Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on February 26, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a conversation with Julia Ioffe, author of “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy,” in conversation with Nina Khrushcheva. Moderated by Elise Giuliano.
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—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 The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms.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 becoming a bastion of conservative Christian values?
In “Motherland,” Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Ioffe chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and documents how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and how that failure paved the way for the revanche of Vladimir Putin.
Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, “Motherland” paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe reveals what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the sacrifices of its women.
Julia Ioffe is a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck.
Image: Max Avdeev
Nina Khrushcheva is a professor of International Affairs at The New School and an editor of, and a contributor to, Project Syndicate: Association of Newspapers Around the World. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and other international publications. She is the author of several books in English and Russian including “In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones” (2019) (co-authored) and “Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics” (2008). Her latest book (in Russian) is a biography of her great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev: “An Outlier of the System” (Diletant, 2024).
