Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedJulia Ioffe: evaluation
5 Aug 2026 Conversations with Tyler Julia Ioffe on Russian Women, Missing Men, and the Roots of Autocracy
“I think in Russia in general, the phrase is “the harshness of the law is mitigated by the need to get around it.”
Source trail
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- Speaker
- Julia Ioffe
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 5 Aug 2026
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…Is it actually enforced? It went underground, and we know that Stalin’s lieutenants, when they got women pregnant, were able to get them abortions even though it was illegal at the time. I think in Russia in general, the phrase is “the harshness of the law is mitigated by the need to get around it. ” People got around it, but I think in general, most things were enforced in Stalin’s Soviet Union. So many of these communist societies, they seem to evolve toward an extreme form of prudery. We know what Beria did with women, Chairman Mao also, but the regimes themselves seem fairly anti-sex. Why does that happen? What’s your mental model of that?…
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