November 9, 2025 • 39 mins
How do you tell the history of a whole country through its women? And what can it tell us about the world today? These are the questions Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe has set out to answer in her new book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy.Having reported from, and on, Russia for publications including The New Yorker and Foreign Policy for more than a decade, Ioffe says she has repeatedly been asked to explain the actions and motivations of one man: Vladimir Putin.Motherland is, she says, partly a response to Putin, through her desire to show that Russia is much more than one person, let alone one man.In this conversation Ioffe talks to Mishal about reclaiming Russia’s women, about Donald Trump’s hollowing out of American institutions and why Putinism will endure. (Note: This podcast contains a discussion of sexual violence that some listeners may find distressing.)
02:30 - “I was born in a country that no longer exists”03:55 - The anti-feminist at Lenin’s side during the Revolution06:55 - Reluctancy to write about Russian women12:55 - What a “horrible boyfriend” Vladimir Putin was16:50 - Return to Russia, oligarch hunters and ‘trad wives’22:13 - Alexei Navalny, “the last shred of hope”29:20 - Can Russia sustain the war in Ukraine?32:32 - Trump’s assault on US institutions, faster than Putin34:30 - American authoritarianism, risk of “one party state”
Watch this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe4PRejZgr0Ns_wjGlmjlPz0cded0nTYS
You can find the written version of this interview with Mishal’s notes on Bloomberg Weekend: https://www.bloomberg.com/latest/weekend-interview
Contact The Mishal Husain Show mishalshow@bloomberg.net
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. A quick note that
this episode includes a discussion of sexual violence that some
listeners might find distressing. His motherland, part of a response
to being asked so much about one man putin Gaidia.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Absolutely, yeah, I'm just so sick of talking about him.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Julia Yoffi, political journalist, interpreter of Russia and now author
of an epic book on the women of Russia.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
On one hand, I get it, he is the sole
decision maker effectively in a dictatorial state. But I know
from my own experience that Russia is bigger and more
complex than that.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm
Michelle Hussein. To set out to tell the story of
an entire country over more than a century is such
an immense undertaking that it's almost hard to imagine, let
(01:14):
alone deliver. And I think I got interested in Julia
Yoffi first of all because of the scale of that ambition,
and because the country that she's revealing is one that's
important for all of us to understand. The Soviet Union
was a major part of defeating Nazism in World War Two,
and yet today Russia is engaged in a war of
(01:35):
aggression against its neighbor Ukraine. Julia is a Russian American journalist.
She's based in Washington now, but she has spent more
than a decade reporting from and on Russia, and in
her new book Motherland, she is telling the story of
Russia through its women, some of them notable who've been
(01:56):
airbrushed by history, Others who would have thought their lives
completely on remarkable, but whose experiences tell us something about authoritarianism,
what it meant and what it means today. Within it, too,
are the women of Julia's own family, her mother, her grandmothers,
her great grandmothers, many lives which resonated with me, as
(02:20):
I hope they will with you through the course of
this conversation, which begins with Julia herself and her early
years in nineteen eighties Moscow.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I actually was born in a country that no longer
exists in many senses of the word. I was born
in the Soviet Union, and no longer does that country
not exist. But also the emancipatory experiment it embarked on
in nineteen seventeen, Visavit's women also evaporated.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yes, And before we get to the stories within the book.
I'm keen to understand more of your own story, because
you do weave between the big history of Russia and
individual's story. When you were living in Russia for those
first seven years of your life, what do you remember
of that time?
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The little things that I really liked that were ultraspecific.
You know how kids like very specific things. So there
was never orange gum. I really liked orange gum. I
had it once and then I never saw it again.
This was the era of deficits and empty store shelves.
I remember a lot of time spent with my grandmother,
my maternal grandmother, who was a cardiologist and quite a
(03:29):
formidable woman, and she lived four floors down from us.
She had a very vibrant social life. On the evenings
she was home, I would saunter down to her apartment
and we would read and write stories. And I was
her Cinderella and she was my Prince.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
I'm going to pick out a few stories of individual
women from the book, and unconscious as I do, so
that this is a very limited choice of the massive
tapestry that you have. But to go back to the
foundations of Soviet Russian to nineteen seventeen and the Revolution
tell us about Alexandra Kolontai, who is at Lenin's side
(04:06):
and is the one who lays the framework for women
in Soviet Russia and the way that they do have
an equality that is unusual for that time.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
So the Bolsheviks were unusual in that while all the
revolutionary parties were grappling with what at the time in
the late nineteenth century was called the woman question, the
Bolsheviks were by far the most egalitarian of all the
underground opposition parties to the Czar. And while Karl Marx
(04:39):
and most of the kind of the old Guard, the
Marxist founding Fathers kind of YadA YadA. The part of
how communism and socialism was to liberate women specifically, Alexandra
Kolontai really fleshed out these ideas about what would be
needed for women to be truly emancipated, for them to
(05:00):
be truly equal to men in a future utopian, egalitarian
socialist society. And when she is named the Commissar for
People's Social.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Welfare, which is a cabinet position, she was the.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
First female cabinet minister, and in nineteen eighteen she institutes
some incredibly radical reforms. Women are given the right to
no fault divorce, Women get paid maternity leave in nineteen eighteen,
access to free higher education, child support that they can
claim even from a man who is not their husband,
(05:38):
even for a child that is born out of wedlock,
regulations on maternity care, both medical and in terms of
the facilities. In nineteen twenty, the Soviet Union legalizes abortion
and makes it free and relatively safe for Soviet women.
And yet she would have bristled if we called her
(05:59):
a feminist. Really, they were very anti feminists because they
were socialists. For socialists, class comes above everything, right, everything
is subsumed to class. So anything that breaks people out
further by gender, nationality, religion is seen as bourgeois splitterism.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And you studied Soviet history here in the US, right,
you grew up in the US West, speaking here in Washington.
Did you know about her? Is she someone who is
sort of noted propably in no studying Soviet history?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
You didn't know. I didn't want to about her.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
She was written out of the history by the Bolsheviks.
She was very quickly banished. The Bolsheviks were radically egalitarian
when they were in the underground and the stakes were
quite low and they weren't in charge of anything. The
second they took power, they were like, okay, the men
get the real positions of power. And also the history
(06:56):
was written by men, and they don't take the these
issues seriously. As a rule, I think for male historians,
male journalists, war is important. Economics, you know, like numbers,
big factories and pipes and guns are important, and this
kind of stuff is seen as soft and not serious.
And I think I don't know if that reflects your
(07:18):
experience in the profession, but in my experience, you very
much have to write about those topics to be taken seriously,
and then you think those are the only serious topics
when writing about a country. And that is why I
was reluctant to even do a book about Russian women.
I had to be talked into it because I was like,
that's not serious.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I want to bring out another couple of women from Motherland.
And one of them is really tragic and painful. It's
Valentino Drogeova, who was raped by Stalin's henchman Berrier, one
of many girls and women who he abducted and assaultedd
(08:00):
was it to uncover a story of someone like that
who was abused, and it affected the rest of her life.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Very very, very hard, because so on one hand, people
knew anecdotally that this was happening. People even knew where
it was happening. People knew where Barry lived. They knew
what went on in that house. That he cruised the
streets of Moscow looking for pretty young girls, that he
brought them back to his mansion and rape them. That
(08:28):
he hunted for Soviet actresses on the silver screen. And
if they had husbands, you know, if they hid behind
you know, I can't sleep with you because I'm married,
he would take care of that.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
So they were no longer marri.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Rid of the husband. And your grandmother told you about this, yeah,
and then lifted out the house to you.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
She did, she did. But then I found out my
father had heard about it as a kid. His father
had told him, so even the men knew. But when
I went to find this in the kind of historical
canon in the West, it really was wasn't written about.
