At a moment when the world is desperate to comprehend Russia, journalist Julia Ioffe seeks to explain it through the eyes of women, some of them historical figures, some from her own family. The germ of her book was the idea that “the Soviet Union’s First Ladies were a reflection of the country’s fate”. But on a deeper level, Motherland suggests that the way women are treated – and what happens to them when they refuse to accept that treatment – says a lot about the mindset and culture of a place. Perhaps it says everything.
Ioffe and her family left the Soviet Union for the US in 1990, when she was seven years old, which makes her superbly placed to tell this story. Two of her great-grandmothers were doctors; another had a PhD in chemistry and ran her own lab; one of her grandmothers oversaw the plant that supplied the Kremlin’s drinking water. In the context of US history, she writes, these women might be considered exceptional, but in their own country, they were “perfectly average people”. A great unasked question permeates this book: how did we get from the civilisation that produced these kinds of extraordinary “ordinary” women to the Russia we see today?
Interspersed with flashes of memoir, family stories and journalistic encounters, the book acts as a gender-inflected primer on the past hundred years of Russian history. It assumes – not unreasonably – that most readers will be unfamiliar with names such as Alexandra Kollontai (diplomat, Marxist feminist), Nadezhda Krupskaya (politician, champion of co-education, Lenin’s wife), Inessa Armand (Bolshevik propagandist, Lenin’s lover) and Nadezhda and Svetlana Alliluyeva (respectively, Stalin’s wife and daughter). Opening with stories of overlooked or misunderstood figures from pre-revolutionary times, Ioffe progresses to encounters with Pussy Riot, anti-war campaigners, and Yulia Navalnaya, widow of opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
She writes with warmth, charisma and exuberance and is adept at zooming in and out, mixing precise personal detail with broad historical insights. Motherland is packed with data: at the time of the February Revolution of 1917, women made up 40% of the workforce – and therefore were at the heart of the founding of the Soviet Union (which was, of course, a movement that valued class above gender or any other distinction). The 1930s saw many “fathers of the revolution” being purged – but, as Ioffe points out, “tens of thousands of Soviet women were arrested simply for being the wives of men who had been arrested”. Twenty-thousand women were processed by one camp alone, Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland.
Ioffe’s family history crosses the old borders of the Soviet Union – with ancestors born in both Russia and Ukraine – and at no point does her narrative stray into a hand-wringing plea for Russia. Indeed, this book works well as a complement to Ukrainian writer Olia Hercules’s family memoir Strong Roots, which explains the last century of Ukrainian history and culture through the eyes of female relatives with a matching level of engagement and flair.
The characters Ioffe brings back to life are both eyewitnesses and canaries in the coalmine. She remembers her grandmother Emma pointing out the Moscow house of Lavrentiy Beria (Stalin’s grotesque henchman), the address etched in her memory because of the need, when she was a girl, to steer clear of the home of a notorious rapist. In the present day, Emma cannot be buried in the country of her birth because it is not safe for any of the family to return with her ashes. And while this is a history focused on women, it is Ioffe’s father who supplies one of its more memorable lines in his warning that “our homeland [is] a country without a future”. Although she still dreams at night of the Moscow she knew as a child, she realises he is right. Motherland is her cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed explanation of how it got that way.
• Motherland: A History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
