Ecco Press
Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
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FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
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 The Soviet women she had known growing up--doctors, engineers, scientists--seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms.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.
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Book Details
ISBN:
9780062879127
EAN:
9780062879127
Binding:
Hardcover
Pages:
512
Authors:
Julia Ioffe
Publisher:
Ecco Press
My copy of Motherland came with blank pages so should I assume that feminism drew a blank in Russia and nothing happened? Love a book where one doesn't have to read it to know what happened.
In ‘Motherland: a feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy,’ Julia Ioffe provides readers with a well-written narrative that weaves together solid scholarship, the kind of clarity in writing that characterizes the best journalists, personal family history, and into a deeply humane whole. It reads like a novel. Ioffe, known for her insightful writing on Putin’s Russia, allows us to hear women’s stories in their own voices in a way that makes it hard to look away.
This is an absorbing fascinating account of significant women in Russian history and in Julia Ioffe’s family. Ioffe provides a family tree at the beginning which it helps to refer back to frequently. Starting with the 1917 revolution’s women, Alexandra Kollontoi, Nadezhda Krupskaya and Inessa Armand, through Anna Akhmatova, USSR presidential wives, to Yulia Navalnaya, Ioffe retells the tragic story of Russia’s totalitarian state. She might have even briefly mentioned the courage, commitment, and creativity of the 19th century Decembrist exiles such as Maria Volkonsky, and even of the 18th century’s Catherine the great, who all laid a precedent for leading female contributions. It’s a frequent wry comment in Russian society that, although the men appear to be in charge, it’s the babushkas who really run the country. Russia’s current totalitarian regime certainly needs challenge, resistance and replacement. In France, it was Charlotte Corday who despatched Marat, but perhaps Russia’s women can find a non-violent alternative to depose today’s tyrant.
Motherland is more a study in sociology during the Russian revolution. A good view of history from another's perspective.
Authentic story.
