The Soviet Union, 1917--1991
11 Nov 2011 21:34
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 abroad, 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; Revolution; Socialism; Soviets, Councils, etc.; Space and Space Travel; Totalitarianism; L. S. Vygotsky
- Recommended:
- Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin
- 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
- M. Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1978--1982 [Review: Incipit Tragoedia]
- 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
- A. R. Luria, The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology
- Alec Nove
- An Economic History of the USSR, 1917--1991
- Stalin and After: The Road to Grobachev
- A. Solzhenitseyn, The Gulag Archipelago
- To read:
- Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War
- Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution [blurb]
- Alan M. Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918--1930 [Online]
- Adam Bartos, Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age
- Raymond A. Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology
- Vadim Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science
- 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
- Stalin
- Trotsky
- 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 [Blurb, link to introduction]
- Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War
- Michael Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule
- Peter Gatrell, "Feet of Clay? The Soviet Economic Giant in Recent Historiography", The Historical Journal 49 (2006): 299--315
- Paul R. Gregory, Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives [Blurb]
- 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."]
- Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction
- Boris Kagarlitsky, Disintegration of the Monolith
- 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, Armaggedon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970--2000
- Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe [Online]
- Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914--1921 [Online]
- Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia [Online]
- Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia
- David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
- Blair A. Ruble, Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City [Online]
- Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs
- Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
- Paul Seabright, The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies [Blurb]
- Scott Shane, Dismantling Utopia [information in the fall of the Soviets]
- 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
- Zara Witkin, An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932--1932 [Online]
- Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation [Blurb]
- Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia [blurb]
- Vladislav Zubok and Constantie Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev [blurb]
