Julia Ioffe has created a riveting red history of the Soviet Union through a colourful cast of remarkable women: some of them public figures attached to political power (politburo men), and others who were private citizens who played fundamental roles in the formation of the communist state, like many women in her own family whom the author portrays with deep affection.
Motherland has a spirit and register similar to Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War; you may previously have read several accounts of 20th-century Russian history, but here is another version that’s undervalued: the women’s stories. Ioffe was inspired by “personal fatigue” with the West’s fixation on Putin, on historians’ fixation on Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev and so on, writing that “the women in that history had been overlooked and underappreciated by historians who were, of course, mostly male”.
Alexievich’s book relayed the incredible experiences of Soviet women engaged in the second World War, their involvement a result of radical emancipation following the Bolshevik revolution, where Ioffe begins her narrative. “By 1917, Soviet women had the right to vote, years before their western peers,” she writes. “They had the right to no-fault divorce and child support, paid maternity leave, and free higher education, including sciences, by 1918. By 1920 they had the right to abortion, provided by the state for free.”
Seventy years later though the communist state was collapsing and Ioffe, aged seven, left with her family for the United States. Seeing a woman’s place in western society gave her a deeper appreciation for the “perfectly average” Soviet women and their extraordinary achievements, including those in her family tree: generations of medical practitioners; a chemical engineer who oversaw the lab at a filtration plant that supplied the Kremlin’s drinking water; a great-grandmother who was a PhD in chemistry.
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“By the time my mother entered medical school in 1977,” writes Ioffe, “70 per cent of doctors in the Soviet Union were women”, and with the “double burden” of being homemakers as well.
When Ioffe returned to post-Soviet Russia in the noughties she comprehended how the social experiment of resetting the order between women and men had been fully eroded across decades of retrograde political dictatorship and cultural patriarchy. She met many Russian women whose only ambitions in life were now finding a man and becoming a housewife.
Motherland is a beautifully crafted tribute to the remarkable women of a country that “shaped them”, but it’s also a howl of condemnation at a country that “failed them”, and later generations.
