Governor Olli Rehn's book review in Helsingin Sanomat (1 August 2026): Motherland by Julia Ioffe

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I have no longer felt the urge to "understand" Russia better through its literature and culture. The reason is not only Vladimir Putin's messianic nationalism but also the broad degree of acceptance his war has enjoyed within Russian society – albeit reinforced by repression, fear, and relentless propaganda.

Once again, it has become clear that authoritarian rule and Great Russian imperialism are not historical aberrations but enduring features of Russia's societal DNA. From Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to Lenin, Stalin and Putin, brutal autocracy has repeatedly crushed individual liberty beneath its weight.

Yet I have not abandoned Russian literature altogether. Vasily Grossman, Sergei Dovlatov and Leo Tolstoy still occupy their place on my bookshelves. Julia Ioffe's Motherland now joins Grossman's Life and Fate among those works.

The reason is straightforward. Motherland offers a genuinely fresh perspective on Russia. It is a three-dimensional X-ray of Russian society across more than a century – from the post-revolutionary utopia of gender and sexual equality to Putin's authoritarian state, with its contempt for the rule of law and its increasingly archaic cult of militant macho masculinity.

Ioffe is an impressive storyteller. Her subject is grave, yet the narrative moves with elegance, empathy and a dry wit that is occasionally tinged with bitterness. She writes about people rather than abstractions, about individual lives rather than ideological manifestos. Through the experiences of women – revolutionaries and dissidents, scientists and artists, mothers and widows – she recounts a century of Russian history from the inside.

Her own biography gives the book an unusually powerful perspective. A descendant of Russian Jews whose family history encompasses Tsarist pogroms, Soviet anti-Semitism, and eventual emigration, Ioffe left the Soviet Union for the United States with her family in 1990. She observes both societies simultaneously from within and without – as a journalist and as someone who knows each intimately while belonging completely to neither.

The result is a history that feels at once familiar and entirely new.

The cast of characters includes the "different Bolshevik" Alexandra Kollontai; Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya; Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva; the intellectual force behind perestroika, Raisa Gorbacheva; Pussy Riot's leading figure, Nadya Tolokonnikova; and Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexei Navalny. Alongside them stand the women of Ioffe's own family – medical doctors, physicists and professionals whose personal stories transform sweeping historical upheavals into something immediate and tangible.

Especially compelling is Ioffe's account of women's contribution to the Soviet war effort during the Second World War. In the West, those who know anything at all tend to remember the marshals and generals of the Red Army. Far fewer remember the hundreds of thousands of women who served as pilots, doctors, snipers, signal operators, and front-line soldiers. Fewer still remember the millions who, after the war, quite literally rebuilt the Soviet Union.

Alexandra Kollontai: Valkyrie of Sexual Liberation

The central figure of the book is Alexandra Kollontai.

For Finnish readers, Kollontai is remembered primarily for her role in the peace negotiations ending the Winter War. In the acclaimed Finnish television drama The Men of War and Peace (1978), she appears as one of the very few women on history's grand stage. For Ioffe, however, Kollontai is above all a pioneer of women's emancipation—arguably the most consequential feminist Russia has ever produced.

This is an important reminder.

Women's liberation was never a central concern of Marx's critique of capitalism. Karl Marx devoted remarkably little attention to it, especially compared with his contemporary John Stuart Mill, one of liberalism's foremost thinkers. In The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill argued that women deserved the same civil and political rights as men at a time when such ideas still struck many as dangerously radical. Within the socialist tradition, it was August Bebel who advanced the debate most forcefully in Woman and Socialism (1879).

Kollontai sought to translate these ideas into practice in revolutionary Russia. Yet she went considerably further. Political rights alone, she argued, would never emancipate women unless accompanied by a fundamental transformation of economic and family structures. Her vision was radical for its time: women's economic independence through paid employment, easier divorce, publicly funded childcare, and ultimately liberation from the constraints of the patriarchal family.

Equally controversial was her famous "glass of water" theory of sexuality: under socialism, satisfying sexual desire should be as natural and uncomplicated for a woman as drinking a glass of water when thirsty. The phrase itself later acquired a mythical quality, but Kollontai undeniably wrote in lyrical terms about the emergence of a new socialist woman:

"When the wave of love sweeps over her, she reaches out to the person she has chosen and withdraws with them for a few weeks to drink deeply from love's cup. When the cup is empty, she sets it aside without regret or bitterness. Then she returns to her work."

During the first years after the Revolution, many of Kollontai's ambitions came remarkably close to realization. For a brief historical moment, Soviet Russia became one of the world's most progressive countries in terms of women's rights.

That is precisely why Ioffe's story is ultimately so tragic.

The revolution's promise of equality did not disappear overnight. Instead, it slowly eroded. Under Stalin, traditional gender roles quietly returned through the back door. Sexual conservatism was rehabilitated, abortion was restricted, and although Soviet women gained education, employment and formal legal equality, they also inherited a double burden: full-time work alongside primary responsibility for home and family.

Under Putin, this reversal has gone much further. Cynical nationalism, Orthodox conservatism, and an aggressively masculine conception of political power have become pillars of official ideology. The country that once proclaimed itself the vanguard of women's emancipation now presents itself as a bastion of "traditional values," great-power nationalism, and patriarchal social order.

The First Ladies of the Soviet State

Ioffe also devotes considerable attention to the Soviet Union's First Ladies – above all, its first and its last.

