Review: Vivien Horler
Motherland – A feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy, by Julia Ioffe (William Collins)
Julia Ioffe is a 40-something American-based, Russian-born writer and journalist of great accomplishment – if Motherland is anything to go by.
In her introduction to this magisterial history, told always from the female point of view, Julia Ioffe talks about her female relatives: her sister the oncologist, her mother the pathologist, her grandmother the cardiologist (to whom the book is dedicated) and her great-grandmother the paediatrician.
Americans, she says, consider this history to be extraordinary, but measured against the history of Soviet women of the 20th century, Ioffe’s forebears were “perfectly average people” who happened to be the products “of one of the most radical social experiments in history: the attempt to emancipate women and build a new Soviet person”.
By 1917, Soviet women were able to vote, and by 1918 they had the right to no-fault divorce and child support, paid maternity leave and free higher education. In 1920 they were granted the right to abortion, provided free by the state – but without anaesthesia.
When she was under 10 Ioffe’s family left Russia for the US. Yet years later, when she returned to Moscow on a Fulbright, she found educated, intelligent, cosmopolitan women “orientating their entire lives around attracting men and tricking them into staying put. The pinnacle of their fantasies was to become a stay-at- home wife”.
This book tells the extraordinary tale of how all that came about.
In looking to review Motherland I tried to figure out where to focus. The book covers such a broad sweep of history it is hard to know where to start. Should it be with Alexandra Kollontai, born to privilege, who became a Marxist revolutionary and the world’s first cabinet minister, key to the introduction of women’s rights such as the vote, divorce and higher education?
Or with Nadezhda Krupskaya, Vladimir Lenin’s wife, and Inessa Armand, his mistress, who were both active in the women’s section of the Communist Party? Or with the wives and daughters of Soviet leaders, including Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter who eventually defected to the United States; Galina Brezhneva, daughter of Leonid Brezhnev; Raisa Gorbacheva, wife of perestroika president Mikhail Gorbachev?
And then there are the modern figures, such as the members of Pussy Riot; Yulia Navalnaya, widow of murdered opposition leader Alexei Navaly, and the mothers today fighting for their sons’ live return from Ukraine?
Threaded through the narrative are Ioffe’s stories about her own family, great-grandmothers, grandmothers and mother, and how life, while undeniably “liberated”, frequently led to the worst of all possible worlds, expecting them to perform demanding jobs while generally doing all the work traditionally expected of wives and mothers, often in shared accommodation with no facilities like fridges or washing machines, and being expected to queue for food.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the reborn Russian Orthodox church cosied up to the political elite (hence the outrage at the demonstration in church by Pussy Riot).
In The Guardian of Saturday September 19, there is a report of a woman known as Rita Flores, 29, a former member of Pussy Riot who was recruited to spy for the FSB, the successor to the KGB. She said she had been told if she did not agree to spy on her mates, her mother would be killed. Having read this book, the threat sounds entirely credible.
The FSB wanted her to persuade a former Pussy Riot activist Pyotr (or Petya) Verzilov, now based in Ukraine and fighting for that country, to meet her in Serbia where they would kill him. Verzilov had been married to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, founder of Pussy Riot.
Last month Flores fled Russia, and is now telling all.
The war in Ukraine, sorry, the special military operatation, has led to some bizarre moments with, for example, a quote from the governor of St Petersburg describing his visits to hospitaised soldiers back from the Ukraine battlefields who had seen untold horrors. These included, he said, “gender-neutral bathrooms”.
Right out of the Trumpian playbook. Or maybe Trump got it all from Putin.
I found one (of many) sections – dealing with reproductive rights – fascinating. The general introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1960s and 1970s changed Western women’s lives, and in fact Western society.
In Russia, where abortion had been legal since 1920 and birth control since 1923, things were different. In the early 1980s, when Ioffe’s mother Olga became pregnant with her on her honeymoon, she was desperate for an abortion.
Ioffe describes the birth control methods then available: the locally produced pill had so many side-effects the health ministry had banned it, while imported pills were unavailable. IUDs were so poor they often damaged the uterus or cervix, diaphragms were “rudimentary” and condoms – known as “galoshes” – broke, were thick, rarely lubricated, and despised by men.
What was left were the rhythm method, douching with lemon juice or vinegar, or using a hand-shower immediately after sex.
When all this failed, women turned to abortion. Ioffe tells us more than 80% of Soviet women had at least one abortion; most women could expect to have between three and seven – a rate 6.5 times higher than that of the US.
Because of its ubiquity, abortion was not a taboo topic. Olga knew her mother had had several abortions, as had her grandmother. Now Olga was pregnant herself, and while not wanting the baby, was superstitious about terminating a first pregnancy (it was believed to cause lifetime infertility).
So she didn’t have an abortion – although she did do the things thought to cause a miscarriage, like carrying heavy loads, drinking alcohol and jumping off anything that seemed high enough. None of them worked, and the author of this book was born.
For which I’m sure Olga was ultimately glad, as are we for having access to this remarkable book. The progression from the high hopes of the revolution (we’ll skip the horrors meted out to the aristocracy for now) to the extraorinary progress of women’s rights, the further horrors of the Stalin era, the brief bright light of glasnost and perestroika, and the descent into the present repression and autocracy make for extremely sobering reading.