Colbert praises Soviet feminism — forgets the Gulags, mass murder, and forced labor

By the time of its collapse in 1991, the Soviet regime had overseen a democide of tens of millions of Russians, thrown millions of people into the regime's hellish Gulag labor camp system, and spent nearly 70 years brutally persecuting those at odds with dissenting views, especially Christians.

Stephen Colbert, the departing host of CBS' "The Late Show" who pushed COVID-19 vaccination during the pandemic, recently suggested that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn't all bad on account of its purported feminism.

'Russia and the Soviet Union were the vanguard of world feminism.'

During her Monday appearance on Colbert's show, Soviet-born reporter Julia Ioffe peddled her new book about the feminist experiment in the USSR — a "fairy-tale country" whose communist regime forced women to work, legalized abortion, ushered in no-fault divorce, and took other efforts to transform men and women into interchangeable units of labor devoid of strong loyalties outside the state.

"I remember seeing Soviet posters basically saying, 'In the West women are not allowed to do any of this,'" Colbert told Ioffe. "There was a forward-looking feminist agenda to the communist enterprise."

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Julia Ioffe and Stephen Colbert. Photo by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images.

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

Ioffe's apparent efforts to paint the Soviet Union as the "vanguard of world feminism" didn't get past critics.

Newsbusters noted that whereas women's right to vote, which was granted by the Provisional Government that replaced Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, was taken away by "Colbert's Soviet poster children" after the October Revolution, 15 American states allowed women to vote before 1917, and the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920 without suffering the country to communism.

Although Ioffe acknowledged that women's right to vote in the USSR became "largely irrelevant very quickly," she suggested to Colbert that there were other perks made available to women under the totalitarian regime, including access to free higher education, abortion, child support, no-fault civil divorce, and paid maternity leave.

Ioffe noted further that the regime gifted roughly 800,000 women, mostly teenage girls, the responsibility to fight in active combat during World War II.

Colbert, apparently upset to learn that the USSR's efforts to maximize the utility of women to the state dissipated over time, asked, "Why did it go away?"

"Because men," answered Ioffe.

"I'm so sorry," said Colbert.

Colbert, who recently told fellow travelers that a 2028 presidential run was not in the works despite speculation to the contrary, is leaving "The Late Show" in May.

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