7 November 2025
Charlotte Hobson reviews Motherland: A feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe, WilliamCollins, 496pp, 23 October 2025, ISBN: 9780008469665, £25
This review was first published in the Spectator Magazine, 6 November 2025
Motherland recounts a well-known slice of Russian history from a fresh perspective, that of the mighty Russian woman who, it’s said, can ‘stop a galloping horse and run into a burning hut.’ And goodness, how superhumanly brave and resilient they have had to be. After women were granted sweeping rights following the Revolution, the rest of the century saw their freedoms slowly squeezed. What persisted, however, was the Soviet obligation to work regardless of gender, which created a country of professional women in every sphere: engineers, cosmonauts, judges, professors, 70% of doctors by the ‘70s. Yet by the time Ioffe returns to live in twenty-first century Russia, the fantasy of many women is to marry rich and abandon their career altogether – a full circle back to the bourgeois status quo that the Bolsheviks were determined to destroy. The question this book asks is why.
In early 1918 Alexandra Kollontai, the first female cabinet minister in the world, issued decrees giving Russian women greater equality and protection under law than any other country would achieve for decades. They already had the right to vote; now they gained the right to study in any institution, to no-fault divorce ‘almost completely free of male egoism’, maternity leave and compulsory child support, even from unmarried fathers.
Still more ahead of its time was Kollontai’s vision for women in which their work – ‘the social idea, science, calling, creativity’ – was the focus of their lives, and the state would support mothers, allowing them to continue working as fathers did. Both women and men would be free to express themselves sexually: in her glorious, though misquoted and derided remarks, she suggested of the new socialist woman that ‘When the wave of passion sweeps over her, she holds out her hand to her chosen one and goes away for several weeks to drink from the cup of love’s joy… When the cup is empty, she throws it away without regret or bitterness. And again to work.’
Yet Kollontai resisted the idea of feminism per se. According to Marxist thought, feminists were ‘bourgeois equal-righters’ and their mission was a petty, even dangerous distraction from the class struggle. The result was that when Kollontai and other powerful women were sidelined after Lenin’s death, the floor was left to Bolshevik men who for all their revolutionary zeal, were unthinkingly conservative in their domestic lives. Certainly, women must work – the ravaged Soviet state needed all the hands it could get to rebuild and industrialise – but in the home, without any ongoing debate on gender roles or any other aspect of the patriarchy, women and men would just carry on as they were.
Nonetheless, young women who grew up in the 1920s and 30s were inspired by the sense of the possibilities open to them that their mothers and grandmothers could not have experienced. Ioffe illustrates her narrative with the experiences of her own female forebears, Jewish girls who grew up in the Pale of Settlement, the threat of pogroms ever present. Two of her great-grandmothers became doctors, while a third had a PhD in chemistry and ran her own lab – an ordinary tally in the USSR, whereas in the US at the time, fewer than a third of women worked outside the home in any capacity. They also believed both women and men were responsible for defence of their country, rushing to sign up to the Red Army when war broke out. ‘We are a generation not from this universe,’ one veteran remarked.
After the war, government policy was focussed on the need to repopulate. Khrushchev passed reforms that simultaneously encouraged men to have affairs, taxed childless women and stigmatised single mothers. Soviet women (able to stop a galloping horse, etc) were expected to work fulltime, shoulder the ‘double burden’ of running the home singlehanded as well as bearing as many children as possible. When the promised state support failed to materialise, grandmothers worked till they dropped, bringing up the children. Yet the perception was that Russian men were the ones with problems – and indeed this lopsided situation seems to have marginalised them even within their families, driven them still further into vodka-fuelled despair.
It’s no wonder that the exhausted women of Russia began to dream of a simpler, if narrower life as a housewife. Feminism in Putin’s Russia is seen as a foreign idea, risible, ugly; the women that Ioffe interviews still trot out ideas that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the nineteenth century. ‘In Russia women are too active, too independent… We should be ready to listen to and follow our man, to say, ‘You’re the boss, you’re right.’ The trad wife is on message for Putin’s new Russian Empire, which harks back to pre-Revolutionary cultural mores.
In practice, only a tiny minority of elite women’s lives have changed very much – in the third year of war with Ukraine, millions of households are run by single working women, their husbands away fighting or never coming back. Where the men are present, however, surveys suggest a staggering 70% of Russian women experience domestic abuse. Almost incredibly, the state’s response has been to decriminalise violence within the home. In one of the most shocking sections of this book, Ioffe quotes a Russian legal expert’s opinion on the reasoning behind this move. ‘Sanctioning violence in the home helps to sanction violence by the state… might makes right,’ she suggests. Even more horrible, ‘This could be a way to give men in Russia a steam valve.’ Politically impotent, economically depressed, Russian men can at least feel like autocrats in their own households.
Julia Ioffe has written a fluent, highly readable account of the country she knows both intimately, from childhood, and from American emigration. Like most current analyses of Russia, however, it’s not overfilled with optimism.
Fascinating and shocking review, thank you for covering the book.