Bibliography
for the Soviet Union.

General works

The whole period

• Service, Robert. A History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 2009.
• Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990.
• Hosking, Geoffrey. The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Chapters I–II — Revolution and NEP

1917–1928

• Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Figes, Orlando. A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. London: Cape, 1996.
• Smith, S.A. Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890–1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Lenin, V.I. Collected Works. 45 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960–1970.

Chapters III–IV — Collectivisation and the Terror

1928–1939

• Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin, Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928. New York: Penguin, 2014. Stalin, Volume II: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941. New York: Penguin, 2017. The standard contemporary biography; the third volume is in preparation.
• Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. 40th anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
• Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine. London: Allen Lane, 2017.
• Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Chapter V — The Great Patriotic War

1939–1945

• Glantz, David M., and Jonathan House. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. 2nd ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015.
• Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad. London: Viking, 1998.
• Beevor, Antony. Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. London: Viking, 2002.
• Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
• Merridale, Catherine. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

Chapters VI–VII — Late Stalinism through Brezhnev

1945–1982

• Zubok, Vladislav. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
• Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton, 2003.
• Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. 3 vols. Trans. Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, 1974–1978.
• Sakharov, Andrei. Memoirs. Trans. Richard Lourie. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Chapters VIII–IX — Gorbachev and the dissolution

1982–1991

• Zubok, Vladislav. Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. The most thorough recent treatment of the 1985–1991 period.
• Taubman, William. Gorbachev: His Life and Times. New York: Norton, 2017.
• Brown, Archie. The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Plokhy, Serhii. The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
• Gaidar, Yegor. Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia. Washington: Brookings Institution, 2007.

Chapter X — After the Soviet Union

The successor states

• Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Trans. Bela Shayevich. New York: Random House, 2016. 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature; oral history of the Soviet generation.
• Plokhy, Serhii. Lost Kingdom: A History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin. New York: Basic Books, 2017.
• Roxburgh, Angus. The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia. 2nd ed. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
• Galeotti, Mark. We Need to Talk About Putin. London: Ebury Press, 2019.

Primary archives

The documentary record

• The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), Moscow, holds the Party archives (Politburo, Central Committee, Lenin/Stalin personal funds).
• The Hoover Institution at Stanford holds Soviet-era microfilm collections.
• The Sakharov Center in Moscow (founded 1996) holds the dissident-period documentary record.
• Memorial Society (Russia), founded 1989, was the principal NGO archive of Stalin-era repression; dissolved by Russian court order in 2021, its archives are partly preserved abroad.