Motherland

Award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to exile to autocracy.

In 1990, a year after the Berlin Wall fell, a seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled Russia, fearing anti-Jewish pogroms. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow on a Fulbright and found herself inexplicably pulled back into the country’s orbit. Living on a pullout couch in her grandmother’s apartment, she reported scores of stories while steeped her family’s past—only to realise that history seemed destined to repeat itself in cycles of hope, revolution, and collapse.

In order to better understand this complex country and her own place in its story, Ioffe turned to its women. Now, in Russia Girl, she uses the lens of various women in her family and throughout Russian history to illuminate the contradictory truths at the heart of Russia. Through her family history we see how leading generations of female doctors and scientists were once at the cutting edge of equality, before feminism became taboo. And we hear the voices of the women working towards revolution and see the women working behind the men in power.

Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part oral history, Russia Girl paints a portrait of the country today and the women who shaped it. Through this deeply emotional and personal narrative, Ioffe shows what it means to live through history, revolution, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the story of Russia yesterday and the Russia of tomorrow.