How Russia Turned Its Back on Feminism

This was the only Russia I had known since arriving in the country as a journalist in 2012. LGBTQ rights were under constant assault, from adoption bans to the 2013 “gay propaganda” law. I could count the number of well-known female politicians, most of whom wielded little real power, on one hand. Many women I met in my day-to-day life expressed skepticism about the promises of feminism and a placid acceptance that they would likely have to rely on men—both economically and politically—to get what they wanted in life.

It is easy to assume that Russia has always been like this. But a sweeping new history by Russian American journalist Julia Ioffe provides a vital corrective, reminding us that the country was home to the world’s first feminist revolution and well ahead of the West on gender issues for most of the 20th century. Her book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy, weaves meticulous historical narrative with the stories of women from her own family, whose lives were forever altered by the Soviet experiment.

Ioffe takes us on a heady journey into the early Soviet era, when a largely rural and illiterate nation was, almost overnight, transformed into a place with the most progressive gender norms in the world. This soured in the postwar era, as—just as today—the catastrophic demographic fallout of war pushed anti-feminist backlash into overdrive, posing perhaps the gravest threat to women’s rights yet.

Kollontai moved quickly to overhaul tsarist-era laws and norms that had left most women impoverished, frequently pregnant, and powerless. She established free maternity hospitals and ended taboos on birth out of wedlock. Women were granted equal rights to marriage, divorce, and property ownership. In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion.

Schools were integrated and free. Together with another Bolshevik firebrand, Inessa Armand, Kollontai created the Zhenotdel, or Women’s Section, within the Communist Party, which flooded the countryside with young revolutionaries in red headscarves whose goal was to increase literacy rates among women. This was a smash success by any metric: In 1913, an estimated 17 percent of Russian women could read; by 1939, that figure had risen to more than 80 percent.

The trajectory of Ioffe’s family is inseparable from this history. Her four great-grandmothers were all born at the turn of the 20th century in the Pale of Settlement, a region on the western fringes of the Russian Empire where most Jewish people were forced to live. Their mothers had been locked out of almost all advanced education, but the Soviet feminist experiment launched them into the world as literate, highly educated career women. Ioffe’s writing, always zippy and sharp, is at its most moving when she’s retelling family lore, full of youthful capers and anguished love stories. My personal favorite was the widowed Buzya, who, propelled from a Ukrainian village to Moscow’s elite academic world, stayed up late writing scientific papers as well as forlorn letters to the married lover who would eventually become her second husband: “Your tenderness has melted me, and I’ve become a stupid little woman,” Buzya wrote.

By the late 1920s, as the Soviet regime ossified into authoritarianism, the feminist experiment began to stall. Many male Bolsheviks were not revolutionaries when it came to gender equality. Vladimir Lenin dubbed women the “most backward and immobile element” of society. Joseph Stalin apparently snarled about Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and a heavyweight Bolshevik in her own right, “To sleep with Lenin does not necessarily mean to understand Leninism!” The small number of women at the top of the party leadership dwindled; Kollontai spent most of the late 1920s languishing in obscure postings abroad, far from the levers of power.

While the 1918 constitution mandated Soviet women to work, this was matched with the promise that the state would take over some child-rearing and care duties in the form of free daycares, cafeterias, and laundromats. But these services were slow to materialize, and Soviet women were piled with a “double burden”: Having entered the workforce long before most of their Western peers, they were still expected to cook, clean, and do the bulk of the child-rearing. The Communist Party did little to alleviate pressure on women in this period. In 1930, the Zhenotdel was disbanded. In 1936, the ban on abortion was reinstated.

This backsliding is neither surprising nor unique to the Soviet Union: Leaders had imposed radical changes from above, without the kind of grassroots mobilization or support that would have given them staying power. Nonetheless, in the 1930s, some essential reforms, such as equal education and the right to work, stuck. But something bigger was around the corner that would mark the beginning of the end of this progress.

