Motherland Julia Ioffe: Definitive, Unflinching History

Motherland by Julia Ioffe is the feminist history of modern Russia I wish I’d had years ago—a book that solves a persistent problem: histories of Russia that treat women as scenery, not protagonists.

By tracking women’s lives—from the 1917 revolutions through Stalin’s terror, World War II, perestroika, and Putin’s revanche—you can understand how Russia moved from utopian promises to autocracy.

Snapshot of evidence:

Women ignited the February Revolution in 1917; Russia became the first major country to grant women the vote and, by 1920, the first to legalize abortion; nearly 1,000,000 Soviet women served in the Red Army by 1945; and in the late Soviet era, abortion rates soared so high that the USSR had 6% of the world’s population but 20% of its abortions.

• Feb 23/Mar 8, 1917: Women’s Day strikes swell to 100,000+; within a week the tsar abdicates.
• July 1917: Russia becomes the first large country to enfranchise women; Bolsheviks later mandate equal voting rights regardless of gender, nationality, or religion.
• Jan 1918: Kollontai’s decrees—free maternity hospitals; state obstetricians; church–state separation follows.
• 1918 Family Code: no-fault divorce, equal spouses, secular marriage (ZAGS).
• 1920: Abortion legalized first in the world; birth control only 1923.
• 1941–45: ~1,000,000 women fight; 2,000 snipers, 12,000 recorded kills; peak ≈5% of personnel.
• 1989: USSR = 6% of world population but 20% of world abortions; >80% of women had at least one.

Best for: readers of narrative history, feminists, Slavic-studies students, book clubs hungry for rigor + story. Not for: anyone who prefers “great men” history or who bristles at memoir woven into scholarship.

1. Background

Ioffe opens where most histories don’t: “IT WAS THE WOMEN WHO STARTED THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.” On International Women’s Day—Feb 23, 1917 (Mar 8, West calendar)—Petrograd’s women textile workers walked out, swelled the streets to 100,000+ protestors, and helped topple the Romanovs within a week.

Modern historians broadly corroborate this: BBC-monitored coverage and specialist libraries mark IWD 1917 as the flashpoint of revolution.

2. Motherland Summary

This is the long-form, all-in-one summary you asked for—the sweep of Motherland‘s argument, the dates and turning points, the data, and the memorable lines, woven together so readers don’t need to go back to the text.

Ioffe retells modern Russian history by following what happened to women—from the moment women ignited the 1917 revolution to today’s return to “traditional values”—and shows how promises of liberation repeatedly curdled into obligations placed on women’s bodies, time, and labor.

Ground zero (February–November 1917)

International Women’s Day in Petrograd—February 23, 1917 (March 8 West calendar)—begins with women textile workers defying advice to stay home, walking out, and swelling street protests to 100,000+; within a week, soldiers refuse to fire and the tsar abdicates. Banners on Nevsky read: “If a woman is a slave, there will be no freedom!”

The new order races to encode change: in July 1917 the Provisional Government grants women the vote, “the first large country in the world to do so,” and Bolshevik decrees soon after stretch equality to inheritance, education, and civil status.

1918–1921: Kollontai’s revolution in law and daily life

On January 20, 1918, People’s Commissar Alexandra Kollontai issues her first decrees: free maternity hospitals; obstetricians as state employees (barred from experimenting on poor women); and, soon after, the state replaces religious marriage with civil marriage at ZAGS; no-fault divorce; equal spouses; raised marriage age (16 for girls, 18 for boys); universities opened to women; minimum wage regardless of gender.

A Menshevik scholar calls the new code “almost completely free of male egoism,” and Russia becomes “the first and only country … with full freedom of divorce.”

Kollontai also tries to “socialize” domestic burdens: cafeterias, laundries, nurseries. By 1920 there are 1,500 maternity/childcare centers; by 1921, 93% of Muscovites eat in public cafeterias—some liberation, some wartime necessity.

The Bolsheviks seize a church–state opening—after Kollontai requisitions the Alexander Nevsky Monastery for wounded veterans, the party issues a decree separating church and state, shifting family institutions to the state.

