Russia Was Once a Revolutionary Feminist Motherland

Julia Ioffe’s book Motherland reminds us: Russia’s rejection of feminism today is not because it is alien, but because it once thrived within its own borders.

On Feb. 18, 2022, former President Joe Biden told reporters he was convinced that Russia would invade Ukraine. Five days later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it was likely to happen the next day. U.S. intelligence had tracked troop movements, intercepted communications and pieced together the evidence. Yet predicting Russia’s aggression against its neighbor required no spycraft. For years, the country had been hardening into a hyper-masculine state. One merely had to track the experience of Russia’s women. 

That is the takeaway of Julia Ioffe’s engrossing new book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. It recounts the role that women, at times as actors and more than often as subjects, played in shaping modern Russia. 

Ioffe, a seasoned Russia correspondent, starts the story on International Women’s Day in 1917. “It was the women who started the Russian Revolution,” she writes in the very first sentence. Female factory workers went on strike, and within days the Romanov dynasty collapsed. The upheaval drew the revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai back from exile in Norway. She managed to press the Bolsheviks to focus on women’s liberation. 

Under the Bolsheviks, women won the right to vote—three years before their American counterparts. Laws established equality between husbands and wives in marriage and property ownership. Divorce became easy to obtain. The Soviet Union became the first country to legalize abortion. Universities opened their doors to women, and all citizens were guaranteed the same minimum wage. Women became snipers, fighter pilots and spies. Kollontai poured her attention into building the Palace of Motherhood, the “first free maternity hospital in Soviet Russia” and supporting Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his mistress, Inessa Armand, in mobilizing women into the Zhenotel, the women’s political arm. 

Yet, these early gains for women started to unravel after Lenin’s death in 1924. His successor, Josef Stalin, who resented and sparred with Krupskaya, who sought his ouster, reverted back to patriarchal norms. Stalin dismantled reproductive rights and made it harder to seek divorce. Especially after the Second World War, where the Soviet Union lost about 20 million men, Stalin focused on replenishing the workforce. Bent on rapid industrialization, he taxed the childless and extended financial incentives to women to reproduce. 

Violence against women and violence by the state are part of the same story.

Khrushchev, remembered in the West as the man who thawed Stalinism, went many steps further. He imposed a tiered taxation system that tied women’s value to reproduction. Families with more children paid less, ending only when a woman bore three. Women were rewarded with medals—bronze for five children, silver for seven and the title “Hero Mother” for 10 or more.

Moreover, as Ioffe points out, “he criminalized those who made contraceptives without a license and increased jail time for abortion providers.”

Most brutally, he decreed that only the children of state-sanctioned marriages would be recognized as legitimate. Women who gave birth outside of wedlock could not name the child’s father or hold him responsible for support. While men could not break free from marriage, they were completely freed of any responsibility for children outside of it. Ioffe notes that the “very idea of fatherhood began to dissolve. Parenthood became synonymous with motherhood.” 

Women were rewarded with medals—bronze for five children, silver for seven and the title ‘Hero Mother’ for 10 or more.

Ioffe, who spent years reporting from Moscow, grounds this history in personal experience. She writes about the matriarchs in her own family, all Jews—women who became doctors, endured religious persecution and raised children in impossible conditions. Her maternal grandmother, Emma, once pointed out a pale blue house in Moscow, where Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, had lived. Behind those walls, Beria repeatedly raped young girls, among them 16-year-old Lyalya Drozdova. Ioffe notes that Drozdova was still alive when she was reporting in Moscow between 2009 and 2012, yet she never tried to interview her. “I was trying to write about serious things—that is, topics that men took seriously,” she reflects.

That admission is telling—and, perhaps, why in Motherland, she deliberately reverses that hierarchy. By weaving together the stories of her great-grandparents and grandparents with those of women like Drozdova, she insists that history is not only made by the premiers but also by the women who lived under them, survived them and carried on. These juxtapositions are what make Motherland feel alive and a necessary read. By embedding her family’s story into the larger arc, Ioffe resists the tendency to make feminism only about exceptional figures, including Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space or Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a legendary sniper. The everyday, too, matters.

What makes Motherland more than an excavation of the past is the light it sheds on the present—and on Russia’s current leader, Vladimir Putin. Ioffe sketches his portrait through the women around him, beginning with Lyudmila, who became his wife and the mother of his two daughters. Despite being, in Ioffe’s words, “stubborn and silent, closed and bristly,” and habitually late for every date, Lyuda—as she preferred to be called—fell in love with Putin and became his “obedient subject.” She served her purpose as a dutiful KGB spouse but played no meaningful role in his political rise. But Russia’s women have.

“Putin was the man they never had,” Ioffe observes of the women who idolized him and helped secure his rule—whether through votes, loyalty in the courts or support in the bureaucracy. In a country ravaged by alcoholism and early death among men, Putin projected a rare image of vigor and control. His legitimacy rests in part on that cultivated hyper-masculinity, which in turn has enabled him to scale back rights and protections for women and LGBTQ+ people alike.

One of the most disturbing examples comes from the story of Margarita Gracheva. In 2017, after years of abuse, Gracheva asked her husband for a divorce. He stalked her, threatened her with a knife and beat her. She went to the police; they dismissed her complaints as a family matter. That same year, Putin signed legislation decriminalizing most forms of domestic violence. Unless abuse left lasting injuries, it was no longer a crime but a misdemeanor. A month later, her husband drove her to a forest outside Moscow and chopped off her hands.

Gracheva’s case illustrates not only the vulnerability of Russian women today, but the deeper dynamic her book traces across a century: Violence against women and violence by the state are part of the same story. Just as Stalin used terror to keep the population in line, Putin’s Russia grants impunity to men who terrorize women.

The regime’s claim that feminism is a Western import rings hollow. As Ioffe reminds us, Russian women were pioneers—gaining the right to vote and legal access to abortion long before their American counterparts. What is striking, and sobering, is that today’s hostility to feminism does not arise because it is foreign to Russia, but because it once flourished there, briefly and radically.