Soviet History

Dr. Francine Hirsch

Spring 2015

Reading lists for Soviet History can also be found here:

http://www.history.illinois.edu/graduate/prospective/fields/russia/reading/
https://www.history.upenn.edu/sites/www.history.upenn.edu/files/nathans_readings-soviet-
history.pdf

Revolution, Civil War

Carr, E. H. A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923, 3 vols. (London:
Macmillan, 1953; Pelican Books, 1966).
Corney, Frederick C. Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Daniels, Robert Vincent. Red October; The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. New York: Scribner,
1967.
Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1996; New York: Viking, 1997).
Figes, Orlando, and Boris Kolonitskii. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and
Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Halfin, Igal. From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary
Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
Healey, Dan. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender
Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Holquist, Peter "‘Conduct Merciless, Mass Terror’: Decossackization on the Don, 1919,"
Cahiers du monde russe 38 (1997): 127-162.
Holquist, Peter. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Lewin, Moshe. Lenin's Last Struggle. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968.
Pipes, Richard. The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.
Rabinowitch, Alexander. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd
(NewYork: Norton, 1976).
Raleigh, Donald J. Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary
Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Smith, Steve. "Russian Workers and the Politics of Social Identity." Russian Review 56, no. 1
(1997): 1-7.
Stites, Richard. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian
Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. “Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,” American Historical
Review 88, 1 (1983): 31–52.
Von Hagen, Mark. “The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the Russian Empire,” in
Barnett Rubin and Jack Snyder, eds. Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflict and State-
building (New York: Routledge, 1998): 34-57.
Zelnik, Reginald. “Russian Workers and the Revolutionary Movement,” Journal of Social
History Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1972-1973):214-236.

The Great Terror/Regulating Society

Alexopoulos, Golfo. Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca,
N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
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AIRO XX, 1995.
Chuikina, Sof’ia. Dvorianskaia pamiat’: “Byvshie” v sovetskom gorode (Leningrad, 1920-30e
gody) (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2006).

Economy and Technology

Bailes, Kendall E. "The American Connection: Ideology and the Transfer of American
Technology to the Soviet Union, 1919-1941," CSSH 1981; 23 (3): 426-439.
Ball, Alan M. Russia's Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987.
Graham, Loren R. The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet
Union (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
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Society and Culture in the Interwar Era

Bonnell, Victoria E. Iconography of Power Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Brooks, Jeffrey. Thank You, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold
War. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History As Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981.
Davies, Sarah. Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934-
1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Dobrenko Evgenii. Muzei revoliutsii: sovetskoe kino i stalinskii istoricheskii narrativ (Moskva:
NLO, 2008).
Dunham, Vera Sandomirsky. In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction. Cambridge
[Eng.]: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites. Russia in the Era of NEP:
Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington (Ind.): Indiana university press,
1991.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times : Soviet Russia in
the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After
Collectivization. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Goldman, Wendy. "Women, Abortion, and the State, 1917-36." Russia's Women 243 (1991): 67.
Goldman, Wendy Z. Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life,
1917-1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Hellbeck, Jochen. Revolution on My Mind Writing a Diary Under Stalin. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2009.
Hessler, Julie. A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and
Consumption, 1917-1953. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Hoffmann, David L. Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism,
1914-1939. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Inkeles, Alex, and Raymond Bauer. The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).
Kenez, Peter. The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-
1929. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Kosheleva, Ludmila, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, and Andrej K. Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life:
A Narrative in Documents. New Haven, Conn. [u.a.]: Yale Univ. Press, 2000.
Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995.
Lenoe, Matthew E. Closer to the Masses Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet
Newspapers. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Lewin, Moshe. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1968).
Lewin, Moshe. The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
Naiman, Eric. Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
Randall, Amy E. The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s.
Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Siegelbaum, Lewis H. and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds. Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and
Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant
Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Wood, Elizabeth A. Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2005.
Zelnik, Reginald E. The Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet
Historiography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).

Revolution from Above/Interwar Politics

Cohen, Stephen F. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution; A Political Biography, 1888-1938.
New York: A.A. Knopf; [distributed by Random House], 1973.
David-Fox, Michael. Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western
Visitors to Soviet Union, 1921-1941. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Davies, R.W. The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, 3 vols. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980–9)
Deutscher, Isaac. Trotsky, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954–63).
Fainsod, Merle. How Russia Is Ruled. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila "Cultural Revolution as Class War," in Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in
Russia, 1928-1931, 1978.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed. Stalinism: New Directions (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
Getty, J. Arch. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Nove, Alex. "Was Stalin Necessary?" and exchange in Problems of Communism 25, no. 4
(1976): 49-62.
Schapiro, Leonard. Totalitarianism. New York: Praeger, 1972.
Sebag Montefiore, Simon. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Timasheff, Nicholas S. The Great Retreat; The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia.
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1946.
7XFNHU5REHUW&DQG:áRG]LPLHU]%UXVStalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation. New
York, NY: Norton, 1977.

Nationality Policy/National Identity

Brandenberger, David. National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of
Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002.
Brown, Kate. A Biography of No Place From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Caroe, Olaf. Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism, 1954, pp. 133-188.
Connor, Walker. The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Edgar, Adrienne Lynn. Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004.
Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge & the Making of the Soviet
Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,
1923-1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Massell, Gregory J. The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in
Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.
Northrop, Douglas Taylor. Veiled Empire: Gender & Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2004.
Slezkine, Yuri. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994.
Slezkine, Yuri. 1994. "The USSR As a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State
Promoted Ethnic Particularism". Slavic Review. 53, no. 2: 414-452.
Smith, Jeremy. The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1999.
Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai V. The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia. Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 2003

Second World War, 1939–45

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universita, 1991.
Dallin, Alexander. German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945, 1957.
Gross, Jan. Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and
Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002).
Krylova, Anna. Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Merridale, Catherine. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2006.
Naimark, Norman M. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation,
1945-1949. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.
Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953. New Haven
[Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2006.
Siniavskaia, Elena. Frontovoe pokolenie: Istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie (Moscow: IRI-
RAN, 1995).
Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Weiner, Amir. Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik
Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Werth, Alexander. Russia at War, 1941-1945. New York: Dutton, 1964.

Late Stalin Era, 1945-53

Djilas, Milovan. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. New York: Praeger,
1957.
Gorlizki, Yoram and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-
1953, New York, 2004.
Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Pollock, Ethan. Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2006.
Zubkova, E. Iu. Russia After the War Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957.
Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.
Zubok, Vladislav and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to
Khrushchev, 1997.

Developed Socialism, 1953–85

Aksiutin, Iurii. Khrushchevskaia ‘ottepel’’ i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v SSSR v 1953-1964
gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004).
Brudny, Yitzhak M. Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Bruskilovskaia, L. B. Kul’tura Povsednevnosti v Epokhu “Ottepeli”: Metamorfozy Stilia
(Moscow: URAO, 2001).
Dobson, Miriam. Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform
After Stalin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Filippov, Oleg. Khronika chastnoi zhizni, 1957-1969 (Tomsk-Moscow: Volodei, 2004).
Gorsuch, Anne E. Time Travelers: Soviet Tourists to Eastern Europe, in Gorsuch and Koenker,
eds. Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism,
2006, pp. 205-226.
Kozlov, V. A. 0DVVRY\HEHVSRUL࠰࠱ Ddki v SSSR: pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve, 1953-nachalo 1980-
kh gg1RYRVLELUVN6LELUVNLÕࡅ NKURQRJUDI
Lapidus, Gail Warshofsky. Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Millar, J. "The Little Deal," Slavic Review 44, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 694-706.
Mitrokhin, Nikolai. Russkaia partiia: dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR 1953-1985
(Moscow: NLO, 2003).
Rogov, Kirill Iur’evich, ed. Semidesiatye kak predmet istorii russkoi kul’tury (Moscow/Venice:
Rossiia/Russia, 1998).
Siegelbaum, Lewis H. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2008.
Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton, 2003.
Tumarkin, Nina. Lenin Lives!: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1983.
Tumarkin, Nina. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in
Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
Vail’, Petr, and Aleksandr Genis. 60-e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka (Moscow: NLO, 2001).
Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Zubok, Vladislav. Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, 2009.
Boym, Svetlana. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1994).
Brown, Archie. Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective, 2009.
Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the
Soviet Union. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Remnick, David. Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House,
1993.
Z, "To the Stalin Mausoleum," Daedalus 119, no. 1 (1990): 295-344.

State of the Field/Overview

Cahiers du Monde russe 40, no. 1-2 (janvier-juin 1999), special issue on “Archives et nouvelles
sources de l'histoire soviétique, une réévaluation/Assessing the new Soviet archival
sources.”
Cohen, Stephen F. Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
David-Fox, Michael. “On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers
(In Response to Martin Malia),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
5, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 81-105.
Engerman, David C. Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “New Perspectives on Stalinism,” Russian Review, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct.,
1986), pp. 357-373 and responses.
Kotkin, Stephen. “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical
Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History 70: 2 (1998): 384-425.
Kritika 2, no. 2 (Spring 2001) special issue, “The State of the Field: Russian History Ten Years
after the Fall.”
Krylova, Anna. “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika 1, no. 1 (Winter
2000): 119-46.
Malia, Martin E. The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991. New York:
Free Press, 1994.
Russian Review 61 (January 2002), no. 1. “Historiography of the Soviet Period in Post-Soviet
Perspective.”
Von Hagen, Mark. “The Archival Gold Rush and Historical Agendas in the Post-Soviet Era,”
Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 96-100.