The Tragedy of the Russian Woman

Through a cracking CWT episode, I discovered Julia Ioffe’s ‘Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy’. The book traces the entire arc of Russian history from the Bolsheviks to Putin through a feminist lens and the lived experiences of Ioffe’s own family (who also happen to be Jewish and experienced the worst of Stalin and Hitler).

Some insights were shocking and fascinating at the same time. The tragedy of being a Russian woman throughout the 20^th century was simply too hard to ignore.

The Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 and created some of the most extraordinary pieces of legislation around gender. Abortion was legalized, schools and colleges were thrown open to girls, men and women were equal before the law, and getting a divorce was made easy. Some of the impacts of this was that in the 70s, more than 70% of doctors in Russia were women.

The Second World War and the reign of Stalin and Khrushchev were the worst things for Russian womanhood. WWII killed off close to 25 million men in Russia alone. Societies don’t recover from such gender skewed numbers without drastic social engineering.

Iofffe explains that there were multiple villages with almost no men to get married to. In many such villages, it was common for married women to ‘loan’ their husbands to impregnate the women of the villages to tide over the crisis.

Stalin and Khrushchev, in a quest to increase the working male population, decided to make divorce harder and worst of all made abortion illegal. One of the most draconian aspects of the new family code was that it freed men from providing for their illegitimate offspring. (The thinking was that this would allow men to be reckless and populate the country as a duty to the Motherland). Thus with one stroke, the burden of raising the children of an entire generation fell on millions of single women who were also expected to play the role of the absent father. And this very same ‘absent father’ phenomenon created a generation of Russian men who decided that bravado and machismo were always better than empathy. With the downfall of the Soviet economy from the 80s, the men, emasculated and employed, took to the bottle. Alcoholism in Russia pushed the life expectancy of men to the 50s in the 1990s.

So in a span of 80 years, Russia had the Bolshevik women who were expected to be freed from the kitchen and participate on a equal footing with the men, the Stalinist woman who was expected work and reproduce, the WWII woman who was expected to work, reproduce and also fight and finally the post-war woman who was expected to work, reproduce and raise children without a father. The State took on this role – building creches, schools and colleges.

Ioffe’s work also sheds light on many of Russia’s remarkable female luminaries: Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolshevik revolutionary, pioneering advocate of women’s emancipation and one of the world’s first female diplomats; Inessa Armand, the revolutionary and early leader of the Bolsheviks’ efforts to organize and emancipate women (and Lenin’s lover); Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and a major figure in Soviet education and literacy; and Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, whose work chronicled love, suffering and life under Stalinist repression. Will read up more on them and write hopefully someday soon.

In the ongoing war in Ukraine, the brutality of Russian boys being sent to the front-lines as cannon fodder has been well-documented. And once again, the fight to save the boys is being taken up by the Russian mothers.