Motherland: a ‘brilliantly executed’ feminist history of modern Russia

In 1921, a Bolshevik pamphlet proclaimed the Soviet Union to be a “fairy-tale country” for women. “That was, of course, an exaggeration,” said Francesca Angelini in The Sunday Times . Nonetheless, women were granted sweeping rights during the Revolution (including to abortion and equal pay) and, from the early Soviet era on, many received a “formidable education”. The result was that the Soviet Union was packed with “strong” professional women: doctors, scientists, judges, professors.

In this “brilliantly executed” book, the Moscow-born journalist Julia Ioffe “examines the lives of the women of her country” over the past century. Her subjects include Alexandra Kollontai, who in 1917 became the “world’s first female cabinet minister”; the “hotshot Second World War sniper Lyudmila Pavli