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The Real Housewives of Moscow
Russian women were early to feminism. Now, though, their vision of liberation can look strangely like the domestic trap they were supposed to escape.
By Julia Ioffe
October 19, 2025
I met Alina Rotenberg in the summer of 2012. At thirty-six, she was no longer married, but her last name spoke volumes in Moscow: her ex-husband, Igor, was the son of Arkady Rotenberg, one of Vladimir Putin’s childhood friends and judo buddies. There were a lot of women like Alina in Moscow. They were beautiful, their laser-toned skin and ostentatiously luxe clothing advertising their wealth. But, to the city around them, they were only beautiful despite: despite having been cast off, despite being deemed old in their thirties, despite having a “character”—the Russian analogue of “difficult.”
After Putin was elected President in 2000, he went about creating a new oligarchic class, handing out plum no-bid contracts to old friends or members of the government hierarchy. This was how Arkady Rotenberg, Alina’s former father-in-law, became a billionaire. The post-Soviet nomenklatura was not that different from the one it replaced—and that was intentional. Putin had joined the K.G.B. during Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure, in the seventies, and, having used its power structure to reach the country’s upper rungs, he was all too happy to reproduce it. Back were the villas and the apartments, the chauffeurs and the mistresses swaddled in foreign luxury. This time, however, it was on an entirely different scale. Now Russia had access to world markets—a boon for its exports and for its élites’ insatiable appetite for real estate and high-end goods. Among Russian women, there was a desperate desire to launch oneself into this gilded stratosphere, which could only be accomplished by snaring a man who hovered there.
In the constellation of the Putinist aristocracy, Alina’s last name was a measure of how high she had risen and how far she had fallen. She arrived for our meeting in a white Audi coupé—her summer car, she told me. (A Range Rover Sport was her chariot of choice for the winter.) She was a striking woman, with dark, expertly curled hair spilling over her shoulders. Her wrist was adorned with a Rolex, her neck and earlobes with diamonds and pearls. It was a steamy late-summer afternoon, but for a former duchess of the new Russian empire there was no skimping on ceremony.
In some ways, Alina’s story could have been mine. We were both from Soviet Jewish families, the third generation of women born into a radical social experiment that began when the Bolsheviks seized power and set out to make the traditional bourgeois family obsolete. Vladimir Lenin believed that such families were a prison for women, and his revolutionary comrades—among them, his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya; his mistress Inessa Armand; and his ally Alexandra Kollontai—were assigned the task of freeing them from it. Kollontai, who was the first female cabinet minister in the world, oversaw the most radical reforms. In 1918, Soviet women were given the right to higher education, equal pay, no-fault civil divorce, child support (including for children born out of wedlock), paid maternity leave, and access to free maternity hospitals. In 1920, the Soviet Union legalized abortion. By the time that my mother and Alina’s were born, female illiteracy, the norm in imperial Russia, had been all but eliminated. When Alina and I were born, women constituted more than half of the Soviet workforce and seventy per cent of the country’s doctors. In families like ours, girls were expected to attend university and work. It was a given.
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Alina was born in Lvov, in Soviet Ukraine, and immigrated to Israel in her teens, when the U.S.S.R. was disintegrating. In Israel, she earned a degree in psychology and sociology from Tel Aviv University, then moved to England, where she studied organizational psychology at the London School of Economics. In London, she ran with a crew of women just like herself: smart, educated twentysomethings who worked in the financial sector as investment bankers and consultants.
In 2001, she followed a Russian boyfriend to Moscow. After coming of age around the hard women of Israel and the emancipated ladies of London, she was amazed by the priorities of Russian women. “I see them a lot in the gym, these very obvious one-day butterflies,” Alina told me. “Long, styled hair; very thin. These are physically very attractive girls, usually without any real education, and usually from out of town. You see them one day suddenly drive up in a Bentley, and you think, O.K., she made it.” These were the girls to whom Alina would find herself losing, time and time again, in the city’s fierce battle for men.
She eventually left the boyfriend, started working for an oligarch, and, in 2003, married spectacularly well, to Igor Rotenberg. As his father’s wealth grew, Igor was groomed as his heir, and handed state contracts. But Alina couldn’t seem to get the hang of the marital dynamic. “We had a very good relationship for a long time, until my career took off and I started competing with him for attention,” she said. She had quit her corporate job and, like so many élite wives, started an interior-decorating business. She figured that there were now two entrepreneurs in the family, but her husband didn’t see it that way. Even as Igor’s fortune grew, Alina told me, she kept pointing out her achievements and his lack of them. She had been educated abroad at prestigious universities; he had gone to St. Petersburg’s State University of Physical Education. She was sophisticated; he was a jock. “Everyone was looking at him adoringly, and I was constantly haranguing him,” she said. “At some point, he just got sick of it.” They divorced in 2009.