Women hold Tommy guns as they pose for a photo during World War II in Russia on June 21, 1942. They completed military training for service in regular and guerrilla units.Bettman Archive/Getty Images

The problems started after the war. Twenty-one million men did not come home, marking a demographic catastrophe for the Soviet Union. Under Stalin, the state expected women to give up their reproductive freedom to replace the country’s lost men. “They would give up their sons for the country, pretend their children were heroes rather than cannon fodder, and when those sons fell in battle, they would have more,” Ioffe writes.

To rectify this demographic collapse, the regime began chipping away at reproductive rights with a carrot-and-stick approach. It established a new 6 percent tax on the childless while gifting various medals to those women who gave birth to five children or more. The abortion ban was reaffirmed and would stay in place until two years after Stalin’s death in 1953. Perhaps most significantly, the state helped foster the punitive construct of the odinokaya mat’, or “single mother.” Women lost any right to seek child support from men they were not married to, which incentivized men to have more children with multiple women. These policies worked: At one point, one-third of Soviet children were born out of wedlock. As Ioffe pithily notes, these policies “institutionalized male irresponsibility,” placing the burden of child-rearing solely on women’s shoulders.

To observers of contemporary Russian politics, this might all sound familiar. Putin has taken a similar approach to the demographic catastrophe caused by his brutal war in Ukraine. Putin, whom Ioffe convincingly portrays as deeply chauvinistic in his personal life, was never a friend to feminism in his politics. But war, she argues, has invigorated his regime’s assault on women’s rights.

The most prominent organization protecting domestic violence survivors, No to Violence, was slapped with a “foreign agent” label and significant fines in 2023 and recently announced its closure due to state pressure and a loss of funding. Russia has banned positive portrayals of child-free lifestyles. Dozens of Russian regions have introduced one-off financial payments to incentivize female university students—and, in several regions, even high school students—to give birth.

Abortion is also under assault. Until recently, abortion was still widely accepted and did not have the same politicized valence as in the United States. Clearly wary of outright banning such a widely accepted practice, Moscow has instead since 2022 placed pressure on regional governors —who are tightly controlled by the Kremlin—to restrict access to abortion, adding birthrates to the “key performance indicators” they are evaluated on.

According to a BBC Russian investigation, more than 20 regions have now passed laws that punish doctors for “coercing” women to have abortions, which have had a clear chilling effect on doctors. In the wake of these laws and other pressure by regional authorities, many private clinics have stopped providing abortion services. Much of this regional activity is being lobbied for by anti-abortion groups funded by the Kremlin.

This appears to have done nothing to stem Russia’s demographic decline. In 2024, just 1.2 million children were born in the country, the smallest number since 1999 (when neither annexed Crimea nor wartime Chechnya was included). Ioffe sums up how this dismal chapter of Russian history has impacted women: “[I]nstead of killing fewer of their men, Putin asked Russian women to do exactly what Stalin had asked them to do eighty years prior: have more.”

A woman places a padlock and ribbon on a bridge near the Kremlin in Moscow on Dec. 14, 2019, during a protest in support of three Russian sisters who stabbed their father to death after suffering years of beatings and sexual assault. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

Back then, I saw Russia as being several decades behind the United States in its gender politics—the hope being, of course, that it would catch up. Instead, I wonder if we haven’t been seeing the reverse, with Russia setting the trend for the United States, which I’ve since moved back to.

Now, I am living in a country where abortion is under assault and where the president tells pregnant women to “tough it out” when they have pain and suggests that domestic violence is not a crime. Women are quitting the workplace at record rates, whether because of back-to-work post-pandemic policies or because of the growing influence of “tradwives” online. Pro-natalism, which rarely featured in mainstream politics during my lifetime, is now a vital part of the government’s agenda. And it isn’t just the United States: From Argentina to Poland, the backlash to progressive gender norms is helping to entrench illiberal, anti-democratic regimes and far-right populists alike.

Kollontai, the revolutionary feminist, described the early Soviet Union as a “fairy-tale country” for women. In Russia and the United States—indeed, in much of the world—the fairy tale, if it ever truly existed, has ended. Perhaps that’s only natural: An equal world will likely never be imposed from above, so we must learn to fight for it from below.