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
“Even going into the war, the gender imbalance was pretty skewed in the Soviet Union because before 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, you had World War I, followed by the revolution, followed by the civil war, followed by collectivization, famine, mass political repression, which mostly hit men, and then World War II.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Julia Ioffe
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- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 5 Aug 2026
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…After the war, and for a while, right? I think after the war and well into the present, I think that’s definitely true. A lot of popular culture and just basically the women’s whisper network reinforced that, but it was the reality. There were 27 million Soviets that were killed in World War II. About 21 million of them were men. Even going into the war, the gender imbalance was pretty skewed in the Soviet Union because before 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, you had World War I, followed by the revolution, followed by the civil war, followed by collectivization, famine, mass political repression, which mostly hit men, and then World War II. By the time you get to 1945 and over 50 million Soviets were killed in the intervening three decades, many of whom were men, you have places where the gender imbalance was 100 women to every 19 men. There were villages where all the men left for war, and one came back and the women literally passed him around, or that man’s wife passed him around, to the other women if they wanted to have a child. There’s a lot of unmarried mothers after World War II, right?…
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