A few years after the Bolshevik Revolution, a British journalist interviewed Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869–1939), introducing her to readers as the Soviet Union's "First Lady." Lenin and Krupskaya reportedly found the expression so amusing that Lenin began calling his wife "First Lady" in English at home.

After Lenin suffered a series of strokes, Krupskaya tried to prevent Stalin from consolidating his power by publishing the politically explosive document later known as Lenin's Testament. Yet, as the eminent Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin has convincingly argued, it is highly unlikely that Lenin himself dictated the text in the form traditionally believed.

The Soviet Union's most consequential First Lady, however, was also its last.

Raisa Gorbacheva (1932–1999) was far more than the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev. Trained as a philosopher and sociologist, she was well versed in both Western philosophy and Russian literature. More importantly, she was her husband's intellectual companion and closest interlocutor.

Both Mikhail and Raisa – whose family had Ukrainian roots – came from humble peasant backgrounds, hardly a social advantage in Soviet society. Yet without the Soviet Union's early experiment in female emancipation, Raisa would almost certainly have lived a life only marginally better than that of her grandmother, Anastasia.

As Ioffe recounts, Anastasia's existence consisted of little more than relentless labour. She sewed, cultivated the land, raised six children, and, throughout her life, was expected to remain silent. During Stalin's Great Terror, her husband was arrested and simply disappeared. Only decades later, after Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary, did Raisa finally obtain access to her grandfather's NKVD file. It revealed that he had been executed in 1937.

Gorbachev himself later acknowledged that he made no major political decision without first discussing it with Raisa. Ioffe therefore portrays her not as a ceremonial spouse but as an intellectual co-architect of perestroika. She was a visible public figure who engaged confidently with political ideas and represented a striking departure from the invisible wives of previous Soviet leaders.

Ironically, those very qualities made her deeply unpopular at home. Many Soviet citizens regarded her as too visible, too intellectual, too well-dressed and too influential at a time when the economy was collapsing and grocery store shelves stood empty. Ioffe persuasively argues that this criticism revealed less about Raisa herself than about the persistence of deeply rooted patriarchal attitudes within Soviet society. The public was simply unaccustomed to seeing a leader's wife treated as an equal partner rather than a silent companion.

Pussy Riot as Kollontai's Heirs

No feminist history of modern Russia could ignore Pussy Riot, and Ioffe provides an insightful account of the movement's political philosophy as well as its distinctive combination of performance art, punk aesthetics, and radical street theatre.

Pussy Riot represents a direct challenge to conservative patriarchy and to the increasingly intimate alliance between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kirill.

Its founder, Nadya Tolokonnikova, has openly acknowledged the group's intellectual debt to the revolutionary feminists of the early Soviet period. As a teenager, she discovered the writings of Krupskaya and, above all, Alexandra Kollontai. She later remarked that Kollontai had effectively become "a second-wave feminist sixty years before second-wave feminism existed."

In 2025, the Russian authorities designated Pussy Riot an "extremist organisation." Tolokonnikova and many of her colleagues have lived in exile since 2022.

Yet Ioffe does not romanticise the movement. Even within the Russian democratic opposition, Pussy Riot divided opinion. Many believed its provocative performances distracted attention from what they regarded as more urgent priorities: free elections, the rule of law, the fight against corruption, and the release of political prisoners. The late Alexei Navalny personally disliked their political performances but defended them on legal grounds anyway.

A Powerful Book—with a Few Omissions

Motherland is an impressive achievement, but it has its shortcomings.

At times, Ioffe ventures rather deeply into her own family's history. While these episodes add warmth and humanity, they occasionally lead the narrative onto lengthy detours, leaving the reader waiting for the personal story to reconnect with the broader historical argument.

A more significant omission concerns contemporary Russia.

Surprisingly little attention is paid to influential women within today's Russian state apparatus, above all Elvira Nabiullina, Governor of the Central Bank of Russia. Through extraordinary professional competence, Nabiullina has stabilised the Russian economy through financial crises, sweeping Western sanctions, and eventually the transition to a wartime economy.

Her case presents a profound moral and political dilemma. In an authoritarian state waging an aggressive war, professional excellence and public service can no longer be neatly separated. Nabiullina would have offered a meaningful case study of the difficult choices confronting highly accomplished women who remain within the Russian system.

The History of Russian Women Is the History of Russian Freedom

These reservations notwithstanding, Motherland is an important book.

It demonstrates how the Revolution's promise of equality gradually gave way to the service of Great Russian nationalism. Russian history cannot be understood solely through the actions of tsars, party secretaries, oligarchs, or security services. It must also be seen through the lives of the women who sustained society while men made revolutions, fought wars, filled prisons, and exercised power.

The book's deepest insight is that the history of Russian women and the history of Russian freedom are, ultimately, one and the same.

The book's central insight, in my reading, is that the history of Russian women and the history of Russian freedom are ultimately one and the same story. When society opens up, women's status improves; when power centralizes, equality gets pushed aside. The reform era of Alexander II, the brief democratic interlude following the February Revolution, Kollontai's revolution in family and sexual politics, and Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika now appear as brief interludes in a much longer historical narrative—bold but ultimately short-lived attempts to build a freer and more republican Russia, each cut short before it could fully mature.

That is why Motherland is more than a feminist history. It is a history of Russia's repeatedly shipwrecked journey toward liberty and equality.

For that reason alone, it feels profoundly relevant today, as the country's political trajectory has once again turned deep and hard in the opposite direction.