MOTHERLAND: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy, by Julia Ioffe
In 1990, when Julia Ioffe was 7 years old, her family left a collapsing Soviet Union for suburban Maryland. Her new classmates never let her forget that she was the “weird Russian girl,” but the disdain, she makes clear, was mutual. Growing up, she looked down on American kids who bragged about seeing a Broadway musical or vacationing in Florida. Ioffe’s idea of a good time was going to the opera and reading Pushkin.
She came by her snobbery honestly. Her family was filled with strong, educated women. Ioffe’s mother was an otolaryngologist turned pathologist; her mother’s mother was a cardiologist; her mother’s mother’s mother was a pediatrician. Another great-grandmother was a chemist who ran her own lab in the 1930s; Ioffe’s paternal grandmother was a chemical engineer who ensured the safety of the Kremlin’s drinking water.
Such accomplishments weren’t all that exceptional, Ioffe says. As she explains in “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy,” her female forebears were products of a system and culture that set out to erase the social differences between women and men in order to create a “new Soviet person”: “I was the descendant of women who were doctors and scientists and engineers, women who kept their names, the product of what I thought to be the greatest feminist experiment on earth.”
So when Ioffe, a journalist, returned to Moscow in 2009, she expected a city filled by women brimming with intellectual and professional ambitions. Instead, she met women whose highest goal in life seemed to be to attract a man. The first post-revolutionary generation of teenage girls fought the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; seven decades later, Ioffe was reporting from a classroom at Moscow’s Life Academy, a center for feminine education where instructors offered courses in “Flirtation From A to Z” and “How to Play the Magic Flute: The Art of Fellatio.” For Ioffe, this new dispensation was jarring. How had a country of women freedom fighters become a country of aspiring housewives?
“Motherland” chronicles Ioffe’s intensive efforts to find an answer. She starts with the revolutionary women who envisioned a socialist utopia, and ends with the activist art collective Pussy Riot, the wives and mothers of conscripts sent as part of the “meat waves” to the front lines in Ukraine, and the women functionaries she calls “foot soldiers of Putin’s autocracy.” She was tired of books that fixated on the men in power, like Lenin and Khrushchev; what she wanted instead was to narrate the country’s “big history” through the wives and daughters close to the Kremlin while also showing what it felt like for ordinary citizens making do.
The result is an enthralling narrative that is both sweeping and intimate. Ioffe introduces us to Alexandra Kollontai, who was born in 1872 into an aristocratic family before transforming into a Marxist revolutionary with grand ambitions. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, she was appointed the commissar for social welfare and helped ensure that women were entitled to maternity leave and equality in marriage and higher education. Kollontai’s policies were so attractive that they featured in Soviet propaganda designed to promote world revolution. Soviet Russian women, one pamphlet said, were living in “a fairy-tale country.”
The phrase was apt in more ways than one — not least because this “fairy-tale country” turned out not to be entirely real. Yes, three of Ioffe’s great-grandmothers became examples of the new Soviet woman. They benefited from formidable educations. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union had one of the highest female literacy rates in the world.
But as “Motherland” also shows, the Soviet men who controlled the country weren’t always so keen on encouraging or even maintaining radical egalitarianism. And when they were intent on so-called equality, it was often to punish women because of their connection to men who happened to run afoul of the Kremlin. In Kazakhstan, the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland was just one node in the sprawling network of the Gulag. Children born in captivity were sent to an orphanage where they were sometimes so neglected that they didn’t learn how to speak. One mother compared the sounds such children made to “the muted moans of pigeons.”
Having children, it turned out, would be a consistent obsession of the Soviet regime. Abortion was legalized, then outlawed, then legalized again. Stalin introduced a tax on childlessness. After the demographic disaster of World War II, the new superpower needed an expanding population. Ioffe notes that Stalin’s strategy for development relied mostly on “vast human sacrifice.” Men would make the big political decisions, while women would make more babies: “They would give up their sons for the country, pretend their children were heroes rather than cannon fodder, and when those sons fell in battle, they would have more.”
Alongside this official history, Ioffe traces a private one. One of her great-grandmothers survived a pogrom. Another, the pediatrician, was forced by the secret police to work at a military hospital during World War II. The women in her family would eventually learn that their stellar professional achievements did not mean a break from domestic work.
As the Soviet economy sputtered in the 1970s and ’80s, a dearth of consumer goods also made household tasks infinitely harder. It was impossible to procure disposable diapers or washing machines. (Politburo wives, by stark contrast, had access to special stores filled with otherwise scarce goods at discounted prices.) Women with Ph.D.s and full-time jobs spent their evenings pickling mushrooms and mending clothes. Even basic menstrual products were scarce.
“When I had decided to study Russia’s history and literature in college, my father warned me that our homeland was a country without a future,” Ioffe recalls. She returned to the United States in 2012 and is now convinced that he was right. She points out that Putin has deployed “traditional values” to consolidate control. Her conclusion is unsparingly bleak. “A new Russia had dawned, and it was a lot like the old one,” she writes. If there’s one change she notices, it’s this: Like the brief efflorescence of emancipation, all the people she loved there are gone.
MOTHERLAND: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy | By Julia Ioffe | Ecco | 489 pp. | $35
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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