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

Julia Ioffe left the USSR as a child and came back as an adult journalist to find that the confident, credentialed women she remembered from her Soviet childhood had largely been supplanted by those chasing marriage and domesticity instead. That disorienting reversal is the engine of her book Motherland, a National Book Award finalist that reconstructs modern Russian history almost entirely through its women. Her account, drawn from her own family's history as well as the archives, keeps returning to one plain observation: Soviet policy pushed women into the workforce, the medical schools, and even into combat, while asking so little of men that low expectations became self-fulfilling—and Russia is still living with the results.

Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia's great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist government established women's medical courses in 1872, changing attitudes towards abortion and birth control in the 20th century, why the Soviet regime turned prudish, how Khrushchev's plan to "replace the dead" institutionalized single motherhood, Russian superwomen, why Jewish men were a prized commodity amid rampant antisemitism, the cultural significance of flowers, why a few Russian names still dominate, why Russian women think Western feminists have their priorities backwards, how gender attitudes and autocracy feed into each other, three underrated Russian novels, what she wants to write about next, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded April 7th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:06:38 - Bolshevik feminism

00:08:41 - Birth control, abortion, and prudery

00:14:48 - The Russian mating market

00:23:06 - Russian superwomen

00:32:02 - The importance of flowers

00:37:35 - Common Russian names

00:39:51 - Russian vs. American feminism

00:44:23 - Gender attitudes and Russian politics

00:49:54 - Russian novels

00:54:33 - Outro

Photo credit: Max Avdeev