“It was my fault,” Alina concluded. If she could do it over again, she would change everything. “You have to protect the male ego very carefully,” she explained. “It’s delusional to think that a man needs some kind of exceptional woman. He needs a woman with whom he feels exceptional.” Igor had since remarried, to a woman Alina considered to be of “dubious internal composition.” And yet, “with her, he feels like a great man,” she said. “I didn’t understand this before. I always thought that he’d take joy in my success, that he’d say, ‘This is my dog. I’m very proud of it. I am its owner.’ But it’s not like that at all.”
In fact, Alina said, none of the ultra-wealthy men in her circle had married educated, professional women like her. They married women like Igor’s second wife. Two years after Alina and Igor got married, Igor’s father, Arkady, married a twenty-four-year-old peroxide blonde named Natalia. She was a dance teacher from Kurgan, an impoverished backwater just past the Urals. Natalia had gone from a shabby apartment building to the Moscow and London mansions of one of the richest men in the world. To Alina’s amazement, Natalia, who was five years younger than she was, never seemed self-conscious about her origins. “She’s absolutely confident in the fact that she deserves everything,” Alina said. “Someone once asked her if she could have ever imagined that she’d have a three-hundred-foot yacht, and she says, ‘Yes.’ How? How did she imagine it? She’s from a family with many, many kids, and they all lived in a tiny apartment.” Whenever Natalia called her husband, Alina told me, Arkady always answered the phone, even when he was in a meeting with Putin.
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A trained observer of psychology, Alina had made careful note of the strategies that seemed to work for these gazelle-like young women. For example: “A man values a woman a lot more if she is constantly dragging presents out of him,” she said, “and he values her a lot more than the woman who says, ‘No, no, no, I don’t need anything.’ ” Alina cradled her teacup, half awestruck. “They get everything this way,” she said. “I think that these things should be explained to girls in childhood. It’s very important. And it doesn’t matter if the girl is smart or not, because you can have a girl who goes to university and gets a Ph.D. and is tremendously accomplished but then loses to these pretty young things who will take away her husband before she can count to three.”
Feeling superior to these women, Alina warned me, was a fool’s comfort. “Everyone makes fun of them because they’re walking around with designer bags with diamond clasps, but things are working out just fine for them,” she said, shaking her head. “They’re geniuses. Absolute geniuses.”
A few months later, on a cool evening in September, I sat cross-legged with a dozen women on the floor of the Academy of Private Life, just off Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Street. Our teacher was Olga Kopylova, a middle-aged psychologist with a blond bob. “A man doesn’t go where he is nagged, he doesn’t go where he is put down, but where he is told that he is exceptional, the god-emperor, the light in the window,” Kopylova said. The Academy of Private Life was holding an open house, and Kopylova and her fellow-instructors were here to explain how these busy Moscow women might find happiness in their personal lives.
It was no small task. During the Second World War, some twenty-seven million Soviets were killed, most of them men in prime reproductive age. Hoping to rebuild and repopulate the country, Nikita Khrushchev encouraged women to get married and have as many babies as possible, but there were no men left to marry. Those who had managed to return from the war often came back wounded, both physically and psychologically. These men, too, were encouraged to get married—and stay married. Divorce became much more difficult to obtain. As a result, millions of women had to settle for having children with men who were married to other women—something that the state endorsed. By the twenty-first century, the male population had long since recovered, but there was still a sense, bordering on panic, that good men—single, decent, with well-paying jobs—were an endangered species. As one Russian girlfriend told me, “Men are like public toilets: either taken or shat in.”
Many Russian women felt time keenly, as if they knew to the second how long they had until their physical beauty—their main aktiv, one’s chief asset—would cease to be competitive in a cutthroat market. Until then, they capitalized on what nature had given them, investing as much as they could in clothing, makeup, and beauty procedures. (I was often asked by women in Moscow why their American counterparts “didn’t take care of themselves.”) During the financial crisis of 2008, Russia was the G-20 country hit hardest by the economic collapse, and yet cosmetics sales didn’t budge. Russian politicians, usually male, frequently touted Russian women as the most beautiful in the world, as if they were, like oil and gas, another natural resource to be exploited in the country’s march back to superpower status.
