Motherland
A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
NAMED ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2025 BY THE WASHINGTON POST
NAMED ONE OF THE 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2025 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF 2025
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF FALL 2025 BY ELLE
ONE OF CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY'S MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2025
Acclaimed journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy.
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to becoming a bastion of conservative Christian values?
In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of P***y Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Ioffe chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and documents how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and how that failure paved the way for the revanche of Vladimir Putin.
Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe reveals what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the sacrifices of its women.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
From the earliest days of the Soviet Union, feminism was held up as one of the country’s core values. So what has become of those ideals? Journalist Julia Ioffe answers this fascinating and often dark question in this compelling blend of memoir and history. As she explains, Soviet philosophy proclaimed equal rights for women from day one, when a strike by female textile workers first ignited the Bolshevik Revolution. And though wiping away centuries of misogyny was easier said than done, it’s pretty eye-opening to read about just how much this progressive social policy managed to accomplish. After all, by the time Ioffe’s mother entered medical school in the ’70s, a whopping 60 percent of Soviet doctors were women. Even when she explores why women’s roles in Putin’s post-Soviet society have backslid, the analysis is fascinating, with connections to shockingly young mortality rates and a culture of despondency. You can’t fully understand Russian history without reading Motherland.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Ioffe debuts with a sharp critique of Russia's treatment of women. She begins with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which granted women the vote, no-fault divorce, paid maternity leave, and free abortions, and decreed a radical equality of the sexes. But this era also had its downsides for women, including famines, gulags, and Communist Party predators. (Stalin's secret-police chief Lavrenty Beria raped dozens of women and girls.) The later Soviet period, according to Ioffe, devolved into an exhausting, sexist grind: women were expected to have full-time careers while raising children and doing all the housework with no help from Russian men. Vladimir Putin's reign has seen more anti-feminist backlash, Ioffe contends, with women competing to become housewives to the few stable, sober men. ("When we give him advice... a man interprets it as you taking a sickle to his balls," Ioffe quotes one life coach, who advises submissiveness to her husband-hunting clients.) Ioffe also delves into her own family tree studded with Soviet-trained women doctors and scientists, and her personal struggles with dating in Moscow ("As much as I had come to find him pathetic, I hated myself far more because of what I had become with him," she writes of one paramour). It's a rich analysis of Russian women's lives across a century of political upheaval.