It was usually relegated to a footnote or a kind
of parenthetical as something salacious and prurient and unserious, that
(09:11):
it's about sex, and so it's not serious and it's
kind of gross, and let's not dig into it. And
when I asked very prominent American historians of the Soviet Union,
they waved me off the topic and were like, we
don't really know. You know, it's a he said, she said.
What was the most devastating for me? Though, I mean
(09:32):
it was very hard to research. I was able to
find a collection of documents from Barria's arrest and secret
trial and execution. Women would write to him on behalf
of their fathers, their husbands and say, I know he's innocent,
can you let him go? And his lieutenants would go
and find out if the woman writing was pretty, and
(09:54):
if she was, she'd be called in on the pretense
of Barria helping with her family case, only for the
tragic inevitable to happen. But the most devastating aspect and
researching this was I pretty easily found one of Vellentina
(10:14):
Drasdova's boyfriends, one of her lovers from later in life.
She was married again and then had a series of paramours.
And this man told me a lot about her life
and about how broken she was and how because Barria
was shot and killed and then her second husband, who
was a black marketeer, was arrested, shot and killed. People
(10:35):
called her Laliah the coffin, as if it were her fault,
as if she was the one bringing bad luck to
these men. He told me that so Barry eventually impregnated
her and she had the baby at seventeen. And this
man told me that when Lalah was her nickname, when
she was in labor, Barria called her at the hospital
(10:56):
and said, you know, whatever you want, I'll give you
whatever you want. Because she was just a child herself.
She asked for a bicycle. And this man told me
that she died in twenty fourteen. That means she was
alive when I was living in Moscow. She was alive
when I was traveling back and forth after I moved
(11:18):
back to Washington. I could have found her, I could
have interviewed her, but I was so busy writing about
Putin and what Putin wants and what Putin thinks, and
not thinking about the quote unquote unserious things like women
in sexual violence as a tool of the state, that
I totally missed it, and I massively regret.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
It to this day.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Is Motherland part of a response to being asked so
much about one man Putin.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
God, yeah, absolutely, yeah, I'm just so sick of talking
about him. On one hand, I get it, he is
the sole decision maker effectively in a dictatorial state. But
I know from my own experience that Russia is bigger
and more complex than that, and even a dictatorship is
(12:10):
multifaceted when you start looking closely at it, and even
a country like the Soviet Union, which was a totalitarian dictatorship,
dictator to dictator, the periods were different, and I just I,
on one hand, wanted to write a book where he
was a big player, And this was one of the
(12:31):
reasons I wrote the book, not the main one, but
I the original impetus for wanting to kind of take
a time out in twenty seventeen, when all of Washington
was obsessed with Donald Trump and his relationship to Vladimir
Putin that I was like, I just never want to
talk about Vladimir Putin again.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
We're there again though, with Trump and yes, and which
we may come back to. I hope you'll forgive me
if she'll come back to that. But Putin does feature in.
Ludmilla Putin, his now ex wife, is one of the
characters tell us about finding this one interview that she
once gave about him. It's quite a feat that you
managed to track it down.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
So she sat for a number of interviews. When Putin
was named interim president, he had three months to get
elected quote unquote legitimately, and his spin doctors put together
this campaign memoir in the American style, and she sat
for interviews for that, so that's widely available. But then
(13:27):
in two thousand and two, there was an authorized biography
that came out, and it was supposed to be the
first of several volumes. That first volume featured hours of
interviews with Ludmila, his first wife, and clearly she was
resentful and unhappy, and the resentments had piled up over
(13:47):
the course of their marriage, over the first two years
of his presidency, and the fact that he didn't even
tell her that he was going to become president. She
didn't even find out when her countrymen did on TV
because she didn't even know to turn on TV to
watch Boris Yelton hand over the presidency to her husband.
And she pours her heart out to this interviewer and
(14:09):
tells him all about what a horrible boyfriend Vladimir Putin was.
What a terrible fiance he was, What an even worse
husband he was? And after that book is published, I
have no idea what happened to that author. I can't
find him, and I couldn't find I had seen people
refer to this book, but I could. You know, trying
(14:30):
to find the original source was almost impossible because the
book was out of print. And even though you can
get any Russian book pirated seventy five different ways online
for free, this one was nowhere. It had clearly been
purged from the web. I found one copy on Amazon
(14:51):
for about two hundred dollars when it was originally about three,
I think, and it was a treasure trove of information
about pardon my French, What an apple Vladimir Putin was
at home, what a tyrant he was at home before
he became a tyrant to the rest of the world.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Let's go to your return to Russia. I know, after
emigrating with your parents, you went back once as a visitor,
but then you returned in two thousand and nine in
your own right, and you end up living back in
the same apartment block that you lived in when you
were growing up with your parents.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, I lived on a fulld out couch in my
grandmother's apartment. We had been on the seventh floor. She
was on the third in what had originally been her
mother in law, my great grandmother's apartment, And I lived
on a fulld out couch in the living room for
three years and had a black some of the best
years of my life watching a Russia that now in
(16:04):
retrospect we know was in a temporary thaw under Midvidhev,
when media outlets were sprouting up, and there was this
freedom to speak, to think, and there was a sense
that maybe some of the powers and the freedoms and
the liberties that Putin had taken away during his first
(16:25):
two terms in office between two thousand and two thousand
and eight could be returned free elections, free press, an
independent judiciary, or releasing of political prisoners. And it was
this moment of incredible ferment and excitement.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And people getting rich.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
The riches are insane.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
I mean, I had never seen wealth like this, not
even living in New York, because Westerners don't flaunt their
wealth quite the same way. And I also noticed that
women had changed. They weren't like the women in my family.
It was like we left years beforehand and were this
weird extinct species preserved in amber. Back in the US,
(17:06):
where post Soviet women had evolved to be these oligar hunters.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Essentially wanting husbands vant and rich husbands. Do you see
parallels to today and the treadwives.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Except the tradwife thing here in the US is much
more intense and kind of hope. It has this kind
of homesteader aspect to it. The women in Russia who
wanted to marry rich and who wanted to stay home,
didn't want to have eight kids and cook all their
meals from scratch, you know, and make their kids cereal
(17:39):
from scratch because you know, I woke up this morning
and my husband was craving gums, so I decided to
make it from scratch kind.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Of you know.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
I think people will know which influencer I'm talking about.
They wanted to not have to cook, to maybe have
one kid or two kids, but they wanted to just
live for themselves and get their nails done and get massages.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
And how did you fit into that? Because you were
a young woman at that time, you're dating I did
good in the two thousands, You didn't date.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Not really I mean, I was I felt in this environment,
coming from the West, coming with my parents' ideas about
what it meant to be a woman. You know, in
my family, it was just assumed that you go to college.