Among themselves, Russian women competed fiercely for male commitment—a commodity even rarer than the actual men. Expecting a man to be faithful in a marriage was seen as puritanical and unrealistic; infidelity was just men’s nature, women said, implying that, in this country that had once diverted wild rivers and dried up whole seas, a man’s nature was immutable. If anything, having mistresses was a status symbol: How many women (and love children) could a man afford to maintain? One Moscow banker I knew, who was on his third marriage at thirty-six, told me about a real-estate project that his bank was thinking of financing: an élite gated community with ten-million-dollar homes in the center, for the wives and legitimate children, surrounded by a ring of smaller, humbler homes, worth around two million each, for the mistresses and their illegitimate kids. This would be more convenient for everybody, explained the banker, who told me he always vacationed with his wife, two ex-wives, and all their children, even though each successive wife had started out as a mistress.
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And yet, despite the paltry, tentative prize at the end of this race, it was one that Russian women never stopped running: first to win a husband, then to fend off the other women who were surely scheming to take him from her. The Academy of Private Life was created to serve this demand, which was itself an outgrowth of the failure of the Soviet feminist experiment. By the late nineteen-eighties, Soviet women were accustomed to coming home after a draining work day to run unmechanized households and hunt for vanishingly rare food and clothing for their children, who were primarily their responsibility. These women, in the words of the historian Greta Bucher, “had to perform each of her roles—worker, mother, and homemaker—as if it were her only occupation.” And as if it were her occupation alone.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, only accentuated their hardships. Faced with hunger, instability, and salaries that weren’t paid for months, men and women responded differently. Millions of Russian men, unwilling to take on lower-status work, lay down on the couch and took to drink. Women, meanwhile, stepped into the breach. Former school principals scrubbed toilets; physicists became cashiers. As their men fell away—and divorce rates surged—women did whatever they needed to do to feed their families. All of this left many of them dreaming of being a stay-at-home wife supported and protected by a rich and masculine man. As Elena Zdravomyslova, a sociologist and feminist scholar in St. Petersburg, argued, with respect to motherhood and a career, the liberation of women from “the double burden” can “be seen, at least in part, as a liberation of women.”
This new ideal, which Zdravomyslova called “civilized patriarchy,” offered the Russian woman many benefits, the chief one being choice. She could, theoretically, stay at home, or she could work for her own pleasure and self-actualization. She could call the reproductive shots while her husband earned the money, shielding her from the harsh reality of the Russian workplace. A family with one breadwinner is “all people dream of here, because they never had it,” Zdravomyslova said. A hundred years after Kollontai and Lenin railed against traditional, economically motivated marriage, it had become women’s ultimate fantasy.
At the Academy of Private Life, Kopylova explained how that fantasy could be fulfilled. Every woman, Kopylova said, cycled through four states of being: the little girl, the seductress, the queen, and the khozayka, or the mistress of the house. What did it mean, Kopylova asked her students, if a man stopped giving you gifts? “It means the state of the little girl is suffering, that the girl isn’t present enough,” she declared. “Because the girl moves the man to action, to feats of chivalry.” Or, Kopylova asked, what if you were able to attract a man but not keep him? That was obviously the weakening of your internal khozayka.
“This is a man,” Kopylova said, holding up a dry-erase marker to signify a phallus. She wrapped her manicured hand tightly around it. “A man has a special little device that shows his vector, his direction. So if he suddenly finds some woman attractive, his little device immediately shows him what direction to move in.” But it was possible, Kopylova explained, to confuse a man’s little device. “When we keep saying, ‘I’ll do it myself,’ or when we give him advice—stupid advice, let’s be honest—a man interprets it as you taking a sickle to his balls.” A woman who was too headstrong, Kopylova said, risked turning her feminine energy into masculine energy. “A man can see, on an intuitive level, that you have a member and he has a member,” she said. “Can you have sex with him? You can’t!”
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Of course, the expert teachers of the school were happy to guide women back to a true feminine balance. The Academy of Private Life, which claims to have served more than a hundred and fifty thousand women, has several national outposts and a large syllabus of classes: Flirtation from A to Z, The Art of Walking Beautifully, Mysteries of the Jade Cave: How to Use Your Intimate Muscles, How to Play the Magic Flute: The Art of Fellatio. (These last two offerings aroused the most interest during the open house.) In all of the courses, the pedagogy is an awkward pastiche of traditions, combining Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Slavic paganism, Siberian shamanism, and Asian spiritual practices, spiked with elements of Jungian and American pop psychology.
