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Book Summary and Reviews of Motherland by Julia Ioffe

Motherland by Julia Ioffe

Motherland

A Feminist History of Modern Russia,from Revolution to Autocracy

by Julia Ioffe

  • Publishes:
  • Jun 17, 2025, 320 pages
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Book Summary

Award-winning 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—had seemingly been replaced with 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 the last 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, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to 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 shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women. 

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This information about Motherland was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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More Information

Julia Ioffe is a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New YorkerForeign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and the Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck.

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