The Soviet Union, 1917--1991

Last update: 13 Dec 2024 21:23
First version: Before 10 September 2004

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.)

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

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
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 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
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...]
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
- 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
William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military
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
David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
Blair A. Ruble, Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City
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
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
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, Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia
Vladislav Zubok and Constantie Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev