Wide-ranging ... Complex yet swift-moving ... Ioffe brings together the stories of her own female relatives along with those of many other Soviet women.
Brilliantly executed ... A refreshing change as macho males dominate Russian news coverage ... Into this riveting history, drawn from an impressive range of memoirs, histories and interviews, she weaves in her own family stories ... These women make for a heroic bunch ... But Ioffe is a clear-eyed journalist. They all, as she shows, carry the scars of the Soviet experiment that shaped them ... The final chapters on modern Russia are particularly fascinating ... Excellent.
Interspersed with flashes of memoir, family stories and journalistic encounters, the book acts as a gender-inflected primer on the past hundred years of Russian history ... She writes with warmth, charisma and exuberance and is adept at zooming in and out, mixing precise personal detail with broad historical insights ... Cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed.
The strongest sections of Motherland derive from Ioffe’s own family history. Her great-grandmothers, grandmothers and mother benefitted from Soviet-era policies that enabled women – including Jewish women from the Pale of Settlement, like all four of her great-grandmothers – to become educated and independent ... Ioffe also offers insights into the policies of Nikita Khrushchev, who sought to foster a postwar Soviet baby boom ... The paradox of what the author calls 'the Soviet feminist experiment' is that it ended up producing women who aspired to 'a romantic, Western ideal of a stay-at-home wife supported and protected by a rich and masculine man'.
