Born of Jewish-Russian parents who emigrated to the United States when she was seven, Julia Ioffe has long been one of the sharpest commentators on her former homeland. This is her first book.

Writing it, she says, she had two aims: to find out why the Soviet Union reneged on its early promises of gender equality and to tell the story of post-revolutionary Russia through the lives of women. On the first, Ioffe’s puzzlement is disingenuous. Women’s rights were not given, then taken away under Communism. They were never truly given in the first place. The vote, granted in 1917, was worthless (one of Lenin’s first acts, on winning power that year, was to break up Russia’s first-ever fully elected assembly), and Aleksandra Kollontai, the radical feminist who had developed women’s policy for the Party in exile, was quickly sidelined. New women-friendly public services, such as day-care centres, largely existed only on paper, and were swamped by the tsunami of ghastlinesses – civil war, epidemics, famine, mass deportations and executions, the Gulag – that eased only with Stalin’s death in 1953. 

Even in the gentler late Soviet period, women’s near-universal participation in the workforce was a product of economic necessity rather than of choice, and they faced at least as much discrimination as their Western sisters. By the late 1970s, Ioffe notes, a remarkable 70 per cent of the Soviet Union’s