Review of Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe (Ecco Press, 2025)
Julia Ioffe left the Soviet Union in 1990 at age seven, when her family immigrated to the United States. In her newly released Motherland, the Russian American journalist does a full-on investigation of the pioneering egalitarian movement in 1917 and the revolution’s profound effects on women over the last century. The results are at the same time comprehensive, emotionally jarring, tragic, seemingly petty, and amazing.
The Bolsheviks ushered in the most revolutionary program of women’s rights the world had ever seen, and they didn’t call it feminism. Importantly, rather than being initiated by a separatist, feminist uprising, like that promoted by activists in the West, the changes came from the newly imposed 1918 Constitution, along with separate decrees issued by Alexandra Kollontai, the first woman in the world to hold a cabinet position.
Kollontai was a brilliant revolutionary. More than a hundred years later, no Western government has even come close to enacting her comprehensive policy. Kollontai’s decrees gave legal rights to the many children that were born out of wedlock after World War I; maternity leave was planned for eight weeks before and after birth; equality was to exist for husband and wife in marriage, divorce, and property ownership.
Universities also removed gender requirements and made tuition free (although in the Stalin era, a quota system was introduced for Jewish students, making it more difficult to get a place in a top-ranking university). The 1918 Constitution also stipulated that every citizen was required to work and to receive the same minimum wage. Kollontai’s input, according to Ioffe, “became the blueprint for Soviet family policy,” an accomplishment that Ioffe rightly gives huge praise, while it lasted.
Ioffe demonstrates the reach of these plans in the context of cultural and political…
Auteur: Anne Colamosca