After explaining the four feminine states, Kopylova revealed that an imbalance could be corrected only by realigning one’s chakras, an ancient Hindu concept. “I had one young woman who really wanted to give her boyfriend an expensive new car,” Kopylova said, illustrating how an errant chakra could backfire. “Of course, it’s your choice, but if you give a man expensive presents then you are definitely not his girlfriend. You are his mommy, and men don’t want to sleep with their mothers.” By the end of the session, she was pitching the women on a very handy dildo, which was for sale at the academy for just twenty-two hundred rubles—perfect for practice in the Magic Flute class.
One evening not long after the open house, I stopped by the Academy of Private Life to interview its founder. Larisa Renar was soft-spoken, with dyed copper hair and big blue eyes. She wore a long, diaphanous dress and the Medallion of Women’s Strength—a filigreed pendant, worn by many of the academy’s instructors, with four gemstones that represent the four states of femininity.
As Renar poured me tea, I asked why she had opened the academy, back in 2000. “I think the real problem is that modern society, not just in Russia but in the whole world, forces women to live according to male standards: to be like a man, to act like a man, to look like a man,” she began. In Russia, this problem was especially acute. “Women carry all the responsibility,” she explained. “A woman makes all the decisions. She makes the money. And in Russia a lot of women are too active, too independent. It’s related to historical events, to wars and revolutions when men were killed and women had no choice but to take on leadership roles. My generation of women, the ones born in the sixties—it really is easier for us to do everything ourselves and not depend on the men.”
I told Renar that I had to agree with her. By that point, I’d been living in Russia for several years, and had been dating a Russian man for some time. This particular man gave me flowers and paid me poignant compliments; he held the door and pulled out my chair in restaurants. By all outward appearances, he was successful and handsome, but with me he was a needy and manipulative child. His inability to make hard decisions or abstain from becoming a maudlin, clingy drunk had transformed me from his girlfriend and lover into his mother and disciplinarian. I hated myself for what I had become with him: a scold, a jealous girlfriend who waited for him to fall asleep so I could read through his phone, a woman angry and bitter beyond my years.
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And yet I knew that, in Moscow, he was the best that I could get. Other women openly pined for him; one tried to kiss him in public. “Men don’t grow on trees,” my grandmother chided whenever I despaired at his behavior. Plus, as she and my Russian girlfriends pointed out, he really loved me. What did it matter that I no longer loved him? Many of those Russian girlfriends believed my problems would vanish if I simply married him and had a child. “You can always get divorced!” my grandmother said, by way of reassurance. After all, I was nearing thirty and, apparently, the end of my life.
“Yes, men have been ground down,” Renar said. “This situation when a woman is strong, and not in a feminine way but a masculine one, and a man is weak—this role reversal is what has led to women’s unhappiness.” The solution, as Renar outlined in her 2015 book, “Make Your Husband a Millionaire,” is to channel your feminine energy into inspiring your man to become wealthy and successful. Renar is herself a successful businesswoman, and she told me that she thinks it’s wonderful for women to have careers. But she was also wary of modern feminism, because it destroyed the natural equilibrium between the sexes. “A man gives us women a home, physical protection, and a woman gives him pleasure, enjoyment of sex, beauty,” she said. “And so we should be ready to follow our man, to say, ‘You’re the boss, you’re right.’ ”
Eleonora and Leyla never attended the Academy of Private Life, but they understood its teachings instinctively. Like me, they were both born in 1982; Leyla in Ufa, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Bashkortostan, Eleonora in what was then Leningrad. They came from the Soviet middle class, from families of engineers and accountants and factory workers who, in the stagnation of the eighties, found themselves to be, practically, rather poor.
Both women had provincial lives, until they met men significantly older than themselves. Leyla’s was a Frenchman, an art collector twice her age, who picked her up in one of Moscow’s posh night clubs and began to educate her intensively. There were days in Parisian galleries and museums, quizzes at night. “Like Pygmalion,” Leyla told me. Eleonora met the scion of a celebrity Moscow family in St. Petersburg. He taught her about luxury hotels, about fine dining and silk napkins. “Like ‘Pretty Woman,’ ” Eleonora recalled.
After Leyla and the Frenchman parted ways, she made use of that education and became an interior designer, the universal profession of a glamorous Russian devushka. Although she loved her work, she craved the economic security of marriage, and found it in record time. After meeting a charming man through a friend, she quickly determined that he ticked most of her boxes. Ten days later, he proposed. How did she do it? “I think that my abilities helped me: conviction, marketing, management,” Leyla said. “I successfully advertised myself and was able to show myself in a positive light.” If it had been love with the Frenchman, Leyla admitted, this relationship was “cold calculation.”
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And yet things hadn’t turned out as she had hoped. When we met, she showed me around the well-decorated apartment she shared with her husband, who was also her boss in the design business they ran together. He wasn’t home, and he’d been gone all summer, though he sometimes called to remind her that he owed her nothing. Recounting this, Leyla, who had told me she strived to be “a flinty woman” like Margaret Thatcher, began to cry. “When I got married, I was hoping for solid ground under my feet, a husband as my shoulder, and I’ve got nothing,” she said. “We’ve been married for two years, and for the last six months I’ve been realizing that there’s only me, my work, my brains, my ambition, and that’s it. There is absolutely nothing around me.”
She wasn’t sure that she was ready for divorce. The women in her circle who had found rich husbands “will absolutely stay with them,” she said, even if these husbands openly cheated or had families with their lovers. Her friends took lovers, too, usually men over whom they had some power: bodyguards, drivers, or hachiki, a racial slur for men from the Muslim North Caucasus. Leyla gave a generalized description of a man in this vein—perhaps named Mahmoud, perhaps from Dagestan. One such man told her that he looked for women like her friends: rich, married, and neglected. They were perfectly low-maintenance, he said, and they wanted only one thing from him. Alina Rotenberg also remarked that several of her friends, even those married to Forbes-listed billionaires, liked to play around with the occasional Mahmoud.
Eleonora, who I chatted with over coffee at a Moscow restaurant, at first appeared to be an anomaly, in that she was still unmarried at the advanced age of twenty-nine. A pink-cheeked real-estate broker, she had spent the morning examining an out-of-town warehouse in heels and an elegant cashmere sweater. In Moscow, real estate can be a strikingly lucrative career, and Eleonora was in no rush to get married. But when the time came, she said, she wanted a man who was “stronger”—by which she meant a man who earned more money than she did. “It is the nature of Russian women to be protected behind a man’s back no matter how successful they are,” she said. “If there’s a man, then the woman will always prefer to be No. 2.”
This was strange to hear. Eleonora reminded me of my girlfriends back in New York: beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious, someone who loved her career and made a fabulously good living doing it. But, unlike them, she would gladly give it all up in an instant. Renar would have approved, I thought.
Ifirst met Renar just a few months after Putin won his third Presidential term. He has held on to the throne ever since, weaving a legitimizing ideology of traditional gender norms, Orthodox Christianity, and Russian neo-imperialism. In recent years, the “global L.G.B.T. movement” has been declared an extremist one, putting gay Russians on par with ISIS terrorists. Abortions have become harder to obtain, while domestic violence has been decriminalized. Putin’s cabinet ministers now encourage young women to forgo higher education and have babies—as many of them as possible. As Putin has sent hundreds of thousands of men to die trying to conquer Ukraine, he has reintroduced Stalin’s Order of Maternal Glory, military-style honors for women who produce an eye-popping number of children. (Stalin himself borrowed the idea from Nazi Germany.) In the militant revanche of the late Putin era, men are men, women are women, and the men are in charge.
This doesn’t seem so distant from Renar’s vision, but when I met her again, in 2015, I discovered that she had struggled to apply her teachings to her own life. She had once had a marriage that most Russian women only dream of. Her husband was a handsome and intelligent older man, a pioneer in the post-Soviet advertising market. He had helped her achieve her dream of getting into a psychology Ph.D. program, and bought her a building in St. Petersburg to house the business that eventually became the Academy of Private Life.
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And yet she hadn’t been happy. On the scale of love that she had developed, the fifth and highest level described two people who love each other so completely that their hearts block their bodies from lusting after anyone else. Most love in the world falls short of that ideal, Renar told me. She and her husband’s love, for instance, had been on the second level, when you choose your mate not with your heart but with your head. At this level, Renar explained, your desire for others does not disappear. And so he had affairs, she had affairs, and in this way they were just like so many other Russian couples “who are always searching for someone better, constantly scanning the options,” Renar said.
As the academy had flourished, Renar had increasingly questioned her marriage. “I thought, My God, how is this happening?” she recalled. “I’m smart, I’m beautiful, I’m sexy, I’ve learned every sexual technique I can think of. I’m trying to develop myself. I’m doing everything for our family.” When she asked her husband for a divorce, he thought it was foolishness. This was as close to happiness as any married couple could get in Russia. Asking for more could lead only to being alone, a far worse fate for a Russian woman than being unhappy. But he complied.
When I last spoke to her, Renar was dating a man a decade her junior, which clearly delighted her. “I think I will get married again, absolutely,” she told me. “And I will only marry a man not because he loves me, or because he checks the boxes on some checklist, but only when, inside of myself, I will have that knowledge that this man is the best man for me.”  |
