The best books if you want to understand Pre-Putin’s Soviet Russia

This book made me a traveling companion of Lenin. Together with him we go on an incredible journey: from Switzerland across Europe via Finland to Petrograd. This journey changed the world, because it brought Lenin back to Russia, Russia the October coup, and the century of a Soviet regime. Merridale depicts the unique moment of the dawn of a new age as banally and grotesquely as if she had really been there. The best part: just before he left, Lenin called the American embassy because he would have preferred to be transported by the Americans rather than the Germans. But it was Easter Sunday and no one could be reached at the embassy, and so the story took its course....

This book is incredible, because it tells the story of Stalinist terror through a single house. Moreover, Slezkine creates a world history around this house of victims and perpetrators, which literally begins in the primordial mud and ends on the Day of Judgment. Slezkine takes no prisoners: either you follow him and the apocalyptic horsemen, or you don't, he doesn't care. Like a man possessed, he tells the story of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century and I found it almost impossible to escape his spell. 

This book took me into the abysses of Soviet society, but in a very different way than the books on terror: Dobson does an incomparable job of describing what it meant for Soviet people to take in millions of Gulag returnees after 1953, and to do so in a society that was far from leaving the ravages of war behind, that itself had barely any housing and enough to eat, that on the one hand was severely traumatized by Stalin's terror, but on the other hand was in large part unwilling to accept the Gulag returnees as innocent victims. They were perceived as troublemakers and competitors for the few resources, their language as vulgar and outrageous, their culture as an attack on Stalinist "culturedness." Anyone who wants to understand what Stalinism did not only to the victims, but to society as a whole, must read this book. But be aware: you will feel cold while reading it.

This book is the best proof that history can also be simply fun and insanely comical. The ten days that Khrushchev spent traveling through the U.S. in 1959, visiting both Hollywood and the farm of President Eisenhower, who gave him a calf, show, as if in a snow globe, all the comedy and tragedy of Soviet-American relations: the mutual fascination, the great similarities of wanting to please the world and dominate space, and the great mistrust that both sides could never quite put aside. And yet, these ten crazy days invite us to dream and speculate what would have been if the relations between the USA and the USSR had always been as good and cordial as in that September 1959. The US-Soviet story as a road movie with a happy ending!

This book grabbed me and I devoured it like a thriller. This is not just simply a history book about the biggest nuclear disaster of the 20th century, it is at the same time investigative journalism, exposing the international nuclear lobby that successfully downplayed the scale of the casualties and consequences, and exposing the do-gooderism of the West that thought it could patronizingly show that it was much better equipped to deal with such a disaster, when in fact the real experts on radiation sickness were in the Soviet Union, quietly doing their job without PR. Anyone who wants to know why workers in a wool spinning mill were rightly given the "liquidator" status of firefighters from day one and why jam made from berries from the Pripyat marshes around Chernobyl still end up on the European breakfast table must read this book.