When I was just starting out in journalism and in media,
my father, who as a Soviet didn't understand what being
(18:30):
a journalist was, said something to me that only in
retrospect I realized was incredibly feminist of him, without him
even realizing it. He said, sure, it's fun now to
be a journalist and have this bohemian lifestyle, but when
you're thirty and you have a family, how are you
going to support them? How are you going to make
money to support them? The underlying assumption being that I
(18:53):
would be the main breadwinner, and that didn't even that
was just the natural assumption, both for me and for
my sister. Add to that Western feminism that was everywhere
I get to Russia, and it's women just want to
wear crazy heels and are made up all the time
and are kind of cosplaying femininity and are just constantly
(19:18):
hunting for men. That's just what they wake up thinking about,
what they go to bed thinking about. And in that context,
I felt like a third a sexual gender or like
a talking dog that didn't fit in at all. And
I think Russian men found me bewildering.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Do they see you as Russian in that period?
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I mean they saw me as very American and as
a feminist, which was a bad word still is a
bad word. I've been told that by a friend who
runs a publishing house in Moscow that they can't translate
my book because feminist is now essentially a band word
and it's in the feminist title. And Western men. That
was the most disappointing part is Western men who were
(20:00):
highly educated, who had gone to the Harvard's and the
Stanfords and the Cambridges, went to Russia and were so
happy to throw feminism overboard because they had these women
who were like, Oh, I'll just be the traditional, very pliant, subservient,
ultra feminine woman for you, and you're in charge, and
I'll do anything you say.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
And they love it.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
They loved it.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Plus these women look like supermodels and they loved it.
And then of course they would wake up to realize,
I think I'm paying my girlfriend an allowance.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
But I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
What did your parents make of you? Coming back to
Russia and immersing yourself in the study of the Soviet Union,
because when they emigrated in nineteen ninety, they do it
deadly because they fear that Polgrims are going to come again.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Yeah, that's why my mother gave my father the green light.
Is she in nineteen eighty eight had heard the widespread
rumor at the time that to celebrate the one thousandth
anniversary of Russi becoming Christian, that there would be programs
and that the police were handing out names and addresses
of Jews. And she realized that, even though nothing ultimately happened,
(21:11):
that it was believable, and she gave my father the
green light to start the emigration process.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
But he had wanted to leave forever. He hated the system.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
He hated the totalitarianism, the lying, the you know, wars peace, the.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Lies, the truth kind of logic twisting.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
So when I went to college, a college they could
not afford as refugees who had only been in the
country for a few years, they took out massive loans
for me to go to this prestigious university. And I
decided to study Soviet history, and I'm like, oh, I
just read about Marxism Leninism and all the stuff that
(21:51):
they had been forced to learn.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
And hated and wanted to leave behind and wanted to
leave behind.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
They were horrified and they couldn't understand why I was
doing it. Moreover, they, as my father, kept saying, this
country has no future. Why are you doing this? You
have a future.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Russia doesn't keep uncoupling the two.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
I want to talk about one of the people that
you got to know in that period when you went
back to Moscow in the two thousands. Can you take
those headphones and have a listen to this voice.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
All this sacrifice made from my family, my brother, made
by Boris nimself who was killed, he was shot in
the back close to the Kremlin, a lot of other people.
We have a political prisoners, hundreds of them all over
the Russia. And if I will stop, it means all
these sacrifice this are useless, and they are not. And
(22:50):
I do believe in what I'm doing, and I do
believe that my alternative is better for Russia, and I'm
absolutely sure that we will succeed, and I'm believing victory.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
That's tough to hear, tough to hear because it's Alexey Navalni.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Yeah, sorry, I mean there it is in your eyes. Yeah,
it's yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Tell me about meeting him for the first time. What
you thought of him then? I think it was twenty eleven.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Twenty ten. He was a kind of up and coming.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Blogger who was writing about corruption and the way that
the Putinist regime was using state corporations to funnel money
away from Russian taxpayers to the pockets of Putin's friends,
and people were taking notice of him just because there
was a thriving blogosphere. I mean, this was a period
(23:43):
of relative freedom, and it was before the FSB had
figured out the internet period, let alone how to police it.
So I thought I would just do a quick kind
of blog post about him. And I met him for lunch,
and immediately it was like, no, this is It felt
like what it must have been like to meet a
(24:04):
young Bill Clinton or a young Barack Obama. The force
of personality, the force of conviction. He had his own
gravitational pull, and it was intoxicating in a way that
he had this charisma and force of personality that was
unlike anything I had ever seen before. And you know,
I had met Boris Namsoff as well, and many other
(24:28):
opposition leaders, but.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
He had it.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
He had that thing that marquee politicians, global leaders have.
And I decided to pitch David Remnick about writing a
profile of him, and he was like, who is this guy?
I've never heard of him. I was like, we need
to write about him. He was really extraordinary. I mean
we had big differences and we would get into fights sometimes.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
And I think you told him, didn't you? At one
point you thought one of.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
His speeches was anti Semitic.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, the nationalist rhetoric. Yeah, you told him that. I
think elements of this a I.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Tweeted it and then my phone rang and it was
him yelling at me and said, how dare you say
it was anti semitic? I was because it was you
were talking about Jewish. He was talking about oligarchs, and
he specifically mentioned oligarchs who had recognizably Jewish names, and
he said they were drinking the blood of the Russian people,
(25:20):
eating the livers of the Russian people. Just very kind
of old school Russian anti Semitic imagery. And he was
speaking at a nationalist march where neo Nazis were heavily represented,
so he was very clearly doing something, and I tweeted
about it and he immediately called.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Me up to argue with me, and we were yelling
at each other on the phone.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
But I still had a very deep admiration for him
because of how.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
I don't know how to put it.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
He was curious, and he surrounded himself with smart people
who disagreed with him, and his views really did evolve
on issues of nationalism and how he saw migrants from
the Muslim North CAUCUSUS from Central Asia. And he was
(26:14):
very imperfect, as all humans are, and as all politicians are,
and all politicians who aspire to the presidency of our country.
But he was an incredibly brave, incredibly charismatic person. And
I think one of the reasons I teared up is
because of the person he was, but also because of
he was people's hope for a better Russia. And when
(26:37):
he was killed, it felt like the last shred of
hope that any of us had for a better Russia post.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Putin went with him. It felt like.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
The Russia that I was a part of when I
moved back, this young, democratic, vibrant, pro western Russia that
saw Russia's a collabor member of the international community. That
is so different from the Russia that it became that
he was. He was the last living representative of that, and.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
They killed him.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
The words that we heard him speaking to the BBC
in twenty seventeen, and by the time that his death
was announced in twenty twenty four, he'd spent three years
in detention, and the way that he died in that
prison in the Arctic Circle, it was so tragically in
line with so many deaths in your book in the Gulag,
the extreme depravity, the senseless tragedy, the closeness to death,
(27:36):
and in the way that people live. It feels like,
even in death, the way he died is emblematic of
so much more.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
I think you know, in writing this book, I got
to the part where Vladimir Putin, in his address to
his annual Address to the Federal Assembly in twenty twelve,
essentially says, I'm no longer dealing with liberal.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Pro western Russians.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
They came out into the streets against me, and so
I'm cutting them out. I will just no longer contend
with them. I will crush them, and he uses the
sword s meaning binds, like the traditionalist ties that will
bind Russia have bound Russia throughout the centuries, nationalism, the
Russian Orthodox Church, a patriarchal traditionalism, one that is quite
(28:20):
violent and macho. And he talked about shoring up the
institutions that are those scripa that have held Russia together
over the centuries. And I realized that one of the
most important institution was the penal one, that the penal
institutions of Putins Russia were much like the penal institutions
(28:42):
of Stalin's Russia, which were much like the penal institutions.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Of Tsarist Russia.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
That if there was one very important Russian institution that
transmitted the values of the Russian state over the centuries
across an imperial monarchist vision, socialist utopian vision, and today's
whatever nationalist ravanchist vision, it's the penal system.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
You write in Motherland that part of what undoes Navalni
is the Ukraine War. And in twenty twenty two, when
the full scale invasion happens, so many of his base
of educated Russians want to leave Russia. Do you think
Russia can sustain this war in Ukraine?
Speaker 3 (29:25):
It will try as long as possible.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
But economically does it have the might to don't care?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
I think the valorization of World War Two, the turning
of World War Two into a state religion and a
state cult, allows Vladimir Putin to say, look, we defeated
Nazism by laying down twenty seven million Soviet soldiers. The
war nearly destroyed our country, but we won. Right now,
(29:52):
Russia has lost maybe a million men, both to injury
and to death. Russia can I think the messages. That's
so much less than twenty seven million. That's a fraction
of the cost.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
We can do that. And I think what.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
We've seen in Putin's most recent negotiations with Trump is
that at first he tried to outmaneuver Trump and say, hey,
forget about Ukraine. Let's just normalize a relationship between Russia
and the US, and then you, your family, American companies
can come in and do business in Russia and just
make an absolute killing. But he just can't let go
(30:28):
of his fixation on Ukraine. And he doesn't care if
there are business operatity, Like, he doesn't care enough about
the normalization with the US to let go of this
Ukrainian fixation that he has. He is willing to, I think,
sacrifice everything because he has made this war existential. I
(30:50):
think he understands that if Russia loses the war, or
is seen to lose the war, then he is a goner.
He cannot last on the throne.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Others who feel like him At the point where he is,
is it more likely that he's replaced by someone who
is similar to him, who's going to feel the same way.
Do you think this is a personal obsession with this war.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
I think it started off as a personal obsession. But
now from everything I've seen, the state has done so
much to indoctrinate the population and the younger generations about
this war that I worry that even if he were
to leave power, which I think will only happen through
his death, that his successors will feel the need to
(31:37):
carry it on. And originally I had thought of Russian
history for examples and analogus to this, but now I
think a lot about the US and the Iraq War,
where even democrats like Barack Obama, who felt that George W.
Bush's invasion of Iraq was wrong and criminal and should
(31:57):
never have happened, had to keep fighting the war even
after he won the presidency as the anti Bush and
as the anti war candidate, because Americans even though they
felt that the war was a mistake, didn't want to lose.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
I want to ask you about your work today and
Washington and covering Washington as you do in your day job.
How has it been as a journalist, because we are
we're seeing all these different ways in which the Trump
administration has tried to restrict the press or sue the press.
What's your assessment of what all of it adds up to.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
I think what it adds up to is that Donald
Trump has been able to do in less than a
year what it took Vladimir Putin two decades to do
in certain cases. The speed at which he has hollowed
out American institutions, the courts, the legislative body, every check
and balance imaginable. The way private industry has been the
(32:55):
NY rather than risk their profits, and forgetting, by the
way that more than half the country doesn't like this,
forgetting that those customers also have a say, makes me, really,
I don't know how to put it, disappointed in my
American compatriots.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
In all those years that I.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Was reporting on Putin, anytime Putin did something restrictive, authoritarian,
anytime things got a little hard economically, I would be
asked to come on TV or to write a piece,
and people would say, well, why aren't Russians out in
the streets protesting and overthrowing him? Can't they see how
terrible it is? Can't they see he's a dictator? Surely
(33:37):
young people, college students hate this right because college students,
in their minds are by definition liberal revolutionaries. I just
want to ask all of them, why aren't Americans in
the streets all the time demanding answers and demanding a change,
not protest by appointment and for fun, you know, with
funny posters, but real protests. Why aren't we holding our
(33:59):
corporations to account, our Congress to account? I mean, Speaker
Johnson with Donald Trump's blessing, because he has no real power,
he has said, and Donald Trump, according to the reporting
in the New York Times, Donald Trump jokes that he
Donald Trump is the speaker of the US House of
Representatives and the president. He's essentially dissolved parliament. I mean,
(34:20):
if I were a foreign correspondent here trying to explain
this for an audience back home, that's how I would
write it.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Is this subversion of authoritarian absolutely, you would call it absolutely.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
And the thing is, for many of us who know
this movie, who have seen this movie before, in Hungary
and Russia, in China and Venezuela, we were leaning on
the horn sounding the alarm starting in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen.
You can see where this is going, and still people
are like, well, no, surely that won't happen given the
(34:51):
way things are going. I would not be surprised if
Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House or the
future Speaker of the House, refused to see Democrats who
win seats in the November midterms in twenty twenty six
I would not be surprised if after those midterms we
are effectively a one party state, in the way that
Hungary or Russia are a one party state even though
(35:14):
other parties still exist on paper, effectively a one party state,
and people say that for some reason every next step.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
And I saw it in Russia too.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
I saw my Russian colleagues saying, oh, well, Putin wouldn't
do that. He did a b CD E FG NH,
but he wouldn't do I in J. And You're like, WHOA,
why not? And then he does I and J and
they're like, well he wouldn't do m right. And it's
I think it's time to open our eyes and see
where this is going and stop pretending that somebody who
(35:44):
has gone this far won't go one more step, two
more steps, three more steps to close.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Julia, this is the weekend interview, and I wonder if
we can go back in time to your childhood and
still Soviet Russia and your weekends then, especially as a
Jewish family, the Sabbath in a state where you know religion.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Is not We didn't know what that was. I wouldn't
call myself religious. It's just I think in part because
it's not something I grew up with, and growing up
with parents who hated the Soviet Union but were still
very much creations of the Soviet Union, both in terms
of the militant atheism definitely left its mark.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
And Russian do you think in Russian? Do you dream
in Russian?
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Only when I'm in Russia?
Speaker 2 (36:27):
For you know, after about a week, I switch, and
I haven't been back since just before the pandemic, and
I don't know when I'll ever go back. If ever,
when the war first started or the full scale invasion happened.
The war started in twenty fourteen. I would ask everybody
I knew and loved from that place, like, when do
you think we can go back? When do you think
(36:47):
it will be safe for us.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
To go back? And I don't know.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
I can't imagine it being safe to go back for
a very long time. I think definitely not while Putin
is alive, and I think Putinism will live on after
him for quite a while, the same way Stalinism lived
on after Stalin for about forty more years.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
And how do you feel thinking that? Do you miss it?
Is it a sense of loss in you?
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Massive?
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Yeah, it's a massive sense of loss in the same
way that you know. Hearing Alexey's voice, just the voice
brought tears to my eyes because that was his death
was also a severance of a thread tying me to
that place. And so many people have either left or
died or been killed, so many beloved institutions and places
(37:35):
have closed that I think even if I were to
go back now, it would be a totally alien place.
So yeah, there is a massive sense of loss.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Is there any source of hope that you have for Russia?
Like even Glimmers, I.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Mean, Russian culture, Russian humor always find a way like water,
and nothing is forever, but Russia certainly does have a pattern.
I imagine that this will lead to a period of
thaw and liberalization before another snapback and backlash. That's just
(38:12):
how Russia does things, so I'm hoping to at least
catch that little thaw in the future.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
To dear your fee, thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
And that's the Michelle Hussein Show for this week. If
you haven't subscribed, please do that way you'll know as
soon as we have a new episode. To those who've
left comments or even given us some stars, thank you,
and you can watch these conversations on YouTube and on
Bloomberg TV. And you'll also find a written version with
(38:47):
my notes at Bloomberg dot com. Forward Slash Weekend. The
team is producers Jessica Beck and Chris Martlu, Guest booking
by Dave Warren, Social media by Alex Morgan. This week,
our sound engineer was Richard Ward and video editing was
by Laura Francis. The executive producer is Louisa Lewis at
(39:08):
Bloomberg Weekend. Editorial director of Audio and Special Projects is
Brendan Francis. Newnham and our executive editor is Catherine bell Our.
Music is composed by Bart Walshaw and this week's special
thanks go to Moses and dam Brendan Palmer, Rachel Lewis Kriskey,
Alana Susnow, Sammasadi and Sage Bauman, and to you, of
(39:31):
course for listening. Do come back next weekend
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. A quick note that
this episode includes a discussion of sexual violence that some
listeners might find distressing. His motherland, part of a response
to being asked so much about one man putin Gaidia.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Absolutely, yeah, I'm just so sick of talking about him.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Julia Yoffi, political journalist, interpreter of Russia and now author
of an epic book on the women of Russia.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
On one hand, I get it, he is the sole
decision maker effectively in a dictatorial state. But I know
from my own experience that Russia is bigger and more
complex than that.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm
Michelle Hussein. To set out to tell the story of
an entire country over more than a century is such
an immense undertaking that it's almost hard to imagine, let
(01:14):
alone deliver. And I think I got interested in Julia
Yoffi first of all because of the scale of that ambition,
and because the country that she's revealing is one that's
important for all of us to understand. The Soviet Union
was a major part of defeating Nazism in World War Two,
and yet today Russia is engaged in a war of
(01:35):
aggression against its neighbor Ukraine. Julia is a Russian American journalist.
She's based in Washington now, but she has spent more
than a decade reporting from and on Russia, and in
her new book Motherland, she is telling the story of
Russia through its women, some of them notable who've been
(01:56):
airbrushed by history, Others who would have thought their lives
completely on remarkable, but whose experiences tell us something about authoritarianism,
what it meant and what it means today. Within it, too,
are the women of Julia's own family, her mother, her grandmothers,
her great grandmothers, many lives which resonated with me, as
(02:20):
I hope they will with you through the course of
this conversation, which begins with Julia herself and her early
years in nineteen eighties Moscow.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I actually was born in a country that no longer
exists in many senses of the word. I was born
in the Soviet Union, and no longer does that country
not exist. But also the emancipatory experiment it embarked on
in nineteen seventeen, Visavit's women also evaporated.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yes, And before we get to the stories within the book.
I'm keen to understand more of your own story, because
you do weave between the big history of Russia and
individual's story. When you were living in Russia for those
first seven years of your life, what do you remember
of that time?
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The little things that I really liked that were ultraspecific.
You know how kids like very specific things. So there
was never orange gum. I really liked orange gum. I
had it once and then I never saw it again.
This was the era of deficits and empty store shelves.
I remember a lot of time spent with my grandmother,
my maternal grandmother, who was a cardiologist and quite a
(03:29):
formidable woman, and she lived four floors down from us.
She had a very vibrant social life. On the evenings
she was home, I would saunter down to her apartment
and we would read and write stories. And I was
her Cinderella and she was my Prince.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
I'm going to pick out a few stories of individual
women from the book, and unconscious as I do, so
that this is a very limited choice of the massive
tapestry that you have. But to go back to the
foundations of Soviet Russian to nineteen seventeen and the Revolution
tell us about Alexandra Kolontai, who is at Lenin's side
(04:06):
and is the one who lays the framework for women
in Soviet Russia and the way that they do have
an equality that is unusual for that time.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
So the Bolsheviks were unusual in that while all the
revolutionary parties were grappling with what at the time in
the late nineteenth century was called the woman question, the
Bolsheviks were by far the most egalitarian of all the
underground opposition parties to the Czar. And while Karl Marx
(04:39):
and most of the kind of the old Guard, the
Marxist founding Fathers kind of YadA YadA. The part of
how communism and socialism was to liberate women specifically, Alexandra
Kolontai really fleshed out these ideas about what would be
needed for women to be truly emancipated, for them to
(05:00):
be truly equal to men in a future utopian, egalitarian
socialist society. And when she is named the Commissar for
People's Social.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Welfare, which is a cabinet position, she was the.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
First female cabinet minister, and in nineteen eighteen she institutes
some incredibly radical reforms. Women are given the right to
no fault divorce, Women get paid maternity leave in nineteen eighteen,
access to free higher education, child support that they can
claim even from a man who is not their husband,
(05:38):
even for a child that is born out of wedlock,
regulations on maternity care, both medical and in terms of
the facilities. In nineteen twenty, the Soviet Union legalizes abortion
and makes it free and relatively safe for Soviet women.
And yet she would have bristled if we called her
(05:59):
a feminist. Really, they were very anti feminists because they
were socialists. For socialists, class comes above everything, right, everything
is subsumed to class. So anything that breaks people out
further by gender, nationality, religion is seen as bourgeois splitterism.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And you studied Soviet history here in the US, right,
you grew up in the US West, speaking here in Washington.
Did you know about her? Is she someone who is
sort of noted propably in no studying Soviet history?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
You didn't know. I didn't want to about her.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
She was written out of the history by the Bolsheviks.
She was very quickly banished. The Bolsheviks were radically egalitarian
when they were in the underground and the stakes were
quite low and they weren't in charge of anything. The
second they took power, they were like, okay, the men
get the real positions of power. And also the history
(06:56):
was written by men, and they don't take the these
issues seriously. As a rule, I think for male historians,
male journalists, war is important. Economics, you know, like numbers,
big factories and pipes and guns are important, and this
kind of stuff is seen as soft and not serious.
And I think I don't know if that reflects your
(07:18):
experience in the profession, but in my experience, you very
much have to write about those topics to be taken seriously,
and then you think those are the only serious topics
when writing about a country. And that is why I
was reluctant to even do a book about Russian women.
I had to be talked into it because I was like,
that's not serious.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I want to bring out another couple of women from Motherland.
And one of them is really tragic and painful. It's
Valentino Drogeova, who was raped by Stalin's henchman Berrier, one
of many girls and women who he abducted and assaultedd
(08:00):
was it to uncover a story of someone like that
who was abused, and it affected the rest of her life.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Very very, very hard, because so on one hand, people
knew anecdotally that this was happening. People even knew where
it was happening. People knew where Barry lived. They knew
what went on in that house. That he cruised the
streets of Moscow looking for pretty young girls, that he
brought them back to his mansion and rape them. That
(08:28):
he hunted for Soviet actresses on the silver screen. And
if they had husbands, you know, if they hid behind
you know, I can't sleep with you because I'm married,
he would take care of that.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
So they were no longer marri.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Rid of the husband. And your grandmother told you about this, yeah,
and then lifted out the house to you.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
She did, she did. But then I found out my
father had heard about it as a kid. His father
had told him, so even the men knew. But when
I went to find this in the kind of historical
canon in the West, it really was wasn't written about.
It was usually relegated to a footnote or a kind
of parenthetical as something salacious and prurient and unserious, that
(09:11):
it's about sex, and so it's not serious and it's
kind of gross, and let's not dig into it. And
when I asked very prominent American historians of the Soviet Union,
they waved me off the topic and were like, we
don't really know. You know, it's a he said, she said.
What was the most devastating for me? Though, I mean
(09:32):
it was very hard to research. I was able to
find a collection of documents from Barria's arrest and secret
trial and execution. Women would write to him on behalf
of their fathers, their husbands and say, I know he's innocent,
can you let him go? And his lieutenants would go
and find out if the woman writing was pretty, and
(09:54):
if she was, she'd be called in on the pretense
of Barria helping with her family case, only for the
tragic inevitable to happen. But the most devastating aspect and
researching this was I pretty easily found one of Vellentina
(10:14):
Drasdova's boyfriends, one of her lovers from later in life.
She was married again and then had a series of paramours.
And this man told me a lot about her life
and about how broken she was and how because Barria
was shot and killed and then her second husband, who
was a black marketeer, was arrested, shot and killed. People
(10:35):
called her Laliah the coffin, as if it were her fault,
as if she was the one bringing bad luck to
these men. He told me that so Barry eventually impregnated
her and she had the baby at seventeen. And this
man told me that when Lalah was her nickname, when
she was in labor, Barria called her at the hospital
(10:56):
and said, you know, whatever you want, I'll give you
whatever you want. Because she was just a child herself.
She asked for a bicycle. And this man told me
that she died in twenty fourteen. That means she was
alive when I was living in Moscow. She was alive
when I was traveling back and forth after I moved
(11:18):
back to Washington. I could have found her, I could
have interviewed her, but I was so busy writing about
Putin and what Putin wants and what Putin thinks, and
not thinking about the quote unquote unserious things like women
in sexual violence as a tool of the state, that
I totally missed it, and I massively regret.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
It to this day.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Is Motherland part of a response to being asked so
much about one man Putin.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
God, yeah, absolutely, yeah, I'm just so sick of talking
about him. On one hand, I get it, he is
the sole decision maker effectively in a dictatorial state. But
I know from my own experience that Russia is bigger
and more complex than that, and even a dictatorship is
(12:10):
multifaceted when you start looking closely at it, and even
a country like the Soviet Union, which was a totalitarian dictatorship,
dictator to dictator, the periods were different, and I just I,
on one hand, wanted to write a book where he
was a big player, And this was one of the
(12:31):
reasons I wrote the book, not the main one, but
I the original impetus for wanting to kind of take
a time out in twenty seventeen, when all of Washington
was obsessed with Donald Trump and his relationship to Vladimir
Putin that I was like, I just never want to
talk about Vladimir Putin again.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
We're there again though, with Trump and yes, and which
we may come back to. I hope you'll forgive me
if she'll come back to that. But Putin does feature in.
Ludmilla Putin, his now ex wife, is one of the
characters tell us about finding this one interview that she
once gave about him. It's quite a feat that you
managed to track it down.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
So she sat for a number of interviews. When Putin
was named interim president, he had three months to get
elected quote unquote legitimately, and his spin doctors put together
this campaign memoir in the American style, and she sat
for interviews for that, so that's widely available. But then
(13:27):
in two thousand and two, there was an authorized biography
that came out, and it was supposed to be the
first of several volumes. That first volume featured hours of
interviews with Ludmila, his first wife, and clearly she was
resentful and unhappy, and the resentments had piled up over
(13:47):
the course of their marriage, over the first two years
of his presidency, and the fact that he didn't even
tell her that he was going to become president. She
didn't even find out when her countrymen did on TV
because she didn't even know to turn on TV to
watch Boris Yelton hand over the presidency to her husband.
And she pours her heart out to this interviewer and
(14:09):
tells him all about what a horrible boyfriend Vladimir Putin was.
What a terrible fiance he was, What an even worse
husband he was? And after that book is published, I
have no idea what happened to that author. I can't
find him, and I couldn't find I had seen people
refer to this book, but I could. You know, trying
(14:30):
to find the original source was almost impossible because the
book was out of print. And even though you can
get any Russian book pirated seventy five different ways online
for free, this one was nowhere. It had clearly been
purged from the web. I found one copy on Amazon
(14:51):
for about two hundred dollars when it was originally about three,
I think, and it was a treasure trove of information
about pardon my French, What an apple Vladimir Putin was
at home, what a tyrant he was at home before
he became a tyrant to the rest of the world.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Let's go to your return to Russia. I know, after
emigrating with your parents, you went back once as a visitor,
but then you returned in two thousand and nine in
your own right, and you end up living back in
the same apartment block that you lived in when you
were growing up with your parents.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, I lived on a fulld out couch in my
grandmother's apartment. We had been on the seventh floor. She
was on the third in what had originally been her
mother in law, my great grandmother's apartment, And I lived
on a fulld out couch in the living room for
three years and had a black some of the best
years of my life watching a Russia that now in
(16:04):
retrospect we know was in a temporary thaw under Midvidhev,
when media outlets were sprouting up, and there was this
freedom to speak, to think, and there was a sense
that maybe some of the powers and the freedoms and
the liberties that Putin had taken away during his first
(16:25):
two terms in office between two thousand and two thousand
and eight could be returned free elections, free press, an
independent judiciary, or releasing of political prisoners. And it was
this moment of incredible ferment and excitement.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And people getting rich.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
The riches are insane.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
I mean, I had never seen wealth like this, not
even living in New York, because Westerners don't flaunt their
wealth quite the same way. And I also noticed that
women had changed. They weren't like the women in my family.
It was like we left years beforehand and were this
weird extinct species preserved in amber. Back in the US,
(17:06):
where post Soviet women had evolved to be these oligar hunters.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Essentially wanting husbands vant and rich husbands. Do you see
parallels to today and the treadwives.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Except the tradwife thing here in the US is much
more intense and kind of hope. It has this kind
of homesteader aspect to it. The women in Russia who
wanted to marry rich and who wanted to stay home,
didn't want to have eight kids and cook all their
meals from scratch, you know, and make their kids cereal
(17:39):
from scratch because you know, I woke up this morning
and my husband was craving gums, so I decided to
make it from scratch kind.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Of you know.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
I think people will know which influencer I'm talking about.
They wanted to not have to cook, to maybe have
one kid or two kids, but they wanted to just
live for themselves and get their nails done and get massages.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
And how did you fit into that? Because you were
a young woman at that time, you're dating I did
good in the two thousands, You didn't date.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Not really I mean, I was I felt in this environment,
coming from the West, coming with my parents' ideas about
what it meant to be a woman. You know, in
my family, it was just assumed that you go to college.
When I was just starting out in journalism and in media,
my father, who as a Soviet didn't understand what being
(18:30):
a journalist was, said something to me that only in
retrospect I realized was incredibly feminist of him, without him
even realizing it. He said, sure, it's fun now to
be a journalist and have this bohemian lifestyle, but when
you're thirty and you have a family, how are you
going to support them? How are you going to make
money to support them? The underlying assumption being that I
(18:53):
would be the main breadwinner, and that didn't even that
was just the natural assumption, both for me and for
my sister. Add to that Western feminism that was everywhere
I get to Russia, and it's women just want to
wear crazy heels and are made up all the time
and are kind of cosplaying femininity and are just constantly
(19:18):
hunting for men. That's just what they wake up thinking about,
what they go to bed thinking about. And in that context,
I felt like a third a sexual gender or like
a talking dog that didn't fit in at all. And
I think Russian men found me bewildering.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Do they see you as Russian in that period?
