Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy

Journalist Ioffe debuts with a sharp critique of Russia’s treatment of women. She begins with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which granted women the vote, no-fault divorce, paid maternity leave, and free abortions, and decreed a radical equality of the sexes. But this era also had its downsides for women, including famines, gulags, and Communist Party predators. (Stalin’s secret-police chief Lavrenty Beria raped dozens of women and girls.) The later Soviet period, according to Ioffe, devolved into an exhausting, sexist grind: women were expected to have full-time careers while raising children and doing all the housework with no help from Russian men. Vladimir Putin’s reign has seen more anti-feminist backlash, Ioffe contends, with women competing to become housewives to the few stable, sober men. (“When we give him advice... a man interprets it as you taking a sickle to his balls,” Ioffe quotes one life coach, who advises submissiveness to her husband-hunting clients.) Ioffe also delves into her own family tree studded with Soviet-trained women doctors and scientists, and her personal struggles with dating in Moscow (“As much as I had come to find him pathetic, I hated myself far more because of what I had become with him,” she writes of one paramour). It’s a rich analysis of Russian women’s lives across a century of political upheaval. (Oct.)