Name: Julia Ioffe: The Soviet Union Was Once The Vanguard Of World Feminism
Uploaded: 2026-01-06T17:10:09.000Z
Duration: 4 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Trump hinted similar actions for Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Greenland.

Rubio in a little press conference on Saturday, said, quote, when the president speaks, you should take him seriously.

So taking him seriously, what could happen next?

All of Washington during Trump once said, take him seriously, not literally.

Trump tends to do what he says he's going to do.

He wanted a Muslim ban, he instituted a Muslim ban.

And so when he says that he's going to go after Greenland, that he's going to maybe go after Cuba, he's going to go after Colombia, why wouldn't we believe him?

And so I know it's just that we hold on to a scrap of our sanity, and

it's very hard to wander into the demented fields where he wanders sometimes, that is.

He's our president and he's doing this stuff in our names, and

we might as well take him seriously and be prepared.

But he also said, seriously, no more wars.

Okay, to be fair, he hasn't actually started wars, though.

None of these things have resulted in wars.

This is in cooperation with the Justice Department.

they are arguing that he does these strikes on Iran, on Somalia, on Yemen.

He's done more strikes in less than a year than Biden did in all four years combined.

But none of them have resulted in protracted military action in war.

So he can technically argue he has not started any wars.

And I think for him, Venezuela is further proof of concept that he can just strike at places that don't have big armies like Cuba or Greenland, and

it won't start a war, and he gets what he wants, and

there's no pushback from Congress and certainly not from the oil companies.

Stephen, you seem like you're on board with all this.

That's how we're going to edit it, though.

Okay, so, okay, you have a new book, you have a new book called Motherland.

it's about Russian history and Soviet history told from the perspective of women.

I pitched this book in early 2018 because after spending all of 2017 talking about Trump and Putin, I was so sick of talking about those two men and I never wanted to talk about them again.

The thing is, I remember seeing, like, Soviet posters basically saying in the west, women aren't allowed to do any of this.

There was a very forward looking feminist agenda to the communist enterprise.

So I think a lot of people forget, including Russians, that Russia and the Soviet Union were the vanguard of world feminism.

Russian women had the right to vote in 1917.

Very quickly in 1918, they got access to free higher education, paid maternity leave, child support, even for men who weren't their legally married husbands.

And they had to start paying it when the woman was still pregnant.

Let's see, they got no fault civil divorce.

They no longer needed their husband's permission for anything.

In 1920, women got the right to abortion in the Soviet Union.

In World War II, over 800,000 women, most of them teenage girls, fought in active combat.

You know, they had all female squadrons of fighter pilots.

The best snipers in the Soviet Union were women.