Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy

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 Pussy 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.

Review

'A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia. Julia Ioffe tracks the transformation of Russia from dictatorship to democracy and back again in sharp, engaging prose, filling in the blanks, telling the stories left out by so many others'

Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Red Famine

'A masterful blend of history, reportage, and family memoir. A fascinating, captivating, and unforgettable read'

Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History

'The most brilliant survey of Russian and Soviet women ever written. Women, the ‘draft horses of the economy,’ have been abused in every patriarchal way possible and yet somehow remain the only slim hope for the world’s most hopeless country. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Ioffe has produced a page-turner full of bittersweetness and humor'

Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Story

'Julia Ioffe’s Motherland is a fierce, intimate reckoning: a century of Russian history told through the women who lived it, shaped it, and survived it―revolutionaries, snipers, doctors, dissidents, artists―women trying to be happy and fulfilled in the long, turbulent century'

Nadya Tolokonnikova, founder of Pussy Riot

'Julia Ioffe has given us a masterpiece! Motherland is at once epic and intensely intimate, devastating, inspiring, and always riveting. Ioffe brilliantly interweaves the lives of four generations of remarkable women in her own family with those of some of the most iconic individuals in the history of the Soviet Union―male and female. I could not put this extraordinary book down'

Lynn Novik, documentary filmmaker and co-director of The US and the Holocaust and The Vietnam War

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.