Motherland

 A Feminist History of Modern Russia from Revolution to Autocracy

Award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the women who have lived, fought, and struggled within it—from revolution to utopia to autocracy.

In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, she returned to Moscow, only to find a society transformed. The Soviet women she had known—doctors, engineers, scientists—seemed replaced by a generation preoccupied with wealth, marriage, and domestic life. How had a nation that once prided itself as a vanguard of global feminism become one of the last strongholds of conservative Christian values?

In Motherland, Ioffe tells modern Russian history exclusively through its women. From her own great-grandmothers and Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary, to the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II and the millions of single mothers who rebuilt a shattered nation, she traces the arc of ambition, resilience, and constraint. She chronicles contemporary figures—from Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny—showing how the promises of the Soviet social experiment failed the very women it sought to empower, paving the way for the resurgence of Vladimir Putin.

Part memoir, part historical investigation, part cultural portrait, Motherland illuminates the lived experiences of Russian women across a century of upheaval. With clarity and empathy, Ioffe reveals how revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak have shaped the lives of women—and how their stories, in turn, define the Russia of today.