The journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the lives of its women, blending memoir, history, and reportage. Ioffe fled the Soviet Union with her family in 1990 at the age of seven; returning to Moscow as an adult journalist nearly two decades later, she found a society transformed—where the doctors, engineers, and scientists she had known as a child seemed to have given way to women intent on marrying rich and staying home. How, she asks, did a country that once cast itself as the vanguard of world feminism become a bastion of conservative Christian values? To answer, Ioffe retells the sweep of Russian and Soviet history from the vantage of its women. She moves from the textile workers whose strike helped ignite the Russian Revolution and the feminist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai, to the hundreds of thousands of Soviet women who fought as snipers, medics, and pilots in the Second World War, to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country, and on to contemporary figures such as the members of Pussy Riot and Yulia Navalnaya. Threaded through this national story is Ioffe's own family history across four generations, beginning with her great-grandmothers, pioneering female physicians. The result is an argument as much as a chronicle: that the Soviet experiment in emancipating women ultimately failed the very people it claimed to liberate, and that this failure helped pave the way for the reactionary nationalism of Vladimir Putin. Emotionally charged and deeply researched, Motherland reframes a century of Russian history around the women who endured and shaped it.