Motherland Quotes

“I understood that you have to protect the male ego very, very carefully, she explained. It’s delusional to think that a man needs some kind of exceptional woman. He needs a woman with whom he feels exceptional.”
― Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy

“These nigilistki, the nihilist women of the 1860s, were deadly serious about living their convictions. They wore their hair short and their dresses dark and plain because they didn’t want to be decorative objects. They studied and developed their minds and personalities and demanded respect from their male peers—often successfully. Preaching total freedom in love and sex, they wed their radical brethren in sham marriages to escape their parents’ control.12”
― Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy – A National Book Award Finalist

“In the end, the woman veterans fell silent. "We were as mute as fish," one woman veteran told Alexievich, "Men were the victors, heroes, suitors, they have been to war, but they looked at us with completely different eyes... They took away our victory.”
― Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy

“There is an apocryphal story, that when he [Stalin] was warned about the catastrophic losses the Red Army would suffer while taking the city , he replied "It's fine. Russian women will have more."

He probably never actually said this, but he didn't have to. It was his unspoken strategy for everything. For Stalin, great achievements in industry, in politics, and in war required proportionally vast human sacrifices. Soviet Women would always step into that breach. They would pick up guns and climb into cockpits of planes in which they burned like matchsticks. They would give up their sons for the country, pretend their children were heroes rather than cannon fodder, and when those sons fell in battle, they would have more.”
― Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy

“them. Kollontai pushed for socialists to recognize that childbearing was a public good that should be supported by the state”
― Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy – A National Book Award Finalist

“If a woman is a slave”
― Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy – A National Book Award Finalist

“After reading your letter, I again feel that you went up one more step, and I, again, have to stretch to reach you.”
― Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy

“The human mechanism is a strange thing. Large volumes of blood can, under the influence of reading a small piece of paper, shift from part of the body to another.”
― Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy