When diving into the history of the Soviet Union and modern Russia, one expects to encounter the towering figures of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin.
But in Motherland, Russian-born American journalist Julia Ioffe shifts the spotlight to the women – from the revolutionary thinkers and wartime snipers to the Soviet first ladies and her own ancestors – who shaped the country’s tumultuous past and uncertain present.
Shortlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for non-fiction, Motherland blends memoir, history, and reportage to chart how early gains in women’s rights gave way to erasure, exhaustion and backlash – and how the legacy of that unravelling continues to reverberate today. Drawing on archival research, interviews and personal history, Ioffe excavates a largely overlooked narrative: one in which women are not just witnesses to Russia’s upheavals, but central protagonists.
Speaking from her home in Virginia, Ioffe reflects on the hidden history of Russian women’s advancements, the fragility of progress, and what she sees in Russia’s future.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
My agent was always very impressed that not only was my mum a doctor, but her mum was a doctor and her mum was a doctor. (She) was like, “These women are extraordinary.”
And I was like, no, they’re actually not; they were just average middle-class Soviet people. I realised to explain to somebody like (my agent) – an educated, curious American – why this was something so ordinary to me, I would have to go back and tell the history almost from the beginning. That also gave me the chance to write something that wasn’t centred on Putin or on Stalin.
Another person I’ll credit is Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev. When I was interviewing her for the book, she said something very astute, very piercing: “If you think about it, the women at the top – the first ladies, the wives of the leaders – reflected the fate of the country.”
And I realised I could tell the story of Russian history through its women by using the Soviet first ladies to tell the arc of the history in the late 19th and 20th and early 21st centuries.
Publishers wanted more family memoir, and I felt like there wasn’t a lot to say about them; they were ordinary people.
And that’s where I got into the question that I opened the book with, which is: How do you tell the story of ordinary people living in extraordinary times?
I mean, they were ordinary people living through one of the craziest social experiments ever conducted by human beings.
I grew up with parents who were from the last Soviet generation, who were completely cynical. And I grew up thinking that nobody ever believed in the cause; that everybody was always lying and paying lip service.
When I started studying with (historian) Stephen Kotkin, I realised there were a couple of generations that really, really believed in this stuff, including some of my great-grandparents.
And the plunge that the whole country took – some willingly, many, many more unwillingly – into this utopian experiment was absolutely nuts. What made the story of my ancestors interesting, to me at least, was what they lived through and how they lived through it.
I picked up Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, which was her magnum opus about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
She interviewed people from all over the Soviet Union as it was collapsing, and she just takes herself out and condenses them into what are essentially these little monologues.
And they tell you the whole history of the Soviet Union from the vantage point of little people, as she called them: “These are little people living through big history.”
For me, it hit on the thing that had always made studying history so intoxicating for me. She shows what it feels like to live through historical cataclysm.
And I think it also showed how people can be incredibly, unwittingly poetic in describing their own lives and their own histories. She really informed my approach here to let the “little people” be the guide to the big history.
As I wrote it, I constantly felt that tension (of) how much explaining is too much explaining? And then I realised that most Russians don’t know this history, to Nadya’s point.
I think most Russians don’t know this history because history is the story of great men. And so I think to a large extent, I was narrating my own education in this stuff. I didn’t know pretty much any of this going in.
One of the many reasons I think Westerners think they invented feminism is (because of) the Iron Curtain. But the Soviet wasn’t interested in feminism. These feminists weren’t interested in feminism. They refused to call themselves feminists.
So I think Russians also wanted to believe that Westerners invented feminism and then tried to export it to Russia to poison it from the inside out, when in fact, Russia has its own very robust and very different tradition.
Progress is neither inevitable nor linear nor irreversible. And often, progress brings backlash from unexpected places.
The late Soviet government and early Russian government was very happy to facilitate women leaving the workforce because they wanted to save the jobs for the men as the economy shrunk very drastically.
But in some ways, the main driver was the women themselves because they were exhausted. (There was) this kind of uneven progress that most of them hadn’t fought for, hadn’t asked for. It was such uneven progress. Like on one hand, yes, work, make your own money.
On the other hand, you don’t get a pass from being a full-time mum and a full-time homemaker while you’re also working a full day’s shift at the hospital or the factory while men were doing only one job.
Right now, there are no plans for it to be translated. I talked to a friend who runs a publishing house in Russia from exile and she was like, “There’s no chance.”
There’s no way we can do a book with feminist in the title when Susan Sontag’s books are being seized from bookstores. But I really want to get it into Russia because I think Russians need to know their own history.
It’s incredible that the ways I’ve been thinking about getting this book into Russia parallel the way that my grandmother read certain things.
Like, can we get it in through basically electronic samizdat (clandestine self-publishing that swept the Soviet Union across the latter half of the 20th century)? Can we smuggle it in? Can I pay for a translation so that people can just pass it around? That’s how my grandmother read things in the 1950s and 1960s, and here we are again.
So I think, unfortunately, Russia’s future is going to look a lot like its past and its present. And though I still miss Moscow so much and I have a visceral need to go and see what has become of this place and to witness how it’s changing, I know I can’t go and I try to keep myself from wanting it too much because I don’t think it’s going to happen for a very long time. I think Putin and Putinism will be with us for a very long time. And I don’t know when it would be safe to go back. – Reuters