In November 1920, the Soviet Union legalizes abortion—first in the world—even as leaders remain ambivalent about birth control (not fully legalized until 1923) and insist women have a “moral obligation” to bear children. Ioffe names the core contradiction: emancipation was praised, but motherhood (and production) were still politicized.

To win women in the countryside, the party creates the Zhenotdel in September 1919, a mass mobilization “one of the most ambitious attempts to emancipate women ever undertaken by a government.” Trains and river boats take propaganda—and practical services—deep into villages.

1920s ideas: the “new woman” vs. the old economy

Kollontai’s theory is frank: the “new woman” should be economically independent, sexually self-directed, and supported by the state if she bears children; marriage is a comradely union, not a prison; divorce should be simple. She skewers double standards of sex and ownership in bourgeois marriage.

Yet the labor market and custom resist. Women are paid a fraction of men’s wages; some even pose as men to earn full pay. Kollontai’s socialization vision runs up against budgets, bureaucracy, and the sheer scale of the country.

1941–1945: women at war

When Hitler invades, teenage girls swarm recruiting posts; aviator Marina Raskova petitions Stalin, and on October 8, 1941 (Order 0099), three all-female air regiments are formed.

By May 1945, nearly 1,000,000 Soviet women have served in the Red Army; a sniper school graduates ~2,000 women (with ~12,000 recorded kills). Motherland’s emblematic figure is Lyudmila Pavlichenko, with 309 confirmed kills.

Postwar to late Soviet: “double burden,” demographic policy, and the abortion reality

Victory yields no domestic relief. The “double burden”—paid labor plus housework—hardens into normal; consumer scarcity keeps women sewing, patching, queuing. A 1989 study finds a mother with young children has 7 hours 36 minutes “for herself” (including sleep) and just 17 minutes of daily “quality time” with family.

With contraception unreliable or unavailable, abortion becomes “the only absolute form of family planning”: >80% of Soviet women have at least one; average 3–7 abortions over a lifetime; by 1989 the USSR has 6% of the world’s population but 20% of its abortions.

Late Soviet to post-Soviet: exhaustion, backlash, and the cultural turn

By the late 1970s–1980s, a once-utopian promise feels like attrition: three generations of Soviet women “carried this fairy-tale country on their backs,” rebuilding and repopulating it as leaders burned through them—until many simply didn’t want to “do everything” anymore.

Ioffe’s personal bridge—from a family of Soviet women doctors (by 1977, 70% of doctors are women) to 2010s Moscow—captures the turn: educated women orient lives around marriage markets, beauty labor, and dependency fantasies just as Vladimir Putin re-enters the presidency in 2012 and pivots from “managed democracy” to religious/cultural revanche, folding the Orthodox Church into state ideology and weaponizing “traditional values.” The question that drives Motherland: what happened between Kollontai’s future and this reaction?

The arguments

• Revolutionary inclusion vs. administrative control: Women win rights at unprecedented speed (vote 1917, family code 1918, abortion 1920), yet these arrive through a state that increasingly controls family, church, and reproduction—liberation administered from above.
• Emancipation vs. production: Leaders praise women’s equality, then cast motherhood as patriotic duty; birth control lags; abortion fills the gap; the “double burden” never truly lifts.
• Heroism vs. erasure: Nearly a million women fight the Nazis—snipers, pilots, gunners—yet postwar memory recasts them into caretakers, not combatants.
• Modernization vs. morality politics: Once the state seizes family institutions (church–state separation; ZAGS), the same machinery later pushes “traditional values”—a reversal that helps explain the slide to autocracy.

