Julia Ioffe with David Remnick: Motherland
The 92nd Street Y, New York
34,727 views
Acclaimed journalist Julia Ioffe, one of America’s foremost voices on modern Russia, joins us to tell the story of her home country through the history of its women in a discussion of her book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, with The New Yorker’s David Remnick. Recorded October 23, 2025, at The 92nd Street Y, New York.
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Forty years ago, my maternal grandmother, then in her mid-90s, was blind, with a broken hip, lying in bed in the dark all day. Her husband, all her friends, and some of her children, were dead. Sitting at her bedside one day, somehow the topic of speaking multiple languages came up. Appealing to her background, I said that if I could speak Russian, I could read Tolstoy in the original Russian. "Do you know who Tolstoy was?", I asked her. Given that she was a farmer's wife, who had raised 8 children, when not hiding my grandfather from the Czar's soldiers in the hayloft, and had been blind from glaucoma since her 40s, I prepared my answer to her likely response of "No". "Sure", she said. "We lived near him in St. Petersburg. He was a bah-ROHN, but he still worked in the fields like everyone else, even though he didn't have to. And he had a big red beard like so, and he wore his shirt tails out, like so. Everybody liked him, because he worked like everyone else, even though he was a bah-ROHN. And when he died, everybody was so sad.. They came from all over for his funeral." All these years later, I'm still scraping my jaw off the floor. I was ready to wag a finger at an old blind woman and say "He was a very famous Russian writer", and the guy was her neighbour . She provided some details about his funeral that were all confirmed for me, years later, in the Plummer/Mirren film "The Last Train Station".
So I repeat, ALWAYS ask your grandparents about their life. To them, it's "just" minor details of their life, even if to us it's "history".
Julia Ioffe with David Remnick: Motherland
The 92nd Street Y, New York
34,727 views
Acclaimed journalist Julia Ioffe, one of America’s foremost voices on modern Russia, joins us to tell the story of her home country through the history of its women in a discussion of her book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, with The New Yorker’s David Remnick. Recorded October 23, 2025, at The 92nd Street Y, New York.
Your support helps us continue creating online content for our community. Donate now: http://www.92NY.org/Donate
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