The Soviet Union, 1917--1991

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.)

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

Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War
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]

Notebooks

The Soviet Union, 1917--1991