.

26:09And wanted to leave behind. And wanted to leave behind. They were horrified, and they couldn't understand why I was doing it. Moreover, as my father kept saying, this country has no future. Why are you doing this? You have a future. Russia doesn't. Keep uncoupling the two. I want to talk about one of the people that you got to know in that period when you went back to Moscow in the 2000s. Can you take those headphones and have a listen to this voice? All this sacrifice made from my family, my brother, made by Boris Nemtsov, who was killed, who was shot in the back, close to the Kremlin. A lot of other people, we have political prisoners, hundreds of them all over Russia.

26:58And if I will stop, it means all this sacrifice, this, are useless. And they are not. And I do believe in what I'm doing. And I do believe that my alternative is better for Russia. and I'm absolutely sure that we will succeed and I believe in victory. That's tough to hear. Tough to hear because it's Alexei Navalny. Yeah. Sorry. There are tears in your eyes. Tell me about meeting him for the first time, what you thought of him then. I think it was 2011? 2010. He was a kind of up-and-coming blogger who was writing about corruption and the way that the Putinist regime was using state corporations to funnel money away from Russian taxpayers to the pockets of Putin's friends.