Julia Ioffe: observation

Transcript context

…Do you think Ukraine is diverging from these norms at all? I know it’s hard to tell at this point. I’ll be honest, I don’t know Ukraine very well, but what you do see is that Ukraine is reaching back to a different set of norms from the Soviet era, which is women fighting in the military. In some ways, it’s because Ukraine needs all hands on deck and it has a manpower crisis, and they haven’t been able to fix the manpower shortage in the Ukrainian military. From the very beginning, you saw women volunteering to fight on the front lines, like you saw at the beginning of World War II when tens and tens of thousands of Soviet girls essentially, teenage girls, went and volunteered to fight. Some of the best snipers the Soviet Union had were women. They were tank drivers. They were fighter pilots. There were all-female squadrons of fighter pilots in the Soviet military. They did everything. They were sappers, machine gunners, spies, paratroopers. Over 800,000 Soviet women fought in active combat in World War II. You see Ukraine doing that, so in some ways, that’s a historical norm, whereas Russia is not doing that. Russia is sticking to that very reactionary essentialism, that essentialism we talked about. Men are men, and men do man things like fight wars, and women are women, and they do woman things like have babies back at the home front. What’s an underrated Russian novel that you would recommend to our listeners?…

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