Motherland
- Author Julia Ioffe
- Narrator Julia Ioffe
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Publish Date 23 October 2025
- Run Time 17 hours and 15 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Memoirs, Refugees and political asylum.
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What to expect
'A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia' ANNE APPLEBAUM, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Red Famine
'A century of Russian history told through the women who lived it, shaped it, and survived it' NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA, founder of Pussy Riot
Award-winning 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—had seemingly been replaced with 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 the last 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, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to 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 shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women.
Critics Review
n An i Paper Best History Book of 2025n
n‘Ioffe has written enough about the Kremlin that she cannot set foot on Russian soil without risking arrest. The motherland she was instructed never to forget has cast her out. But if you want to comprehend it, examining it through the eyes of its women — the backbone of the country — as Ioffe does, is an excellent place to start'
nn n Sunday Timesn n
n‘Julia Ioffe makes a refreshing argument that a different Russia is possible…a major achievement’
nn n Financial Timesn n
n‘Cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed’
nn n Guardiann n
n‘Excellent…an extremely readable, personal and original account’
nn n Spectatorn n
n'A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia. Julia Ioffe tracks the transformation of Russia from dictatorship to democracy and back again in sharp, engaging prose, filling in the blanks, telling the stories left out by so many others'
nn Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Red Faminen
n'A masterful blend of history, reportage, and family memoir. A fascinating, captivating, and unforgettable read'
nn Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American Historyn
n'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'
nn Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Storyn
n'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'
nn Nadya Tolokonnikova, founder of Pussy Riotn
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