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 narrowly focuses on one of the most famous moments that putatively determined the course of Russian and world history in the 20th century—Lenin’s journey from exile in Zurich, through enemy territory, to Petrograd in April 1917. The journey acquired infamy because it was facilitated by the German Army and government.

Leaving to one side consideration of counterfactuals or “what-ifs,” I loved Merridale’s book because it manages to capture so many worlds—the world of Russian revolutionary politics and exile, of espionage during WWI, and the early weeks of the Revolution of 1917—all while maintaining a focus on the human level of a train journey.

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.

For me, the most interesting aspect of this autobiography is its honesty. I already knew a lot about Sakharov when I read this book. I learned about Sakharov’s development that he was initially a devoted team member providing the most lethal weapons to a dictatorship, and how he evolved and eventually became a most fearless and forceful human rights advocate in a ruthless dictatorship—in the post-Stalin Soviet era.

I learned how he had opposed the Soviet leader Khrushchev and how he then became enemy No. 1 of the regime under Brezhnev. I found it also instructive how Gorbachev continued playing the role of his predecessors and how he found a formidable opponent in Sakharov. All this I find sadly relevant when I look at today’s Russia and its dictator.

Less than a decade after Lysenko’s downfall, Zhores Medvedev published The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, one of the first and most fascinating accounts of the controversy published during the Cold War.

For this and other acts of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, Medvedev was declared insane and forced into a mental hospital where the challenge of keeping one’s sanity around people telling you you are crazy became his daily existence. Chilling.

To me, this is the best Gulag memoir ever written. It chronicles in gripping detail the process of arrest, prison, trial, transportation, and finally, the camps that Ginzburg unjustly endured.

Ginzburg brings her education, wit, and relentless optimism to bear as she presents a colorful range of characters and explores deep questions about good, evil, and human nature. I often use this book in my university classrooms because it so effectively illustrates the nature of Stalinism.

Prepare to experience the full range of emotions with this one! (And if you like it, check out the rest of the story in the sequel, Within the Whirlwind.)

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.

The book that shocked the world! The classic account of the Gulag! I deeply admire Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived several years of imprisonment and then interviewed hundreds of former inmates while lobbying the Soviet government to abandon its use of repression. The interviews and his own experiences form the basis of this three-volume book of over 1,500 pages (don’t worry—there’s an abridged edition!) that chronicles nearly every aspect of Stalin’s forced labor camps.

I love how Solzhenitsyn infuses his writing with righteous indignation—punctuated by dark humor—at what he and millions of others endured. I find him particularly effective at entering the prisoner’s mind to explore a range of morally fraught decisions that must constantly be made in the oppressive labor camps. Not to be missed!

Wow, break out the tissues! This book is a compilation of letters home, from fathers imprisoned in the Gulag to children wondering when, if ever, they will see their dads again. As a father, I have difficulty making it through these messages of instruction, tenderness, and love without completely losing it.

To me, this book presents the uncrushed humanity of Gulag inmates, who, amidst violence, back-breaking labor, starvation, disease, exposure, and despair, intuitively understood the deep importance of writing words of comfort to their kids. I also love how beautifully illustrated this book is, with many photographs and lovely color drawings that were included in the letters.