At a moment when the world is desperate to comprehend Russia, journalist Julia Ioffe seeks to explain it through the eyes of women, some of them historical figures, some from her own family. The germ of her book was the idea that “the Soviet Union’s First Ladies were a reflection of the country’s fate”. But on a deeper level, Motherland suggests that the way women are treated – and what happens to them when they refuse to accept that treatment – says a lot about the mindset and culture of a place. Perhaps it says everything.
Ioffe and her family left the Soviet Union for the US in 1990, when she was seven years old, which makes her superbly placed to tell this story. Two of her great-grandmothers were doctors; another had a PhD in chemistry and ran her own lab; one of her grandmothers oversaw the plant that supplied the Kremlin’s drinking water. In the context of US history, she writes, these women might be considered exceptional, but in their own country, they were “perfectly average people”. A great unasked question permeates this book: how did we get from the civilisation that produced these kinds of extraordinary “ordinary” women to the Russia we see today?
