Julia Ioffe

Gebundenes Buch

Motherland

A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy

Beschreibung

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 The Soviet women she had known growing up-doctors, engineers, scientists-seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms.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.

Autor

JULIA IOFFE is a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker,  Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico , and The Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Ecco / HarperCollins US
• Seitenzahl: 512
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. Oktober 2025
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 167mm x 40mm
• Gewicht: 654g
• ISBN-13: 9780062879127
• ISBN-10: 006287912X
• Artikelnr.: 69235332

Rezensionen

"Ioffe-whose family fled the Soviet Union when she was a child-brings a unique personal and political perspective to this new book, which tells the story of promises made and broken to [Russia's] women." - Boston Globe

"Piercing . . . A pensive account of a revolution betrayed." - Kirkus

"Julia Ioffe, in her magnificent new book, asks how Russia, which gave rise to some of the world's most radical feminist ideas in the early twentieth century, ended up as a bastion of traditional gender roles a hundred years later. From the Bolshevik feminists to the wives of Soviet leaders to her own Jewish great-grandmothers and their improbable survival, her story crackles with

revolutionary action, the tragedy of missed opportunity, and brave struggles against authoritarianism. It is an urgent book for all of us." - Sabrina Tavernise, writer at large and former Moscow correspondent for The New York Times and former host of "The Daily"

"Julia Ioffe tracks the transformation of Russia from dictatorship to democracy and back again in sharp, engaging prose, telling the stories left out by so many others." - Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Red Famine

"Motherland is the most brilliant survey of Russian and Soviet women ever written. Women, the 'draft horses of the economy,' have been abused in every patriarchal way possible and yet somehow remain the only slim hope for the world's most hopeless country. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Ioffe has produced a page-turner full of bittersweetness and humor." - Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Story

"Julia Ioffe's Motherland is a fierce, intimate reckoning: a century of Russian history told through the women who lived it, shaped it, and survived it-revolutionaries, snipers, doctors, dissidents, artists-women trying to be happy and fulfilled in the long, turbulent century." - Nadya Tolokonnikova, founder of Pussy Riot

"A masterful blend of history, reportage, and family memoir. A fascinating, captivating, and unforgettable read." - Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History

"Julia Ioffe's Motherland is a brilliant retelling of the last century of Russian history through the eyes of the women who made it-and suffered through it. It's also a passionate family memoir that explains how the United States ended up with this gifted writer as one of our own. The best book I've read this year." - Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker and coauthor of Kremlin Rising

"Julia Ioffe has given us a masterpiece! Motherland is at once epic and intensely intimate, devastating, inspiring, and always riveting. Ioffe brilliantly interweaves the lives of four generations of remarkable women in her own family with those of some of the most iconic individuals in the history of the Soviet Union-male and female. I could not put this extraordinary book down." - Lynn Novick, documentary filmmaker and codirector of The U.S. and the Holocaust and The Vietnam War