The Soviet Union, 1917--1991

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version: Before 10 September 2004

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At some point here I need to write out my (non-serious) ideas about how the Leninists were like the Chinggisids and the Timurids, and similar Eurasian powers: explosive rise to dominance over a wide area of conquest, remarkable horrors, widespread emulation of them abroad, elaborate patronage of sciences and arts, profound cultural transformations and importations, collapse and fragmentation leaving many successor states struggling to sustain the same style. But Stalin wasn't Timur; he was worse. (Likewise, Gorbachev was better than Ulugh Beg.)

See also:
• Afghanistan
• Central Asia
• the Cold War
• the Czech Legions
• the Left
• A. R. Luria
• Revolution
• Socialism
• Soviets, Councils, etc.
• Space and Space Travel
• Totalitarianism
• L. S. Vygotsky

Recommended (misc., inadequate):
• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet [i.e., a life of Trotsky]
• Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin
• Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning
• Yakov Feygin, Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform [Revision of Dr. Feygin's dissertation]
• Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art
• Ernest Gellner, State and Society in Soviet Thought
• Loren R. Graham
  • The Ghost of the Executed Engineer
  • Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union
• Catherine Guirkinger, Gani Aldashev, Alisher Aldshev and Maté Fodor, "Economic Persistence despite Adverse Policies: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan", Working Paper No. 2020-39 ECARES, Universite Libre de Bruxelles [Comments under "Transmission of Inequality"]
• M. Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1978--1982 [Review: Incipit Tragoedia]
• Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present [i.e., from the 1700s to 2020]
• David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia
• Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. III, The Breakdown
• Stephen Kotkin, Stalin [I eagerly await volume 3 (and beyond?)]
  1. Paradoxes of Power, 1878--1928
  2. Waiting for Hitler, 1929--1941
• A. R. Luria, The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology
• Alec Nove
  • An Economic History of the USSR, 1917--1991
  • Political Economy and Soviet Socialism
  • Socialism, Economics, and Development
  • Stalin and After: The Road to Gorbachev
• Alec Nove and J. A. Newth, The Soviet Middle East: A Model for Development? [1967]
• Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution [Review by Sheila Fitzpatrick; another in the New York Review of Books]
• A. Solzhenitseyn, The Gulag Archipelago
• Francis Spufford, Red Plenty [Not-exactly-a-review: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You]
• Marc Trachtenberg, "Assessing Soviet Economic Performance During the Cold War: A Failure of Intelligence?", Texas National Security Review 8 February 2018

To read, not otherwise classified:
• Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War
• Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution
• Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917--1941
• Alan M. Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918--1930
• Adam Bartos, Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age
• Raymond A. Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology
• Abram Bergson, The Economics of Soviet Planning
• Joseph S. Berliner, The Innovation Decision In Soviet Industry
• Vadim Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science
• Ivan Boldyrev, "Soviet Mathematics and Economic Theory in the Past Century: A Historical Reappraisal", Journal of Economic Literature 62 (2024): 1647--1670
• Robert W. Campbell, The Failure of Soviet Economic Planning: System, Performance, Reform (1992)
• Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888--1938
• Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collecitivization and the Terror-Famine
• Isaac Deutscher, cite>Stalin
• Gerald M. Easter, Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity in Soviet Russia [Review from H-Russia]
• Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
• Michael Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR: The Contributions of Mathematical Economics to their Solution, 1960--1971
• Michael Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule
• Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics
• Peter Gatrell, "Feet of Clay? The Soviet Economic Giant in Recent Historiography", The Historical Journal 49 (2006): 299--315
• Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression
• Paul R. Gregory, Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives
• Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin
• Mark Harrison and Byung-Yeon Kim, "Plans, Prices, and Corruption: The Soviet Firm Under Partial Centralization, 1930 to 1990", The Journal of Economic History 66 (2006): 1--41 ["Our results explain rapid Soviet economic growth despite high corruption levels, and why slower economic growth in the 1970s was accompanied by increased privatization of rents."]
• Kristy Ironside, A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union [Irritatingly not in our library, even electronically...]
• Michael Kaser, Soviet Economics
• Mark N. Katz, The USSR and Marxist Revolutions in the Third World [1991]
• János Korani, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism
• Stephen Kotkin
  • Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
  • Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era
  • Stalin, vol. III, when he writes it
• Nikolai Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction
• Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide
  1. Devastation: The European Rimlands, 1912--1938
  2. Annihilation: The European Rimlands, 1939--1953
• Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe
• Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914--1921
• Norbert Lynton, Tatlin's Tower: Monument to Revolution
• Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia
• Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919--1929
• Sarah E. Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
• China Mieville, October
• Peter Murrell, The Nature of Socialist Economics: Lessons from Eastern European Foreign Trade
• Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia
• Alec Nove, The Soviet Economy: An Introduction
• Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet [Review by Danny Yee]
• Sergey Radchenko, To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power
• Blair A. Ruble, Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City
• Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs
• Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
• Asif A. Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge
• Canfield F. Smith, Vladivostok under Red and White Rule: Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Russian Far East, 1920--1922
• Ronald Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States
• Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution
• Anya von Bremzen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
• S. G. Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies (eds.), Materials for a Balance of the Soviet Economy, 1928--1930
• Zara Witkin, An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932--1932
• Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation
• Vladislav Zubok and Constantie Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev

To read, the end:
• Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich (eds.), The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders' History
• Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War
• Boris Kagarlitsky, Disintegration of the Monolith
• Stephen Kotkin, Armaggedon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970--2000
• Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation
• William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military
• David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
• Scott Shane, Dismantling Utopia [information in the fall of the Soviets]
• Vladislav Zubok
  • Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia
  • Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

To read, after the end:
• Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction
• Paul Seabright, The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies