MOTHERLAND

Russian women take one step forward and two steps back in their struggle for equality.

A tenet of the Russian Revolution—ignited, writes Moscow-born American journalist Ioffe, by a strike of women textile workers in 1917—was that women were to be emancipated. They had the right to vote, the right to abortion, the right to no-fault divorce. Nearly a million women, Ioffe notes, fought alongside men in the Red Army, and when Ioffe’s mother entered medical school in 1977, “70 percent of doctors in the Soviet Union were women.” For some men, these rights were immaterial: The head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, was a known serial rapist whom Stalin tolerated even while forbidding his daughter to go to the Beria residence. Beria secured the silence of his victims “with threats of execution or the prospect of their families being sent to the Gulag,” even as other Soviet brass “used their power and access to scarce resources to, essentially, purchase sex.” The statutory freedoms and rights of women have since steadily been whittled away, Ioffe holds, and for numerous reasons. The regime of Vladimir Putin, at once neo-Stalinist and, at least in its nominal devotion to the Orthodox Church, tsarist, has restored women to second-class citizens, with his own wife as his first test case: “He was the leader, and she his eternally obedient subject, his first before he acquired 143 million more.” But some women, Ioffe observes piercingly, are complicit in their own subjugation, in part because men are now a scarce resource themselves, many succumbing in early middle age to deaths of despair, “with only 60 percent of Russian men surviving to the age of sixty.” The shortage of men, “an endangered species,” has yielded desperate competition among women, even as Putin’s draconian regime is considering taxing childlessness to combat one of the world’s lowest birth rates.

A pensive account of a revolution betrayed.