Highlighted timeline

• Feb 23 / Mar 8, 1917 — Women’s Day strikes begin; crowds >100,000; soldiers refuse to fire; the tsar abdicates within a week. “Hungry women and children” started it, wrote one witness.
• July 1917 — Women’s suffrage (first large country).
• Jan 1918 — Kollontai decrees: free maternity hospitals; state obstetricians; abolition of religious marriage; ZAGS civil marriage; no-fault divorce; equal spouses; raised marriage ages.
• Sept 1919 — Zhenotdel (Women’s Section) created; mass outreach across the countryside.
• 1920–1921 — Social services expand: 1,500 centers; 93% of Muscovites use public cafeterias.
• Nov 1920 — Abortion legalized (first in the world); 1923—birth control legalized.
• Oct 8, 1941 — Stalin’s Order 0099 creates three all-female air regiments.
• May 1945 — ~1,000,000 women have served; ~2,000 trained women snipers; ~12,000 recorded kills; Lyudmila Pavlichenko with 309.
• 1989 — Time-use and reproductive reality: mothers’ “17 minutes” of daily “quality time”; >80% of women had an abortion; 3–7 abortions per woman on average; 20% of world abortions with 6% of population.

Core themes

1. Women as political accelerant. When women move, regimes move—1917 proves it, and Ioffe keeps returning to moments when women’s collective action forces elite recalibration.
2. State feminism from above. Early Soviet law is breathtaking in speed and scope; it also centralizes power over marriage, divorce, and reproduction, laying tracks for future moral policy.
3. The unresolved paradox. Emancipation is celebrated so women can work more—and produce more citizens—without truly socializing domestic labor. That contradiction drives policy lurches for a century.
4. Heroism without inheritance. WWII women earn decorations and myths; peace hands them the basin and the queue. The “generation not from this universe” returns to a universe that undervalues them.
5. From utopia to autocracy via the family. The same institutions that once broke church control later enforce “traditional values,” helping explain the political regression Ioffe charts into the 2010s.

Quotes

• “IT WAS THE WOMEN WHO STARTED THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.”
• “These measures made Russia the first and only country in the world with full freedom of divorce.”
• “The new state legalized abortion in 1920, becoming the first country in the world to do so.”
• “By May 1945 nearly 1 million Soviet women had fought in the Red Army… and snipers.”
• “A woman with young children has seven hours and 36 minutes a day for herself… 17 minutes a day for family ‘quality time.’”

Chapter analysis

• Part I builds the revolutionary preconditions (women’s urban labor, hunger, strike action), then moves swiftly into legal revolution: suffrage (1917), 1918 family code, ZAGS, and the Zhenotdel’s project to turn “babas” into citizens. It frames Kollontai’s thought—economic independence, socialized domestic labor, comradely marriage—and the 1920 abortion law, with the book’s central paradox plainly stated.
• Middle chapters pivot to World War II, where women become a measurable share of the fighting force—air regiments, snipers, logistics—and where individual profiles (Raskova; Pavlichenko) illustrate systemic mobilization, loss, and myth-making.
• Late chapters walk through the lived postwar trade-offs: scarce goods, “double burden,” abortion as the de facto family planning system, and the emotional cost measured in minutes and exhaustion.
  
  That lived history grounds Ioffe’s final question about the 2010s—why the drift toward dependency scripts and state-sponsored traditionalism under Putin—and answers it by showing how policy, scarcity, and propaganda trained generations into accepting the family as a political instrument.

Key takeaways

• Women’s centrality isn’t an add-on; it’s an explanation for the shape of Russian modernity. When women were mobilized and resourced, the state modernized; when they were rhetorically exalted but materially overburdened, the system stagnated and then sought control via the family.
• Policy facts matter: suffrage (1917), family code (1918), church–state separation (1918), Zhenotdel (1919), abortion (1920), birth control (1923), all-female regiments (1941), nearly 1M women in arms (1945), and late-Soviet reproductive statistics (1989). Those dates and numbers—plus the book’s vivid portraits—are what make the feminist frame explanatory rather than decorative.
• The contradiction endures: emancipation on paper; obligation in practice. The USSR could be a “fairy-tale country” for working women in propaganda (1921), yet by perestroika, the fairy tale sits on women’s exhausted backs. That tension sets up the post-Soviet slide to autocracy through the “traditional family.”

