100 books like Lenin on the Train

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. 

The collapse of the Russian Empire into revolution took place across a vast landscape, and amid the chaos, countless individuals who might be charitably (naively) described as “colorful” percolated to the surface to become consequential figures in the civil war. One of the most notorious was Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, who fought against the Red Army in East Siberia until his capture and execution.

This book by Willard Sutherland is a biography of Ungern-Sternberg that is also an immensely insightful history of the Russian Empire and a study of the imperial man—the kind of person who was the product of a multiethnic empire, who moved comfortably in a world of many cultures, and who ultimately fought desperately, brutally, and delusionally for a restoration of that lost imperial world.

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:… show more.

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.

The history of the revolution in Russia has changed both in terms of chronology and geography. Over the past 25 years, historians have documented the multifaceted ways in which the First World War set in motion the collapse of the Russian Empire.

At the same time, much recent research has explored how that collapse was experienced and how the revolution was processed across the expanse of the empire, in effect de-centering the narrative of the revolution in new and insightful ways.

Laura Engelstein’s book is an up-to-date narrative history of the revolution and civil war that manages the challenging trick of knitting all of those disparate threads together.

While Russia had had a parliament for nearly a decade before the outbreak of World War One, its politics were extremely limited by the Tsarist government, which clung to the ideal of autocracy. The Revolution of 1917 produced an explosion of politics, with the Russian people either saturated in political speech and conflicting claims or otherwise desperate for information about what was going on in the capital and with the direction of the revolution.

Boris Kolonitskii is the foremost contemporary Russian historian of 1917. His book explores the chaotic and contradictory political culture of this moment by focusing on Alexander Kerensky, the central figure of the revolution in 1917. This is not a biography of Kerensky, although it does cover his activities over the course of much of 1917.

Instead, by describing Kerensky as both a central actor in the drama and as a symbolic figure and touchstone for so… show more.

The disasters of the revolution and civil war were experienced differently across the empire and by distinct social groups. For those of material means in European Russia who understood that their lives could never be the same, the priority was escape; most often, this was initially to a safe part of the former empire, and then, as the civil war and the prospect of Soviet rule encroached upon their safe enclave, into a life of exile abroad.

Nadezhda Teffi was an exceptionally popular writer and humorist at the time of the revolution, and her memoir (written a few years after departing Russia) is an account of how her world was turned upside down in 1917, and it documents the ways in which life had been similarly upended in each place she observed during her journey into exile.

The book is unusual in that it retains her light touch and humor,… show more.

Patenaude focuses just on the Mexican period, from January 1937 to August 1940, of Trotsky’s exile, although the previous stages of his exile — Kazakhstan in 1928, then Turkey for four years, France for another three, followed by interment in Norway — are dealt with in a series of flashbacks. In fact, the whole book is written as if Trotsky in Coyoacán were recalling his past, from his prosperous farmer’s boyhood to his underground militancy, his Civil War military brilliance, and his blundering incompetence as a Bolshevik power-broker. The danger that Patenaude flirts with is to let Trotsky’s charisma and undoubted genius charm him into overlooking his subject’s monstrous indifference to the suffering and deaths of others, sometimes even of those close to him, as well as his overweening conceit.

By dealing with the last phase of the tragedy, nemesis, Trotsky is seen to pay in fear, resignation, failure, and… show more.

I love the movie and musical adaptations of Anastasia, so it’s no wonder I love this magical family saga from Nadine Brandes. Brandes effortlessly weaves magic into the tale we thought we knew about Anastasia Romanov. And yes, there is both magic and romance.

With the leader of the Bolshevik army after her, Anastasia “Nastya” Romanov is given a mission to smuggle an ancient spell that might be her family’s only salvation into exile in Siberia. Nastya has barely dabbled in magic, but her only chances of saving herself and her family are to release the spell and deal with the consequences, or to enlist help from Zash, the handsome Bolshevik soldier who seems to be different. This story does contain violence, but overall is another read I both love and could recommend to anyone.