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

Julia Ioffe

Motherland was a finalist for the National Book Award, named one of the 10 best books of 2025 by the Washington Post, named one of the 100 notable books of 2025 by the New York Times, a Guardian best book of 2025, and named one of the best books of fall 2025 by Elle. 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 The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms.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. This meticulously researched history interweaves the personal and the political to explore the Russian Revolution and the forgotten women who started it, from textile workers on strike to feminist revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai; the audacious Soviet attempt to emancipate women and how its failure paved the way for Vladimir Putin; World War II through the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who served as snipers, medics, and fighter pilots in all-female squadrons during the war; four generations of the author's own remarkable family history, from her great-grandmothers—pioneering female physicians—to her own journey from Soviet refugee to acclaimed journalist; and modern Russia's matriarchs, from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, to understand the present through the women shaping Russia's turbulent political landscape today.