This book is fabulous.. I was blown away by Julia Ioffe’s intimate view of women in 20th century Russia as told by stories handed down through the matriarchs of the her family and Julia’s lived experience as a reporter in USSR. Juxtaposing those stories alongside the bigger picture of prominent women in Russian history was brilliant and made for a revealing and readable history of Russia’s most turbulent period in history. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a better understanding of today’s Russia.

4.5 stars

Motherland is a book of contrasts, with 100 years of women's stories from Russia, starting in the end of Tsarist period through revolution, upheaval, and through to the present day authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin. Ioffe shares the personal impact of feminism in Russia through the eyes of her female family members: great-grandmothers, grandmothers, aunts, and cousins, down to her mother, her sister and herself. Other prominent women include early female revolutionaries, soldiers, Communist party members, and the "first ladies", wives, mistresses, and daughters of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, through to Raisa Gorbachev and the noted absence of family members of the current leadership.
Women were promised full equality as part of the Communist takeover, and at times they did get access to education, professional work, and abortion. They worked as physicians, flew planes, and served in combat, but were never allowed to hold powerful positions and any equality ended at the door to their homes. Waves of conservatism, especially related to gender roles, ensured that the state did not protect women from violence or provide fair wages.
Ioffe includes an examination of antisemitism, as well as how the state used secret police and a corrupt "justice" system to ensure that the women who continue to speak against oppression suffer in a barbaric penal system.
Parts of this book are brutal, but the glimmers of hope among women who have fled Russia and those who have chosen to stay and fight are inspiring.

Julia Ioffe is a well-known journalist originally from the former Soviet Union and who has spent years reporting on Russia, including living there and making a variety of connections from various sectors of modern-day Russian civil-society (or what passes for it). She majored in history for her undergraduate career and this volume embodies a meeting point between those twin interests - history and journalism. This volume reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich's work and I'm sure she was in part an inspiration for Ioffe as each chapter is a partly self-contained vignette that allows the larger thread(s) of the book to consistently weave through them.

The idea for the book is somewhat original - writing a history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia through the lens of women, some famous, some less so, including her family members who bore witness to many of the events she covers. The first two sections of the book, looking at the revolutionary period through the collapse of the Soviet Union, rely most on historical 'research' and source material. And here is one of the weaknesses of Ioffe's volume in that numerous minor mistakes are made as most of the chapters are based on a limited source base. However, that shouldn't take away from the larger point of this volume and her contribution(s).

The final, third, part of the book is where Ioffe shines but in part it's due to the fact that much of what she goes over in the post-Soviet period in part relies on her own reporting and contacts. Still, the consistent theme of female trauma, suffering, perseverance, heroism, and self-sacrifice paint a poignant picture of a country that continues to seemingly stumble in the dark as it tries to find its way toward a type of progress that all too often takes advantage of the women who seek equality and parity with their male counterparts who themselves are trying to find and evaluate their own value and self worth as competing ideas about what it means to be a man in Russia at any given time seem to set everyone back sooner or later.

Even for those familiar with Russian/Soviet history, or post-Soviet current events, there is still plenty of value in this volume (overlooking some of the minor mistakes and inaccuracies). Intertwining the larger history of the Soviet/Russian state through the eyes of women and intermixing well-known personalities with her personal family experiences almost builds on Alexievich's work and offers another layer for readers to digest and analyze. Definitely a recommended volume on a difficult topic.