Book Notes: Motherland by Julia Ioffe

This book is an enormous missed opportunity. The trajectory and the results of the Soviet gender experiment are a fascinating topic. So much could be said. Such fascinating insights could be gleaned. But Ioffe is blinkered by her identity as a Russian liberal. This means that she has to massage a complicated reality of a completely different region into the limiting slogans of the tiniest of slivers of the Western left. The explanation she alights upon for the entire history of the Soviet and the post-Soviet space since 1917 is that men are bad and inflict genocides, totalitarianisms and wars on women who are always good and invariably wonderful and victimized. The only good man she has found anywhere on the planet is the neo-Nazi Navalny.

Liberalism produces monsters by attaching itself as a succubus to the already not too potent brains of people like Ioffe. I tried very hard to find some value in Motherland. I can usually find at least a couple of pages, a stray thought or two, something to give me food for thought in anything I read. This book, though, gave me nothing. It’s primitive, plodding, and very unimpressive.

It was very open-minded of me to read Motherland. I knew that Ioffe was very woke. Moreover, as a post-Soviet Jew, she is militantly pro-Russian and hates Ukraine. I was willing to look past all that in hopes that she had interesting ideas about the Soviet gender ideology. That, I guess, is the value of the book. I followed my instinct of open-mindedness that goes beyond ideological alignments and identities anywhere where the intellect has work to do. I did not find what I hoped in Motherland but my life is enormously richer than that of people who are terrified of encountering different beliefs.