The Soviet Union forged its women into supermen and spoiled its men into uselessness
27 million Soviet citizens died in the Second World War, and men became a scarce resource; the state used an abortion ban, rewards for children fathered outside marriage, and the decriminalization of domestic violence to forge its women into supermen and spoil its men into uselessness — an order that still underwrites Putin's patriarchal mobilization.
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The Soviet female elite was made by tsarist radicalism, not by Bolshevism
Tsarist law was harsh: without her husband's permission a woman could not do a great many things. But the same country had a radical tradition that produced women revolutionaries — Sofia Perovskaya, who assassinated Alexander II, was a woman, and there were so many women revolutionaries that the tsar had to build a separate women's prison. Radical women were shut out of the universities, so those who could afford it went to Switzerland to study medicine; the secret police then worried they were being radicalized abroad, and that fear is why Russia opened women's medical institutes at home — to keep watch on them close by. After the 1917 revolution free higher education was opened to women and to Jews, and two generations of Julia's family benefited from it. But the root lies in the pre-revolutionary radical tradition.
— Julia IoffeAbortion became the only contraception Soviet women actually had
The Bolsheviks legalized abortion in 1920 and followed with contraception in 1923, but contraceptive supplies were always short, so abortion became the only contraception Soviet women actually had. By the end of her childbearing years, the average Soviet woman had had between 3 and 12 abortions, and many had far more. Stalin made abortion illegal again in 1936, but elites could still find a doctor while ordinary women went underground. Ioffe quotes an old Russian saying: the harshness of the law is diluted by the need to get around it.
— Julia IoffeSoviet population policy deliberately split childbearing from fatherhood
The Second World War cost the Soviet Union 27 million people, 20.1 million of them men. To ‘replace the dead’, Stalin and Khrushchev introduced the policy of 1944: divorce became extremely hard, which locked men into marriage, while at the same time men were encouraged to father children outside it. A child born out of wedlock could not have the father's name entered on the record and could not claim support from him; the state paid the mother monthly and handed out medals according to the number of children — and the medal scheme was copied directly from the Nazis. The result was that a third of the postwar baby boom was born outside marriage, and an entire generation of children had a blank where the father belongs on the birth certificate. From then on childbearing was decoupled from fatherhood, the Soviet single mother became a protected legal status, and men slowly became surplus at home.
— Julia IoffeThe belief that men don't grow on trees was manufactured by policy
The sex imbalance hardened into a belief passed down the generations. Ioffe says her grandmothers used to tell her that men don't grow on trees, and her mother warned her to secure a husband while she was still at university, because otherwise ‘all the good ones have been taken’. Women were taught to maximize their own attractiveness, or another woman would lead their husband away — one Russian sociologist scoffed: are men calves, that you can walk them on a rope over to a different barn? A whole postwar generation of women also never married at all, because there were no men to marry, and became pitied ‘old maids’. That trauma still distorts the Russian marriage market today.
— Julia IoffeThe all-capable woman paid for it with 40 extra hours of housework a week
The Soviet Union required women to work — a 1920 rule put all women into employment — and after the war, in order to raise the birth rate, it would not let them go home either, tying food rations and nursery places to women's jobs. So women had to absorb all of the housework and childcare on top of their work, and to make it ‘look effortless’. Ioffe's grandmother was a chemical engineer who ran a water-treatment laboratory; at lunch she went into the forest to gather mushrooms, after work she took the children through three separate queues for bread, milk and meat, and in the evening, with no washing machine, she heated water and washed the whole family's clothes on a washboard, then ironed them one by one. By the end of the Soviet period, urban women were spending an extra 40 hours a week on housework and rural women 55. One reader wrote to a newspaper: ‘Soviet women can do everything — we just don't want to do it anymore.’
— Julia IoffeThe bias of low expectations spoiled Soviet men into uselessness
After the war men were an endangered species: fought over by women, protected by the state, and asked to do essentially nothing. Ioffe calls it the bias of low expectations — expectations were extremely low, and men duly met them. Add a definition of a ‘real man’ as someone who drinks, smokes, takes risks and dies young, and they had even less reason to look after themselves or to work at a family. American men will marry Russian women, while American women do not want to marry Russian men — that is the signal the market gives. The one exception was Jewish men: they didn't drink, didn't hit, and looked after the household, so Russian women were willing to marry Jews — though the same poll also said they did not want a Jewish president.
— Julia IoffeFlowers are not manners; they are loyalty signals in a low-trust society
Russia has an extraordinarily high density of flower shops: birthdays, March 8, New Year and any visit to someone's home all call for flowers for the woman of the house. Ioffe argues this is not merely politeness but a repeated demonstration of ongoing loyalty in a low-trust society. The most delicate version is the gender posture at the very top: when Putin decorates women, flowers always come with the medal; and the Russian negotiator Surkov, at the Minsk talks, brought each of the two American women diplomats a bouquet of the national flower of the ‘Donetsk People's Republic’ — which amounts to saying, you are a woman first and a negotiator second. Westerners treat flowers as manners; Russians treat them as a re-confirmation of the gender hierarchy.
— Julia IoffeWartime mobilization divides the labor: men go die, women go breed
After the war began, one ad from the Russian defense ministry turned a layabout drinking beer on the sofa into a soldier in a trench, under the slogan ‘be a real man, go fight in Ukraine’; another courted Western women with ‘Europe has no heating, and Russian homes are warm as spring’. At the same time Putin has restricted abortion in the name of ‘protecting the traditional family’ and made the ‘child-free movement’ a crime; the speaker of the Duma said the most important subject for girls is learning to cook and care for a man, and a minister advised girls not to bother with university and to have children early. In 2016 Russia also decriminalized domestic violence; Ioffe relays a startling explanation for it — it is a ‘steam valve’, letting the aggression men accumulate in a stagnant economy be discharged at home. Ukraine has gone the opposite way, putting women into the army both after the war and today.
— Julia IoffeIn their own words · checked verbatim
There were villages where all the men left for war and one came back
Julia Ioffe16:20
find a husband in college because before you know it all the good ones will be taken
Julia Ioffe20:05
We all grew up in a single sex family.
Julia Ioffe22:04
Soviet women can do it all, we just don't want to anymore.
Julia Ioffe27:50
It's, it's the bigotry of low expectation.
Julia Ioffe29:45
men are men and women are women
Julia Ioffe36:50
be a real man, go fight in Ukraine
Julia Ioffe44:45
It was to be a kind of steam valve.
Julia Ioffe48:00
Figures
| Average number of abortions per Soviet woman | 3-12 | 8:41 |
| Soviet deaths in the Second World War | 27 million, roughly 20.1 million of them men | 15:20 |
| Postwar sex ratio in some areas | 19 men for every 100 women | 16:10 |
| Share of the Soviet population lost in four years | 15% | 16:50 |
| Share of postwar births outside marriage | about one third | 18:50 |
| Weekly housework by women in the late Soviet period | 40 hours urban, 55 hours rural | 27:15 |
| Russian birth rate, September 2024 | the lowest since Putin came to power | 46:50 |
Glossary
- woman question
- The nineteenth-century European intellectuals' umbrella term for women's emancipation and social role.
- single sex family
- A household structure with only a mother and a grandmother and no male figure in it.
- gender essentialism
- The idea that men and women have fixed natures and should each occupy their proper place.
- pronatalist policy
- State intervention that rewards childbearing in order to increase the population.
- steam valve
- A mechanism that gives pressure somewhere to go; here, using domestic violence to absorb male aggression.
How to listen
Investors watching Russian market and political risk, analysts working on gender and population policy, and readers curious about how a postwar society remakes both sexes.
Listeners with little appetite for Russian cultural detail can skip the passage on names at 37:35–39:51; everything else is very information-dense.