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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Friday morning, everyone. Julia Ioffe is with us. You may know her reporting as a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News. She has written recently on how Vladimir Putin may have snookered Melania Trump into softening President Trump's stance toward him regarding Russia's war in Ukraine, and soften it he did toward Putin this week again.

Maybe you missed it with all the Gaza and Venezuela and ICE on the streets and New York mayoral debate news, but did you see Vice President Vance declare in Israel, in yet another story, that Trump will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank as a vote in Israel's parliament declared that they would?

Vice President Vance: When I asked about it, somebody told me that it was a political stunt, that it had no practical significance; it was purely symbolic. Look, if it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it. The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel.

Brian Lehrer: There's a lot going on in US foreign policy right now, as well as, of course, in domestic news. In foreign policy, on the peace track in the Middle East, on the war track in the Caribbean, and on the leave Putin alone while saying we disapprove track, although Trump did announce new sanctions on Russian oil companies yesterday, so we'll get to that, but as Putin continues to bomb civilians in Ukraine.

Well, even with all of that to cover, now comes a new book by Julia Ioffe, already chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award, with a surprising history of how Russia, of all places, led the world in feminism until it didn't. Yes, there's a parallel with what's going on in the United States right now, but the path to a global right-wing merger of on retrograde sex and gender roles was very different in the last century of Russian history than it's been here. The book is called Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. We'll talk about the book and some of this week's high-stakes decisions coming out of the White House.

Julia, always great to have you on. Congratulations on the book and welcome back to WNYC.

Julia Ioffe: Oh my goodness. Brian, thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Can you start, as you do in the book, with your own family history of four generations of women in your family practicing medicine? How far does this go back, and what was the context of how that got started?

Julia Ioffe: Well, my mother is a doctor. Her mother was a doctor, a cardiologist. Her mother was a doctor, a pediatrician. I had two great-grandmothers who were doctors, another great-grandmother who was a PhD in chemistry and ran her own lab and wrote scientific papers in the 1930s. My other grandmother was a chemical engineer who oversaw the lab at the water purification plant that provided drinking water to parts of Moscow and the Kremlin.

What I kept encountering was that Americans who would hear this lineage would say, "Wow, that's so extraordinary." I think in an American context, it is absolutely extraordinary. In a Soviet context, it is not. In the Soviet context, 70% of doctors were women. Women had been working full-time since the 1920s. They made up over half the workforce by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. They were heavily represented in the sciences and engineering, and STEM professions that in the US are considered male-dominated.

The context of how that happened is what the book is about. It's me trying to explain to an American and a Western audience while frankly learning about this myself, because in 20 years of learning and writing about Russia and the Soviet Union, I didn't know this history either. I was not taught it, and it was not readily accessible.

The context is a very radical socialist social experiment that, when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they sought not just to remake the Soviet man, but they wanted to make a new Soviet woman and a new Soviet society where women were emancipated, where they worked, and where they parented like the men did, where child rearing as well as domestic labor were collectivized, and where women were initially given a tremendous amount of rights. No-fault civil divorce in 1918, paid maternity leave in 1918, child support, free higher education, legalizing abortion in 1920.

Brian Lehrer: Abortion in 1920. That was amazing to read in your book.

Julia Ioffe: Then the secondary question is, what happened? How did Russia go from that, from a country that produced women who thought nothing of being a doctor or an engineer, and where women thought nothing of picking up a gun and going to join the fight against the Nazi invasion in 1941, where they were all female fighter bomber regiments? Going from that to a population of women that want nothing more than to marry rich so they can be stay-at-home wives and mothers.

Brian Lehrer: Hold the story of how it all went bad for a minute and talk about one of the names from history that may be worth saying out loud, and tell me if I'm mispronouncing it, Alexandra Kollontai?

Julia Ioffe: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Who is she?

Julia Ioffe: She was a very prominent revolutionary that was originally not on Lenin's side and then switched to his side in 1917. If the big names in Marxist philosophy, like Marx himself and others, kind of yada yada'd the part about how socialism would liberate women and emancipate women, Kollontai actually fleshed it out in her writings and explained what a socialist society would need to do specifically to emancipate women. It would be to treat childbearing as a collective good that is supported by the larger society.

