Julia Ioffe in Conversation with David Remnick: Motherland

Acclaimed journalist Julia Ioffe, one of America’s foremost voices on modern Russia, joins us to tell the story of her home country through the history of its women in an urgent discussion of her new book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, with The New Yorker’s David Remnick.

Russia’s slide into autocracy has vast implications for balance of power all over the world — no one understands this more acutely than the Russian women who stood to be socially liberated by the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled Moscow for the US. Nearly 20 years later, Ioffe returned — only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up — doctors, engineers, scientists — had been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to a bastion of conservative Christian values? Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland seeks to answer this question in a masterful portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it.

Hear Ioffe and David Remnick, who has written and reported extensively on Putin’s Russia for over two decades, discuss the courageous women chronicled in her book — from her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, from the members of Pussy Riot to the wife of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. As Russia’s fate hangs in the balance — and with it, Ukraine and the global balance of power — Ioffe and Remnick tell the stories of the women who helped build and tear down the Soviet Union, how Russian society failed the very women it was meant to liberate, and how the nation’s fate might uncannily mirror our own.