Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy – A National Book Award Finalist: Women's Stories of Idealism, War, and Sacrifice

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 Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, she returned to Moscow and discovered how dramatically Russian society had changed. The Soviet women she had known—doctors, engineers, scientists—seemed replaced by women seeking to marry wealthy men and become stay-at-home mothers. How had Russia shifted from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to embracing conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe examines modern Russian history exclusively through women's stories. She traces 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 a devastated country; from Pussy Riot members to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, this meticulously researched work interweaves the personal and political to reveal how a Soviet social experiment meant to emancipate women ultimately failed them—and how that failure enabled Vladimir Putin's rise.