Motherland

Julia Ioffe, a Russian-born American journalist, opens this work of narrative history and family memoir by posing a paradox. The women in her Soviet-born family, four generations of doctors, were ordinary products of one of history's most radical social experiments: the attempt by the Bolsheviks, the revolutionary socialist party that founded the Soviet state, to emancipate women. The Soviet Union granted women the vote, no-fault divorce, paid maternity leave, free education, and legal abortion decades before their Western counterparts. Yet when Ioffe lived in Russia in the 2000s, educated Russian women oriented their lives around attracting men and aspired to be stay-at-home wives. Under Vladimir Putin's third presidential term beginning in 2012, this reversal deepened as he weaponized traditional values and incorporated the Russian Orthodox Church into political life. Ioffe tells this story by interweaving the lives of leaders' wives with those of her own foremothers.

Part I begins with the February Revolution of 1917, sparked when women textile workers in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) went on strike on International Women's Day, triggering protests that toppled the Romanov dynasty within a week. Alexandra Kollontai, a wealthy aristocrat turned Marxist revolutionary and the leading theorist on the "woman question," the socialist debate over women's emancipation, rushed home from exile. She was the sole supporter of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin's call for an immediate seizure of power. Kollontai had left her husband and young son to develop ideas about collectivized homes, state-supported childcare, and women's sexual liberation. Ioffe also introduces Lenin's two key female associates: Inessa Armand, his lover and underground agent, and Nadezhda Krupskaya, his wife, who built the Party's organizational apparatus.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, Kollontai became the world's first female cabinet minister, implementing reforms including free maternity hospitals, equal voting rights, simplified divorce, and equal minimum wages. The Party created the Zhenotdel (Women's Section) in 1919 to bring these reforms to the countryside, but its workers faced widespread hostility. Kollontai clashed with Lenin and was exiled as a diplomat. The Soviet Union legalized abortion in 1920 but did not legalize birth control until 1923, exposing a tension over whether women's emancipation served women's freedom or the state's need for workers and citizens.

Ioffe introduces her maternal great-grandmother Riva Weisser, born in 1901 in a Ukrainian shtetl (a small Jewish town), whose parents were murdered during Civil War pogroms that killed an estimated 50,000 to 150,000 Jews, the greatest mass murder of Jews before the Holocaust. Riva made her way to Moscow, benefiting from the Bolsheviks' elimination of restrictions on where Jews could live and study. The author's other maternal great-grandmother, Brokha "Buzya" Zuckerman, a PhD chemist, is introduced through a yearlong love correspondence that reveals both the intellectual life of modern Soviet scientists and the crushing "double burden," the combination of full-time work and near-total domestic responsibility, that defined Soviet women's lives.

Nadezhda Alliluyeva's marriage to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and her suicide in 1932 foreshadow the destruction he would wreak on the country. The Great Terror of 1936 to 1939 decimated Soviet society; by 1939, only 2 percent of delegates from the 1934 Party Congress were still alive. Women were affected primarily as survivors, tens of thousands arrested as "family members of traitors to the Motherland" for being wives of arrested men, while their children were sent to orphanages. The Terror touched the author's own family. The poem "Requiem" by renowned Russian poet Anna Akhmatova serves as the book's emotional touchstone for this era, and Ioffe describes how her mother, Olga, read Akhmatova's poetry aloud to her in suburban Maryland, passing down the inheritance of Soviet pain.

World War II transformed the experiment in Soviet womanhood. When Germany invaded in June 1941, tens of thousands of young women flooded recruitment offices, products of coeducational schools and paramilitary training. Nearly one million served in the Red Army as machine gunners, fighter pilots, snipers, and medics. The home front is narrated through the author's grandmothers, illustrating cascading separations and displacement while the Holocaust claimed virtually every relative who stayed behind in the Pale of Settlement, the tsarist region where Jews had been legally required to live. After the war, women veterans returned to suspicion and silence; one told oral historian Svetlana Alexievich that men "took away our victory" (134). Stalin resegregated schools by gender, eliminated military training for girls, and reintroduced home economics, ending the most radical phase of Soviet gender equality.

Part II opens with Stalin's death in 1953 and the rise of his successor, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The arrest of Stalin's secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria exposed his systematic rape of women and girls, illustrating how state power could be weaponized for personal predation. Khrushchev's 1944 family law, whose secret memorandum the historian Mie Nakachi discovered was titled "On Measures for Increasing the Population of the USSR," reshaped gender relations by creating the legal category of the single mother and stripping unmarried women of the right to name fathers or seek child support. Between 1945 and 1955, 8.7 million children were born out of wedlock. The author's grandmothers' marriages illustrate the postwar reality: women performed every role as worker, mother, and homemaker, all essentially alone.

Economist Tatyana Zaslavskaya coined the term perestroika (restructuring) in a 1983 paper diagnosing the Soviet economy's approaching collapse. Raisa Gorbacheva, wife of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, transformed the role of first lady with her education and intellectual partnership. But ordinary Soviet women lacked basic necessities, spent hours in food lines, and worked forty additional hours per week on housework. Zaslavskaya's surveys revealed growing conservatism among young Soviets, with strong pluralities believing women were naturally unfit for leadership. Gorbachev prepared to lay off six million women, encouraging them to return to their "purely womanly mission."

The author's family emigrated to the United States in April 1990, driven by fears of anti-Jewish pogroms. Part III opens with Ioffe's return to Moscow in 2009, where she discovers a culture obsessed with attracting and keeping men. Sociologist Elena Zdravomyslova explains that after the Soviet collapse, when men drank while women scrambled to feed their families, women began craving "civilized patriarchy": the stay-at-home life supported by a masculine provider. Meanwhile, male life expectancy crashed to fifty-eight years. Putin cultivated a persona as the ideal Russian man in deliberate contrast to this crisis.

Pussy Riot's February 2012 "punk prayer" in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a performance calling on the Virgin Mary to "become a feminist" and chase Putin out, became the catalyst for Putin's authoritarian traditionalism. Three members were arrested and sentenced to two years in penal colonies. Putin used the case to launch his skrepy (spiritual bindings) campaign, weaponizing traditional values as political control. His 2017 decriminalization of domestic violence had devastating consequences, exemplified by Margarita Gracheva, a domestic violence victim whose estranged husband severed both her hands with an axe after police repeatedly dismissed her reports.

Yulia Navalnaya emerged as Putin's most compelling female adversary when her husband, opposition leader Alexey Navalny, was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in August 2020. After Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021, he was imprisoned. Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 exposed the familiar pattern of Russian women bearing the consequences of men's wars. Wives and mothers formed groups demanding demobilization, but the Kremlin deployed propagandists against them. Putin doubled down on pronatalist policies, reviving the "Hero Mother" honor, banning "child-free propaganda," and outlawing gender reassignment surgery. Despite these measures, Russia's birth rate dropped to its lowest point since 1999.

Navalny died in prison in February 2024. Navalnaya took the stage at the Munich Security Conference hours later, stepping into opposition politics. The book concludes with the death of the author's grandmother Emma during the Covid pandemic. Emma's ashes remain on a bookshelf in suburban Maryland, unable to be buried in Moscow because the war has made Russia inaccessible. Ioffe reflects that Russia's future may never differ from its past, recalling her father's warning that their homeland was "a country without a future" and her first-grade teacher's parting inscription: "Don't forget, Yulia, Russia will always be your Motherland."