Free child care, cafeterias, laundromats that the state runs, that take the domestic burden off of women's shoulders, emphasizing the importance of work and creative work to a woman's sense of self-worth, liberating women's sexual desires from the confines of marriage. Pretty revolutionary stuff when she was writing it at the turn of the 20th century. It sounds revolutionary even now, but imagine what it sounded like 120-some years ago.

Brian Lehrer: Tell us a little bit more about how that fit into the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 philosophy. We usually hear about it as an attempt that eventually went very bad to erase class distinctions, but so many people will only be hearing for the first time, through your book and through your book appearances like this, that they also set out to erase gender. How did the two go together?

Julia Ioffe: It wasn't so much that they set out to erase gender; it was that they set out to erase the disparities in how the genders were treated.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I said that wrong. Gender inequality, not gender.

Julia Ioffe: No, that's okay. Basically, the idea was that the family, the bourgeois nuclear family, is the building block of a capitalist bourgeois society. At the time, they were writing about a time where women entered into marriage, mostly for economic reasons. They couldn't really work on their own. To be able to feed themselves and have a roof over their head, they went from their father's house to their husband's house. Whether they wanted to be married to that person didn't really factor into it.

Some of the early socialists wrote very movingly about how it wasn't all that different from prostitution and that a sex worker or prostitute could stop. She could say, "Okay, I don't want to do this anymore," or "I no longer want to sleep with this client." A woman in a bourgeois marriage in the 19th century couldn't readily excuse herself from the arrangement. She would be destitute, and divorce was almost impossible to obtain.

One of the first things that the Bolsheviks-- they also felt, I should say, that to get rid of capitalism and this kind of bourgeois arrangement, they had to get rid of this basic building block. What they went about doing was liberating women from the confines of these arrangements, so making divorce, taking the divorce and marriage away from the church, making no-fault civil divorce very easy to obtain, freeing women from needing their husband's permission to do everything.

Brian Lehrer: I see free higher education for women as well as. That's from your book.

Julia Ioffe: Yes, that's right. I just mentioned that. Yes, free higher education, and also erasing the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. A woman could get child support from a man she suspected of being the father of her child, even if they weren't married. She would get paid maternity leave. These are reforms in 1918. We're still fighting over this here today. They just instituted this in 1918. They also forced, they said, "All women have to work." For them, for socialists at that time, the idea of work was central to a person's self-worth and value and self-conception.

Brian Lehrer: What we call work outside the home?

Julia Ioffe: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Who took care of the kids?

Julia Ioffe: Well, the idea was that the state would do it, that there would be state-run nurseries, and there would be state-run laundromats to do the laundry and wash the cloth diapers, that there would be state-run cafeterias to feed everyone. Lenin put it, I think, very funnily, where he said it's very inefficient to have a million women slaving away in a million stinky kitchens. Why don't we just consolidate it? You'll be surprised to know that not everyone liked that. It also didn't really pan out.

The state had other priorities, especially when it was broke after a world war and a civil and artificially created famines and political repressions, and then a second World War and then a Cold War with a very expensive arms race. A lot of these things just never panned out while women were still expected to put in a full day at the factory or the lab or the hospital without the support that the state had originally promised.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, my guest is Julia Ioffe, usually Washington correspondent for Puck News. We're going to talk about some of her reporting on Trump and Putin, on Putin manipulating Melania Trump to get her husband, Donald, to soften his stance on Putin and the war in Ukraine, according to Julia's article. We're also talking about Julia Ioffe's new book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy.

How did it start to go bad? Maybe you were just giving us an inkling of that because the actual take care of the family collectively piece didn't get fully implemented because-

Julia Ioffe: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: -it started to go bad way before Vladimir Putin, right?

Julia Ioffe: Yes, there's that part where the state just had other priorities. At the same time, the men at the top, because once the Bolsheviks seized power, they stopped being so egalitarian. They were quite egalitarian when they were in the underground, and basically, the stakes were very low. Once they seized power, they were like, "Okay, let the men take care of this." Women, very quickly, disappeared from positions of power. The men had other priorities and were themselves quite traditionalist and conservative in their view of the family of gender. They didn't like all the stuff that Kollontai was writing about. She was soon exiled, and they didn't love this. The policies reflected that.

They also needed women to keep working because they kept killing the men. They were building an industrial state at breakneck speed. What took Britain or the US 100 years to build, they were trying to do in 5. They needed all hands on deck, but they didn't build the nurseries, they didn't build the laundromats, they didn't build the cafeterias. Food was always scarce. Clothing was always scarce. Then, after World War II, women were also expected to have more babies. For that, the state doubled down on this kind of traditionalist view that many held at the top but didn't really put into policy. After World War II, they really were like, "Your first role is as a mother and a wife, but you have to keep working."

Soviet women, in addition to being pressed into reproductive service and just productive labor outside the home, they also had to run households full-time by themselves that lacked the mechanization and conveniences that their peers had in the West. There were no dishwashers. There were no washing machines. Oftentimes, there were no refrigerators. It was hard to get food. A lot of times, you had to go forage in the forest or wait in endless lines just to get something that passed for meat so you could make a soup for your family. Child rearing fell exclusively on the women.

By the time the Soviet Union was falling apart, women were exhausted. They were exhausted of carrying this double, triple burden and carrying their entire families, their country, on their back. There was a sense of, like, "If you're telling us that our primary role is as wives and as mothers, can we just do that part and let the men do the other half? Because we are exhausted of having to do everything all at once, as if it were our only occupation."

Brian Lehrer: Did you say this already? Stalin imposed a tax on not having kids?

Julia Ioffe: Yes. In 1944, this was actually a program designed by Nikita Khrushchev. When it was becoming clear, the catastrophic human losses that the Soviet Union suffered in World War II, most of whom were men, there was a state project to, as they called it, replace the dead. They wanted to have a baby boom the same way that the US was going to have a baby boom. The problem was that there were many fewer men to have these babies with.

The state created all kinds of legal and social categories, like the idea of a single mother trying to take away the social stigma that came with being a single mother with a child born out of wedlock, and incentivizing women who were or were not married to have as many children as possible. People who did not have children had to pay a tax. If you had one child, you paid a little less. If you had two children, you paid a little less. Then you only stopped paying it if you had three children. You replace the mother, the father, and you add one person into the state's coffers, as it were.

Khrushchev also borrowed this idea from Nazi Germany of giving military style medals to mothers for having astronomical numbers of children. The top was 10 children or above, and you would get a kind of medal. Vladimir Putin has recently reintroduced this idea.

Brian Lehrer: Have you told Vice President Vance about this? Maybe we would have it here.

Julia Ioffe: [laughs] I'd like not to.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any questions, any stories of your own along these lines, if you are of Russian descent or a Russian immigrant yourself, for Julia Ioffe, author of Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, before we get to some news of the day with her, 212-433-WNYC. Call or text with a question as well as a story. 212-433-9692.

Maybe your last couple of answers have started to neutralize this, but we're getting a few texts that go something like this. Here's one. "Maybe Brian should read a few real-world books regarding the success rates of communist countries. I believe the citizen death toll is about 100 million between 1900 and now." For people who had heard the very beginning of this and thought that you were glorifying the history of Soviet Russia.

Julia Ioffe: Oh, goodness, no.

Brian Lehrer: You're really not?

Julia Ioffe: No. I mean, if you read this book, this book is a tragedy. This book is not a success story. This is not a triumphalist history of the Soviet socialist experiment. This book is a tragedy. What I've heard from a lot of readers is that there are many parts that are quite painful and hard to read because it does document how deeply this promise, as well as its betrayal, hurt the very women it was supposed to emancipate, and how deeply it hurt and betrayed them, as well as the broader society, but specifically women.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe it's worth saying, since you started with your family story and how many generations of women doctors there have been in your family, that you and your parents came to this country as refugees from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Why did your parents feel they needed to take you and flee?

Julia Ioffe: Because of institutionalized, legalized anti-Semitism that drastically curtailed how Soviet Jews could live their lives. We were second-class citizens. There were many schools and universities we were not allowed to attend, many jobs that were completely closed, and professions that were closed to us. Casual anti-Semitism for my parents, for my mother, the deciding factor was the summer of 1988, which marked the 1,000th anniversary of Russia becoming Christian. There were rumors that there would be pogroms and that the police were handing out the names and addresses of Jews.

For my mother, whose grandmother survived a pogrom in 1919 and watched her mother be executed, my mom, even in the year of 1988, felt it was absolutely feasible and plausible for this to happen again, and decided-- My father had long wanted to leave, but she finally gave him the green light. That was on top of living in a totalitarian dictatorship where you can't read what you want to read, you can't associate with whom you want to associate, you can't say what you want to say, and there's no food and no clothing, and it's just society is kind of in a shambles.

The reason that you and I are having this interview in English, that I wrote this book in English, is because the Soviet experiment, also in internationalism and egalitarianism, not just by gender, but by nationality, religion, failed, and people like my family were driven from the country.

Brian Lehrer: Enter Vladimir Putin, eventually. What kind of sex or gender role politics did he grow up with or develop as an ambitious political adult?

Julia Ioffe: Well, he grew up in the post-war traditionalism that had been imposed by Stalin, this return to normalcy, return to traditional gender roles, and that seemed to have resonated deeply with him. He's a very traditional guy. Under his rule now, a lot of that has come roaring back and has become state policy. Again, Putin's government has explored reintroducing attacks on childlessness. He has reintroduced these medals of motherhood.

Russian students in schools are being taught lessons about religiosity and chastity and the value of having many, many children. Cabinet ministers in his cabinet, women, are going around telling young women to forego a higher education so that they can start having children early, so that way, they can have many more children. The state has also decriminalized domestic abuse.

Brian Lehrer: What?

Julia Ioffe: Yes. This has become a hyper-masculine, hyper-traditionalist, aggressively so, state. Some of that is because of the post-war traditionalist context in which he grew up.

Brian Lehrer: You tell the story of when Boris Yeltsin handed power to Putin around 25 years ago. Putin didn't even tell his wife it was going to happen. You excerpted that part on POC. Can you tell that story?

Julia Ioffe: Yes. Boris Yeltsin, who had been ailing and increasingly useless as the president of Russia on New Year's Eve 1999, went on TV and said, "Basically, I'm stepping aside, and here's this new caretaker president, Vladimir Putin." This was all televised. Then Putin gives a little speech, and his wife at the time, Lyudmila, did not know this was happening. She got a phone call from a friend congratulating her, and she thought it was kind of a New Year's greeting. Everybody was calling each other and saying happy coming New Year, etc.

She's like, "Yes, congratulations to you, too." The friend was like, "Do you not know what just happened?" It turned out she didn't. That her husband apparently had been in these talks for weeks to become Boris Yeltsin's successor. She hadn't even known to turn on the television, so she didn't see her husband take on this new role. She was incredibly upset. She understood immediately that her personal life was over with all this.

Brian Lehrer: Julia Ioffe, our guest from Puck News, with her new book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. Want to hear another person's family story. Karina in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Karina.

Karina: Hi. I was born in Ukraine in '73. Both my parents were engineers. They were treated equally. The opportunities provided to my mom in the workforce were very much equal to men. My mom had a very strong position. She felt power and empowered in the workforce. What I wanted to point out is what I have found is, once the women entered the home, so you could be boss at work, but once you entered the home, you were subservient to your husband and you were responsible for raising the kids, running the home, and anything that was associated with that, and that was maintained throughout my childhood. That then obviously started to peter out.

There were these examples of strong women in the workforce that really empowered, I think, young girls, but there always was this double standard of what happened once you were back at home.

Brian Lehrer: Did you hear stories like that in your family, Julia?

Julia Ioffe: Oh, absolutely. The book is full of them. What Karina describes is exactly what happened. Not only that, these women were often subservient to husbands that were quite useless and were dissolute drunkards who didn't bring home their salaries, or were these overgrown man-children that they also had to take care of full-time. It wasn't just that they were raising and taking care of their children full-time; they were also taking care of their husbands full-time. That's if they had husbands.

There was this very, very strong pressure after the reforms that Khrushchev and Stalin introduced in 1944 on women to get married, but there wasn't a lot of men around. There is this panic that develops in women that you have to get married, you have to have a child, no matter what, and this becomes even more important than your career. There are these incredible pressures on Soviet women.

On top of that, I think what Karina said was incredibly astute, and that's exactly what was happening across the entire Soviet Union. The other thing is that they were running a household, not in America, where you could go to the supermarket quickly, fill up a shopping cart, go home, have some pre-prepared meals, a TV dinner you could pop in the oven or the microwave. Everything had to be made from scratch every single day. There were no washing machines, so a lot of people lived in communal apartments. They were washing their clothes by boiling them in pots on a stove, with every other family that was boiling their laundry in a pot on the stove.

After spending a whole day at work being the boss, you then had to grab your kids from school, run to the store, get in line to order whatever kind of paltry selection of foodstuffs they had in the store, then get in another line and wait to pay for it, then get in a third line and wait to pick it up, which took up tremendous amount of time. Then you have to go home and you have to cook the dinner. There's oftentimes no refrigeration. You have to help your kids with your homework, you have to feed your husband. Then you put your kids to bed, and you darn their socks and make clothes from scratch, because you couldn't get clothes anywhere.

It was incredible that Soviet women were able to do it as long as they did because it was just so much work, both at work and at home. As one historian said, Soviet women did each of these jobs, the job in the workforce, the job as a homemaker, the job as primary child rearer, as if it was their sole job, even though they were doing three of them.

Brian Lehrer: When did they sleep?

Julia Ioffe: They didn't. They didn't. They didn't. Again, by the time the Soviet Union fell apart, they were exhausted. As one woman wrote into a newspaper in the late '80s, when things were freer under glasnost, she said, "Sure, Soviet women can do everything. We just don't want to anymore."

Brian Lehrer: Back to the present. How does Putin use traditional gender roles in his autocracy today? Use the word autocracy. How similar or different would you say it is to how Trump or others on the political right use it in this country? Use the term Christian nationalism to apply to both. Of course, the Soviet state was officially non-religious. Christian anything had to make a comeback. How does Putin use traditional gender roles in his autocracy today, and how similar or different from anything Trump is doing or his allies on the Christian right here?

Julia Ioffe: The church has come roaring back in Russia, in part because the Kremlin has asked it to and has empowered it to. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there wasn't a governing ideology anymore. There was no national idea. The church stepped in to fill that void, just as it had pre-1917. Then the idea of the Russian nation becomes a Christian one, and the Russian Orthodox Church is quite, quite backwards. It's the idea that men are men, and men are violent, and men naturally want to conquer and go to war. Women are women, and they should be subservient to their husbands, and their primary role is to be a mother and a homemaker, and to have as many kids as possible.

Of course, for Putin, that suits him quite well because he needs more and more people as he sends more and more people to die in trying to take over Ukraine. There had also been this kind of hollowing out of masculinity under the Soviet Union, in part because so many men were killed and traumatized, and alcoholism took off. Now, in the recruitment ads for the Russian military, because the Russian military just needs more and more and more bodies, they really play on this idea of the defeated emasculated man and say, "G,et off the couch, pick up a gun, and go be a man. Go fight in Ukraine. Do this for your women, protect your women."

We hear a lot of this similar rhetoric, kind of violent patriarchal traditionalism, here in the US, this idea that gay people are psychologically aberrant. Putin's government labeled the global LGBTQ movement, whatever that is, as an extremist one. Now gay Russians are on par with ISIS or Al-Qaeda terrorists. The Russian authorities have been breaking up, raiding gay bars, but even private parties and private people's homes, and saying these are gatherings of extremists, these are extremist cells. They're beaten up on camera, and these videos are then blasted to various Telegram channels. These people are given insane prison sentences.

Again, there's this idea that the government is propagating that men are men, women are women, and the men are in charge.

Brian Lehrer: There are only two genders.

Julia Ioffe: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Where did we hear this?

Julia Ioffe: It's interesting because Putin, even in declaring the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, said very clearly that one of the reasons he was going to fight in Ukraine and try to conquer Ukraine wasn't NATO. What he said was the Western imposition of values that are alien to Russia. The idea that there's more than two genders, the idea that there's radical feminism.

He explicitly said this, that this was one of the reasons he is fighting in Ukraine. He has come back to this idea over and over and over again, as have other members of the elites, saying that they're fighting in Ukraine because Russian soldiers, when they're fighting in Ukraine, discover gender-neutral bathrooms. Oh, my God. Of course, we have to conquer and destroy this country.

Brian Lehrer: How do the women, given even your previous answer, if you can know as a reporter, given how close to society Russia is at this point, how do the women feel about this and the men being encouraged to be men and pick up a weapon and go fight in Ukraine? Are women all behind this, or are they scratching their heads and saying, "Why are we doing this again?"

Julia Ioffe: Well, women, as you know, are not a monolith. There have been different responses. There are some women who have completely bought into this hook, line, and sinker. There have been stories of mothers calling their sons who have fled the draft, saying, "You're a scoundrel and a coward. You've betrayed your motherland. You need to go and fight, and I don't care if you die. At least you'll die a hero. Right now, you fled your duty, your patriotic duty, and I don't even want to be associated with you." There are some mothers like that.

There are mothers and wives who have gotten in their cars and driven behind the convoys taking their drafted sons and husbands down to Ukraine and demanding that they be freed, demanding that they be released from the clutches of the Ministry of Defense. There are some women who see the massive financial incentives that men are given to fight in the war in Ukraine. I mean, massive orders of magnitude more than they can make in their civilian jobs. They're being offered to them in the military, plus a massive signing bonus, plus ₽3 million if you're injured and ₽5 million to your family if you're killed. This, in a country where the average salary is about ₽40,000, 50,000 a month. These are astronomical numbers.

There have been some women who smell an opportunity in this. There was a real estate blogger influencer who went on a podcast, and somebody asked her, "If I'm a young woman in my 20s, real estate prices are so high, how can I buy my first apartment?" She said, "Well, find a man, marry him, and then make him sign up for the military, get shipped to Ukraine, where he'll inevitably get killed. You'll get this ₽5 million payout, and you can buy an apartment." She, of course, got in tremendous trouble.

There are some women who see it as a financial opportunity, and there are others who have gone out and protested and risked their own safety and liberty to protest their sons and husbands being sent to fight in a senseless, bloody war.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote on Puck News about Putin using Melania Trump to get President Trump to soften his stance toward Putin on Ukraine. In brief, what's the Putin-Melania story?

Julia Ioffe: The Putin-Melania story is, I want to say, a couple weeks ago, Melania Trump came out and made this brief, bizarre announcement to the press, didn't take any questions, and said, "As you know, I passed this letter to Vladimir Putin through my husband at Anchorage, when they met at Anchorage in August and asking him to free these Ukrainian children that have been kidnapped by Russia."

She announced that basically that this has opened up a back channel to Vladimir Putin, that she has been working with him and with members of his government to reunite some of these Ukrainian children with their families. She said that she had been successful in reuniting eight such children with their families.

This was interesting because Trump has said in the past that he has a good phone conversation with Putin, and then he gets home and the first lady says to him, "Oh, that's really nice, but did you see he bombed another Ukrainian city today?" I don't know if it's so much about getting Trump to soften his stance, but it's certainly neutralizing or trying to neutralize a voice in his ear that is introducing skepticism about the sweet talk Putin is giving Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any idea if Melania feels she was used in the way you describe?

Julia Ioffe: I don't know that she feels she was used, but you can see that she was. In the press conference she gave or the announcement she made, she said she no longer talks about kidnapped Ukrainian children. She just said they were displaced. She didn't talk about the ICC warrant out for Putin's arrest for, specifically, this issue. She just spoke about it in very neutral terms about this "displacement." Then she spoke very positively about Putin and his government, about how constructive they were and forthcoming, and how they were so helpful. I think it was a coup for Putin in neutralizing this skeptical voice in Trump's ear.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, and I'm going to build this around a clip, because here's Trump yesterday seeming to give up for now on brokering an end to Russia's war in Ukraine, something he campaigned on saying he could do in one day. Just the other day, there was supposed to be a meeting being arranged between Trump and Putin in Budapest, but yesterday, Trump said this.

President Trump: We canceled the meeting with President Putin. It didn't feel right to me. It didn't feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get, so I canceled it. We'll do it in the future. Next week, we'll be with many of you in those locations that I told you. Then it's back to Washington.

Brian Lehrer: I guess my question, Julia, given the contrast with the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, is, does it seem to you that Trump is more willing to put real pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu than he is on Vladimir Putin? If so, why?

Julia Ioffe: Yes, I think because Trump really likes Putin and really admires the kind of leader he is. Again, this kind of toxic, masculine, macho, authoritarian guy. Whatever Bibi is, he's not quite at that level. People can still, more or less, protest freely in Israel, whereas they cannot at all in Russia. Just one example. The other, I think, even more important distinction is that Israel is a US ally, a treaty ally, whereas Russia is an adversary. The US has a lot more leverage over Israel than it does over Russia. That's just a fact. It's much easier to lean on somebody over whom you have a lot of leverage.

Brian Lehrer: Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent for Puck News, is now the author of the book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. Already nominated, I see, for a National Book Award. Congratulations on that, and thank you for sharing it with us.

Julia Ioffe: Thank you, Brian. Thank you for having me.

 

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