How was the history of Russia made by its women through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and defeat? Join us for an engaging tour of Russia through the lives of its women.

Journalist Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union in 1990. She wouldn’t return for nearly two decades, and when she did, she found a country significantly changed. The Soviet Union had tried to portray itself as being on the vanguard of world feminism; today, Russia presents itself as the last bastion of conservative Christian values. How did that happen? What happened to the women of the Soviet era, who served as doctors, engineers and scientists? How, she asks, did they get replaced with women who are just desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home mothers?

It's a topic she explores in her new book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. From her own great grandmothers, who were physicians, to Lenin’s lover, who was a feminist revolutionary, to the hundreds of thousands of young Soviet women to fought in the Second World War to the millions of single mothers who repopulated the devastated country—and onward to Pussy Riot and Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Ioffe reveals the failure of the social experimentation of the Soviet era and how it paved the way for the revanchist policies of Vladimir Putin.

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Commonwealth Club World Affairs is a public forum. Any views expressed in our programs are those of the speakers and not of Commonwealth Club World Affairs.

This program contains EXPLICIT language.

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