# With Julia Ioffe @ The Dreamland Theatre

34 years ago, Julia Ioffe and her family arrived in the U.S. as refugees from the former Soviet Union, having fled their homeland upon rumors of a planned pogrom against the Jews of Moscow. Julia was only seven.

Today, Julia Ioffe –- a happy American accident, as she has called her life — has become a go-to journalist for her singular insights on Vladimir Putin and Russia and her reporting on the war in Ukraine and U.S. national security policy.

In this conversation, we discuss: Ukraine’s surprise offensive inside Russia; Putin’s grip on power – and what it would take to loosen it; the results of Ioffe’s deep dive into Putin’s childhood; the enduring impact of Stalin’s Great Terror on the Russian psyche; Ioffe’s reflections on Alexey Navalny; a show & tell analysis of Putin, on camera, demanding obedience from his top aides; how to curse like a Russian; and, two months before giving birth to her first child, what Julia Ioffe will tell her son about the world he is entering.

**More About Julia Ioffe**:

Julia Ioffe graduated from Princeton and later received a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia, where she worked as a Moscow correspondent for Foreign Policy magazine and *The New Yorker. * Among other things, she introduced American readers to a young Russian opposition figure she had gotten to know well — Alexey Navalny. Back in the U.S., she became a senior editor at *The New Republic* and a featured reporter at *The Atlantic*. In 2021, [she joined the new platform Puck.news ](https://puck.news/author/julia-ioffe/)as a founding partner and Washington correspondent.