The Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
In "Motherland," Ioffe turns modern Russian history on it's head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women.
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 The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms.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?
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. HarperCollins.com
Julia Ioffe is a Russian-born American journalist. Renowned journalist Julia Ioffe is a leading authority on Russian-U.S. relations, showing us precisely what is at stake. She previously served as Senior Editor for The New Republic, was a staff writer at The Atlantic covering politics and world affairs, and a correspondent for GQ Magazine. As a highly sought-after keynote speaker, Ioffe conveys Russian-American relations from both sides with clarity and insight.
“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
-Harpercollins.com
Publisher: HarperCollins
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Created September 23, 2025
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