Motherland

Ioffe's history traces Russian and Soviet women's status across a century, from early Bolshevik gender egalitarianism, genuinely radical for its time, through its slow reversal under Stalin and its near-total dismantling under Putin. Reviewers have flagged the book's central, counterintuitive discovery: that the most ambitious state-led feminist experiment in modern history wasn't in the West but in the early USSR, and that its undoing says as much about the durability of patriarchy as any of its successes said about progress. The book moves fluidly between sweeping political history and intimate individual stories without losing rigor in either register, making the case that Russia's current gender politics are a choice, not an inheritance.