3. Motherland Analysis

Evaluation of content

Ioffe’s feminist frame is anchored in hard policy. The 1918 family code equalized spouses, simplified no-fault divorce, mandated paid maternity leave, secularized marriage (ZAGS), and made Russia “the first and only country in the world with full freedom of divorce,” a Menshevik legal scholar marveled.

Motherland details the 1920 abortion decree—making Soviet Russia the first country to legalize abortion, even as contraception lagged until 1923, revealing an ideological paradox: women were to be free—and also to bear more Soviet citizens.

World War II chapters are empirical and gripping. By May 1945, ~1 million women had fought in the Red Army, with 2,000 trained women snipers and 12,000 recorded sniper kills; these figures mirror external syntheses (e.g., ~800,000 Red Army women, ≈5% of the force at peak).

Does Motherland fulfill its aim?

Yes—and it adds texture. Statistics like 40% female share of Petrograd’s workforce pre-revolution, 1,500 maternity/childcare centers by 1920, 93% of Muscovites eating in public cafeterias by 1921, and late-Soviet abortion prevalence (>80% of women; 3–7 abortions over a lifetime on average; USSR had 20% of world abortions in 1989) turn a “story” into structure.

4. Strengths & Weaknesses

What captivated me first were Ioffe’s mosaic chapters that braid policy with people: Kollontai’s 1918 decrees building a “Palace of Motherhood” while requisitioning an Orthodox monastery—an act that prompted the decree to separate church and state—reads like a parable of modernity’s birth pangs.

Her use of short, primary-source-sharp quotes is terrific: placards—“If a woman is a slave, there will be no freedom!”—Trotsky’s remark that women “marched…more bravely than the men,” and the manifesto proclaiming a Soviet “fairy-tale country” for working women all ground the narrative.

If anything drags, it’s the necessary whiplash between sweeping laws and granular family history; at times, the memoir strand can soften the analytic edge. Yet this is also how Motherlandearns its empathy, especially when charting late-Soviet exhaustion: a 1989 survey found mothers had “17 minutes a day for family ‘quality time’.”

5. Reception, criticism & influence

Early coverage highlights the book’s reframing of Russia’s 20th century via women while revisiting suppressed stories (e.g., Beria’s sexual predation) and connecting to today’s authoritarian “traditional values.”

Feminist outlets underline the book’s timing—Motherland (Ecco, Oct. 21, 2025) arrives as Russia doubles down on patriarchal rhetoric, making the historical arc legible for new readers.

The public record around Pussy Riot—cathedral performance (Feb 21, 2012); guilty verdict (Aug 17, 2012); two-year sentences; video banned as “extremist”—adds contemporary ballast to Ioffe’s last chapters on cultural revanche.

6. Comparison with similar works

If you loved Wendy Goldman’s Women, the State, and Revolution (policy-first) or Barbara Evans Clements’s Bolshevik Women (biographical-historical), Motherland sits between them, adding memoir texture and post-Soviet through-line to Putin. (Goldman and Clements appear throughout Ioffe’s notes.)

On World War II combatants, Ioffe’s synthesis complements Anna Krylova and Svetlana Alexievich while landing near external counts (≈800,000 Red Army women; ≈5% of total personnel).

Related context

• International Women’s Day 1917 as revolution’s spark is well attested by labor and history orgs beyond the book.
• WWII female combatants: independent syntheses put Red Army women at ~800,000 (≈5% of personnel), aligning with Ioffe’s “nearly a million.”
• Pussy Riot (2012): performance Feb 21; conviction Aug 17; video later banned as “extremist”—a bridge Ioffe builds from early feminist militancy to contemporary cultural politics.

8. Conclusion

I closed Motherland convinced that a feminist history of Russia isn’t a niche angle—it’s the master key to a century of promises and retrenchments, culminating in a politics that weaponizes “family values.”

Recommended for general readers who want narrative drive and documentation; for students building syllabi on Russian history, gender studies, authoritarianism; and for book clubs ready to argue about utopia’s costs. (Publication details: Ecco/HarperCollins, First Edition 2025.)