Graphic by Dani Ramirez
Written by Salma Ghori
History books can have a reputation for being rather dry, but this one is a book of history that is quite accessible to people who do not normally read history recreationally. It focuses on telling the tales of several women, and has a descriptive style that feels reminiscent of reading a novel. The book also responds to the question of how Russia changed from a country that has, as Ioffe states in the blurb, “…gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to becoming a bastion of conservative Christian values.”
One of the most alluring of these short biographies is that of Inessa Armand. She was married to Alexander Armand, opened the shelter for downtrodden women in 1902, and closed it down after about a year. By 1903 she had given birth to five children, left Armand for his brother Vladimir, moved with him to Moscow and joined the social democratic party. After Vladimir Armand died of tuberculosis in France, she lived in Paris for another year before meeting Vladimir Lenin through his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. Ioffe notes that love triangles were very popular in Russian literature at that time, and also in real life.
At the beginning of her profiles of Inessa and Nadezhda, Ioffe notes that Inessa was given more attention than Nadezhda Krupskaya by historians because she was better looking, which had given her celebrity status amongst the Bolsheviks, while Krupskaya was considered to be “diligent and unglamorous.” Ioffe goes against the trend of leaving the chronicling of Krupskaya’s life to the wayside by detailing with care how the very charming way Krupskaya and Lenin met. Krupskaya taught literacy, arithmetic, history, and literature classes to the workers at a porcelain factory. Upon first meeting him at a socialist meeting, she was put offby how he scoffed at the idea of, in his own words, “saving the Fatherland through a literacy committee,” and how glowery he was. However, she started seeing him differently, with a newfound understanding, after her friends told her how after his brother had been assassinated, friends and family who also held liberal beliefs had started avoiding his mother. This had made him aware of the scale of people’s cowardice and how easily it could trump loyalty.
Krupskaya was fiercely passionate about her teaching, which Lenin admired, and they grew closer as he would walk her back home from the factories at night. They finally got married so that Krupskaya would be able to visit him when he was imprisoned. She details Krupskaya’s hesitance to marry Lenin, and how she only did it to visit him in prison. The beginning of the tale, with the failed first impression, and then the later redeeming of character, feels almost romantic-comedy-esque. Yet Ioffe does not romanticize history too much or make it sound too fairy-tale like.
Another lovely feature of the book is the pages of pictures, of both the historical figures that are discussed in the book, and of Ioffe’s family. This solidifies the “up until present day” aspect of this book, as does the interviews Ioffe has done with people living in various parts of Russia. Motherland really draws the reader in, delving into what it was like to be a Russian across social classes and time periods.