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I mean they saw me as very American and as
a feminist, which was a bad word still is a
bad word. I've been told that by a friend who
runs a publishing house in Moscow that they can't translate
my book because feminist is now essentially a band word
and it's in the feminist title. And Western men. That
was the most disappointing part is Western men who were
(20:00):
highly educated, who had gone to the Harvard's and the
Stanfords and the Cambridges, went to Russia and were so
happy to throw feminism overboard because they had these women
who were like, Oh, I'll just be the traditional, very pliant, subservient,
ultra feminine woman for you, and you're in charge, and
I'll do anything you say.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
And they love it.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
They loved it.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Plus these women look like supermodels and they loved it.
And then of course they would wake up to realize,
I think I'm paying my girlfriend an allowance.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
But I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
What did your parents make of you? Coming back to
Russia and immersing yourself in the study of the Soviet Union,
because when they emigrated in nineteen ninety, they do it
deadly because they fear that Polgrims are going to come again.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Yeah, that's why my mother gave my father the green light.
Is she in nineteen eighty eight had heard the widespread
rumor at the time that to celebrate the one thousandth
anniversary of Russi becoming Christian, that there would be programs
and that the police were handing out names and addresses
of Jews. And she realized that, even though nothing ultimately happened,
(21:11):
that it was believable, and she gave my father the
green light to start the emigration process.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
But he had wanted to leave forever. He hated the system.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
He hated the totalitarianism, the lying, the you know, wars peace, the.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Lies, the truth kind of logic twisting.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
So when I went to college, a college they could
not afford as refugees who had only been in the
country for a few years, they took out massive loans
for me to go to this prestigious university. And I
decided to study Soviet history, and I'm like, oh, I
just read about Marxism Leninism and all the stuff that
(21:51):
they had been forced to learn.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
And hated and wanted to leave behind and wanted to
leave behind.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
They were horrified and they couldn't understand why I was
doing it. Moreover, they, as my father, kept saying, this
country has no future. Why are you doing this? You
have a future.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Russia doesn't keep uncoupling the two.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
I want to talk about one of the people that
you got to know in that period when you went
back to Moscow in the two thousands. Can you take
those headphones and have a listen to this voice.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
All this sacrifice made from my family, my brother, made
by Boris nimself who was killed, he was shot in
the back close to the Kremlin, a lot of other people.
We have a political prisoners, hundreds of them all over
the Russia. And if I will stop, it means all
these sacrifice this are useless, and they are not. And
(22:50):
I do believe in what I'm doing, and I do
believe that my alternative is better for Russia, and I'm
absolutely sure that we will succeed, and I'm believing victory.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
That's tough to hear, tough to hear because it's Alexey Navalni.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Yeah, sorry, I mean there it is in your eyes. Yeah,
it's yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Tell me about meeting him for the first time. What
you thought of him then? I think it was twenty eleven.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Twenty ten. He was a kind of up and coming.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Blogger who was writing about corruption and the way that
the Putinist regime was using state corporations to funnel money
away from Russian taxpayers to the pockets of Putin's friends,
and people were taking notice of him just because there
was a thriving blogosphere. I mean, this was a period
(23:43):
of relative freedom, and it was before the FSB had
figured out the internet period, let alone how to police it.
So I thought I would just do a quick kind
of blog post about him. And I met him for lunch,
and immediately it was like, no, this is It felt
like what it must have been like to meet a
(24:04):
young Bill Clinton or a young Barack Obama. The force
of personality, the force of conviction. He had his own
gravitational pull, and it was intoxicating in a way that
he had this charisma and force of personality that was
unlike anything I had ever seen before. And you know,
I had met Boris Namsoff as well, and many other
(24:28):
opposition leaders, but.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
He had it.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
He had that thing that marquee politicians, global leaders have.
And I decided to pitch David Remnick about writing a
profile of him, and he was like, who is this guy?
I've never heard of him. I was like, we need
to write about him. He was really extraordinary. I mean
we had big differences and we would get into fights sometimes.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
And I think you told him, didn't you? At one
point you thought one of.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
His speeches was anti Semitic.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, the nationalist rhetoric. Yeah, you told him that. I
think elements of this a I.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Tweeted it and then my phone rang and it was
him yelling at me and said, how dare you say
it was anti semitic? I was because it was you
were talking about Jewish. He was talking about oligarchs, and
he specifically mentioned oligarchs who had recognizably Jewish names, and
he said they were drinking the blood of the Russian people,
(25:20):
eating the livers of the Russian people. Just very kind
of old school Russian anti Semitic imagery. And he was
speaking at a nationalist march where neo Nazis were heavily represented,
so he was very clearly doing something, and I tweeted
about it and he immediately called.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Me up to argue with me, and we were yelling
at each other on the phone.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
But I still had a very deep admiration for him
because of how.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
I don't know how to put it.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
He was curious, and he surrounded himself with smart people
who disagreed with him, and his views really did evolve
on issues of nationalism and how he saw migrants from
the Muslim North CAUCUSUS from Central Asia. And he was
(26:14):
very imperfect, as all humans are, and as all politicians are,
and all politicians who aspire to the presidency of our country.
But he was an incredibly brave, incredibly charismatic person. And
I think one of the reasons I teared up is
because of the person he was, but also because of
he was people's hope for a better Russia. And when
(26:37):
he was killed, it felt like the last shred of
hope that any of us had for a better Russia post.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Putin went with him. It felt like.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
The Russia that I was a part of when I
moved back, this young, democratic, vibrant, pro western Russia that
saw Russia's a collabor member of the international community. That
is so different from the Russia that it became that
he was. He was the last living representative of that, and.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
They killed him.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
The words that we heard him speaking to the BBC
in twenty seventeen, and by the time that his death
was announced in twenty twenty four, he'd spent three years
in detention, and the way that he died in that
prison in the Arctic Circle, it was so tragically in
line with so many deaths in your book in the Gulag,
the extreme depravity, the senseless tragedy, the closeness to death,
(27:36):
and in the way that people live. It feels like,
even in death, the way he died is emblematic of
so much more.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
I think you know, in writing this book, I got
to the part where Vladimir Putin, in his address to
his annual Address to the Federal Assembly in twenty twelve,
essentially says, I'm no longer dealing with liberal.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Pro western Russians.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
They came out into the streets against me, and so
I'm cutting them out. I will just no longer contend
with them. I will crush them, and he uses the
sword s meaning binds, like the traditionalist ties that will
bind Russia have bound Russia throughout the centuries, nationalism, the
Russian Orthodox Church, a patriarchal traditionalism, one that is quite
(28:20):
violent and macho. And he talked about shoring up the
institutions that are those scripa that have held Russia together
over the centuries. And I realized that one of the
most important institution was the penal one, that the penal
institutions of Putins Russia were much like the penal institutions
(28:42):
of Stalin's Russia, which were much like the penal institutions.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Of Tsarist Russia.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
That if there was one very important Russian institution that
transmitted the values of the Russian state over the centuries
across an imperial monarchist vision, socialist utopian vision, and today's
whatever nationalist ravanchist vision, it's the penal system.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
You write in Motherland that part of what undoes Navalni
is the Ukraine War. And in twenty twenty two, when
the full scale invasion happens, so many of his base
of educated Russians want to leave Russia. Do you think
Russia can sustain this war in Ukraine?
Speaker 3 (29:25):
It will try as long as possible.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
But economically does it have the might to don't care?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
I think the valorization of World War Two, the turning
of World War Two into a state religion and a
state cult, allows Vladimir Putin to say, look, we defeated
Nazism by laying down twenty seven million Soviet soldiers. The
war nearly destroyed our country, but we won. Right now,
(29:52):
Russia has lost maybe a million men, both to injury
and to death. Russia can I think the messages. That's
so much less than twenty seven million. That's a fraction
of the cost.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
We can do that. And I think what.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
We've seen in Putin's most recent negotiations with Trump is
that at first he tried to outmaneuver Trump and say, hey,
forget about Ukraine. Let's just normalize a relationship between Russia
and the US, and then you, your family, American companies
can come in and do business in Russia and just
make an absolute killing. But he just can't let go
(30:28):
of his fixation on Ukraine. And he doesn't care if
there are business operatity, Like, he doesn't care enough about
the normalization with the US to let go of this
Ukrainian fixation that he has. He is willing to, I think,
sacrifice everything because he has made this war existential. I
(30:50):
think he understands that if Russia loses the war, or
is seen to lose the war, then he is a goner.
He cannot last on the throne.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Others who feel like him At the point where he is,
is it more likely that he's replaced by someone who
is similar to him, who's going to feel the same way.
Do you think this is a personal obsession with this war.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
I think it started off as a personal obsession. But
now from everything I've seen, the state has done so
much to indoctrinate the population and the younger generations about
this war that I worry that even if he were
to leave power, which I think will only happen through
his death, that his successors will feel the need to
(31:37):
carry it on. And originally I had thought of Russian
history for examples and analogus to this, but now I
think a lot about the US and the Iraq War,
where even democrats like Barack Obama, who felt that George W.
Bush's invasion of Iraq was wrong and criminal and should
(31:57):
never have happened, had to keep fighting the war even
after he won the presidency as the anti Bush and
as the anti war candidate, because Americans even though they
felt that the war was a mistake, didn't want to lose.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
I want to ask you about your work today and
Washington and covering Washington as you do in your day job.
How has it been as a journalist, because we are
we're seeing all these different ways in which the Trump
administration has tried to restrict the press or sue the press.
What's your assessment of what all of it adds up to.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
I think what it adds up to is that Donald
Trump has been able to do in less than a
year what it took Vladimir Putin two decades to do
in certain cases. The speed at which he has hollowed
out American institutions, the courts, the legislative body, every check
and balance imaginable. The way private industry has been the
(32:55):
NY rather than risk their profits, and forgetting, by the
way that more than half the country doesn't like this,
forgetting that those customers also have a say, makes me, really,
I don't know how to put it, disappointed in my
American compatriots.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
In all those years that I.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Was reporting on Putin, anytime Putin did something restrictive, authoritarian,
anytime things got a little hard economically, I would be
asked to come on TV or to write a piece,
and people would say, well, why aren't Russians out in
the streets protesting and overthrowing him? Can't they see how
terrible it is? Can't they see he's a dictator? Surely
(33:37):
young people, college students hate this right because college students,
in their minds are by definition liberal revolutionaries. I just
want to ask all of them, why aren't Americans in
the streets all the time demanding answers and demanding a change,
not protest by appointment and for fun, you know, with
funny posters, but real protests. Why aren't we holding our
(33:59):
corporations to account, our Congress to account? I mean, Speaker
Johnson with Donald Trump's blessing, because he has no real power,
he has said, and Donald Trump, according to the reporting
in the New York Times, Donald Trump jokes that he
Donald Trump is the speaker of the US House of
Representatives and the president. He's essentially dissolved parliament. I mean,
(34:20):
if I were a foreign correspondent here trying to explain
this for an audience back home, that's how I would
write it.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Is this subversion of authoritarian absolutely, you would call it absolutely.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
And the thing is, for many of us who know
this movie, who have seen this movie before, in Hungary
and Russia, in China and Venezuela, we were leaning on
the horn sounding the alarm starting in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen.
You can see where this is going, and still people
are like, well, no, surely that won't happen given the
(34:51):
way things are going. I would not be surprised if
Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House or the
future Speaker of the House, refused to see Democrats who
win seats in the November midterms in twenty twenty six
I would not be surprised if after those midterms we
are effectively a one party state, in the way that
Hungary or Russia are a one party state even though
(35:14):
other parties still exist on paper, effectively a one party state,
and people say that for some reason every next step.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
And I saw it in Russia too.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
I saw my Russian colleagues saying, oh, well, Putin wouldn't
do that. He did a b CD E FG NH,
but he wouldn't do I in J. And You're like, WHOA,
why not? And then he does I and J and
they're like, well he wouldn't do m right. And it's
I think it's time to open our eyes and see
where this is going and stop pretending that somebody who
(35:44):
has gone this far won't go one more step, two
more steps, three more steps to close.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Julia, this is the weekend interview, and I wonder if
we can go back in time to your childhood and
still Soviet Russia and your weekends then, especially as a
Jewish family, the Sabbath in a state where you know religion.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Is not We didn't know what that was. I wouldn't
call myself religious. It's just I think in part because
it's not something I grew up with, and growing up
with parents who hated the Soviet Union but were still
very much creations of the Soviet Union, both in terms
of the militant atheism definitely left its mark.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
And Russian do you think in Russian? Do you dream
in Russian?
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Only when I'm in Russia?
Speaker 2 (36:27):
For you know, after about a week, I switch, and
I haven't been back since just before the pandemic, and
I don't know when I'll ever go back. If ever,
when the war first started or the full scale invasion happened.
The war started in twenty fourteen. I would ask everybody
I knew and loved from that place, like, when do
you think we can go back? When do you think
(36:47):
it will be safe for us.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
To go back? And I don't know.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
I can't imagine it being safe to go back for
a very long time. I think definitely not while Putin
is alive, and I think Putinism will live on after
him for quite a while, the same way Stalinism lived
on after Stalin for about forty more years.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
And how do you feel thinking that? Do you miss it?
Is it a sense of loss in you?
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Massive?
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Yeah, it's a massive sense of loss in the same
way that you know. Hearing Alexey's voice, just the voice
brought tears to my eyes because that was his death
was also a severance of a thread tying me to
that place. And so many people have either left or
died or been killed, so many beloved institutions and places
(37:35):
have closed that I think even if I were to
go back now, it would be a totally alien place.
So yeah, there is a massive sense of loss.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Is there any source of hope that you have for Russia?
Like even Glimmers, I.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Mean, Russian culture, Russian humor always find a way like water,
and nothing is forever, but Russia certainly does have a pattern.
I imagine that this will lead to a period of
thaw and liberalization before another snapback and backlash. That's just
(38:12):
how Russia does things, so I'm hoping to at least
catch that little thaw in the future.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
To dear your fee, thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
And that's the Michelle Hussein Show for this week. If
you haven't subscribed, please do that way you'll know as
soon as we have a new episode. To those who've
left comments or even given us some stars, thank you,
and you can watch these conversations on YouTube and on
Bloomberg TV. And you'll also find a written version with
(38:47):
my notes at Bloomberg dot com. Forward Slash Weekend. The
team is producers Jessica Beck and Chris Martlu, Guest booking
by Dave Warren, Social media by Alex Morgan. This week,
our sound engineer was Richard Ward and video editing was
by Laura Francis. The executive producer is Louisa Lewis at
(39:08):
Bloomberg Weekend. Editorial director of Audio and Special Projects is
Brendan Francis. Newnham and our executive editor is Catherine bell Our.
Music is composed by Bart Walshaw and this week's special
thanks go to Moses and dam Brendan Palmer, Rachel Lewis Kriskey,
Alana Susnow, Sammasadi and Sage Bauman, and to you, of
(39:31):
course for listening. Do come back next weekend
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