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

by Julia Ioffe

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Journalist Julia Ioffe examines modern-day Russia through a feminist lens, using personal anecdotes, stories and research to trace the social and political evolution of women in Russian society.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

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 The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms.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 Pussy 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062879127
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/21/2025
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

Ioffe—whose family fled the Soviet Union when she was a child—brings a unique personal and political perspective to this new book, which tells the story of promises made and broken to [Russia’s] women.” — Boston Globe

“Piercing . . . A pensive account of a revolution betrayed.” — Kirkus 

“Julia Ioffe, in her magnificent new book, asks how Russia, which gave rise to some of the world’s most radical feminist ideas in the early twentieth century, ended up as a bastion of traditional gender roles a hundred years later. From the Bolshevik feminists to the wives of Soviet leaders to her own Jewish great-grandmothers and their improbable survival, her story crackles with revolutionary action, the tragedy of missed opportunity, and brave struggles against authoritarianism. It is an urgent book for all of us.”  — Sabrina Tavernise, writer at large and former Moscow correspondent for The New York Times and former host of "The Daily"

“Julia Ioffe tracks the transformation of Russia from dictatorship to democracy and back again in sharp, engaging prose, telling the stories left out by so many others.”  — Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gulag and Red Famine

“Motherland is 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

“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

“Julia Ioffe’s Motherland is a brilliant retelling of the last century of Russian history through the eyes of the women who made it—and suffered through it. It’s also a passionate family memoir that explains how the United States ended up with this gifted writer as one of our own. The best book I’ve read this year.”  — Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker and coauthor of Kremlin Rising

“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 Novick, documentary filmmaker and codirector of The U.S. and the Holocaust and The Vietnam War

From the Publisher

2025-07-03
Russian women take one step forward and two steps back in their struggle for equality.

A tenet of the Russian Revolution—ignited, writes Moscow-born American journalist Ioffe, by a strike of women textile workers in 1917—was that women were to be emancipated. They had the right to vote, the right to abortion, the right to no-fault divorce. Nearly a million women, Ioffe notes, fought alongside men in the Red Army, and when Ioffe’s mother entered medical school in 1977, “70 percent of doctors in the Soviet Union were women.” For some men, these rights were immaterial: The head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, was a known serial rapist whom Stalin tolerated even while forbidding his daughter to go to the Beria residence. Beria secured the silence of his victims “with threats of execution or the prospect of their families being sent to the Gulag,” even as other Soviet brass “used their power and access to scarce resources to, essentially, purchase sex.” The statutory freedoms and rights of women have since steadily been whittled away, Ioffe holds, and for numerous reasons. The regime of Vladimir Putin, at once neo-Stalinist and, at least in its nominal devotion to the Orthodox Church, tsarist, has restored women to second-class citizens, with his own wife as his first test case: “He was the leader, and she his eternally obedient subject, his first before he acquired 143 million more.” But some women, Ioffe observes piercingly, are complicit in their own subjugation, in part because men are now a scarce resource themselves, many succumbing in early middle age to deaths of despair, “with only 60 percent of Russian men surviving to the age of sixty.” The shortage of men, “an endangered species,” has yielded desperate competition among women, even as Putin’s draconian regime is considering taxing childlessness to combat one of the world’s lowest birth rates.

A pensive account of a revolution betrayed.

Kirkus Reviews