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 NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF FALL 2025 BY ELLE ONE OF CHICAGO PUBLIC
LIBRARY'S MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2025 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scientists—seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become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.
