Motherland
A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy
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- $299.00
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- $299.00
Descripción editorial
'A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia' ANNE APPLEBAUM, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Red Famine
'A century of Russian history told through the women who lived it, shaped it, and survived it' NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA, founder of P***y Riot
Award-winning 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—had seemingly been replaced with 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 the last 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, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to 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 shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women.
About the author
JULIA IOFFE is a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and the Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck.
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.
