100 books like Khrushchev's Cold Summer

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 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 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.

This is the classic account of the Great Terror and the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn roots Stalinist repression firmly in the Russian Revolution, blaming Marxist ideology for the camps. The literary value of this work is incontestable.

I love this book because it “names names.” It is a tragic recounting of the sending of petty criminals combined with a mostly random rounding up of innocent “undesirables” off the street by the police in the USSR in 1934 who are then shipped to exile in Siberia where they were expected to work for the good of the Soviet state. In a matter of months thousands of them died from maltreatment, exposure, and starvation. The book traces the chain of events from inspiration by head of the Gulag Berman and chief of the secret police Iagoda all the way down the chain of command of the Party and police officials to the man responsible for stranding the people on a river island in Siberia. The book gives a glimpse into the nature of the repressive organs and mentality of the Soviet state in a way that humanizes the experience… show more.

Shalamov was a political prisoner in the Soviet Union and was sent to the gulags in northeastern Siberia. This book is life-changing in that he nonchalantly tells stories of extreme discomfort and how the men would kill each other without a second thought if they didn't like what the other was doing. Narrating tales over many years of desperation, Kolyma Tales puts the reader in the shoes of someone who knows they can't escape but can't lose the survival instinct, either. This is easily one of the best books I've ever read.

I studied under the distinguished sociologist, Immanuel Wallerstein. One day in class he said, if you read only one book, it should be this one. So I read it. 

Koestler was a Hungarian Jew who joined the German Communist Party. He became disillusioned with communism, in part because of the Stalin trials of the 1930s, in which many of Stalin’s own former allies were tortured and executed. 

The protagonist of the novel is Rubashov, a dedicated Communist who is accused of treason, tortured, and eventually executed despite confessing to his supposed crimes. The novel is a great way to learn not only about the Stalinist Soviet Union, but about any society that brain-washes its victims. 

This is the other book I kept by my bedside during my three years as head of an academic department.

Every year (until 1937), Stalin took a long working holiday by the Black Sea. His secret line of communication with his subordinates in Moscow relied on daily handwritten letters and couriers. The letters were preserved and are translated and edited in this book. The collection taught me how a suspicious boss micromanages his subordinates and keeps close those he trusts least.

Stalin habitually complained that they overloaded him with trivia, but then complained and corrected them if they showed the smallest initiative. I learned a lot about how Stalin saw his enemies, and I was introduced to the concept of the “unconscious” enemy. For myself, I learned that trust is essential to effective delegation.

I’m recommending this because if have any interest in Russia but haven’t yet read it, you simply must. No, really, listen: You must. David Remnick writes like Muhammad Ali boxed: with grace, power, and an unfair amount of skill. This is a deeply researched, carefully crafted, incredibly absorbing account of the final days of the Soviet Union. Never mind the “tomb” title; the book is filled with colorful characters and delicious slices of life, all captured during a time of historic upheaval.