The most recommended books on Stalinism

Jonathan Waterlow’s book It’s Only a Joke Comrade looks at humor in the Stalinist period, exploring how average citizens used humor to understand the contradictions of their daily reality and to relieve stress. Looking at the way Soviet leaders were mocked Waterlow investigates how people subversively commented on policies that left them hungry and poorly clothed, joking for example that Stalin rid himself of pubic lice (crabs) by announcing he would create a crab collective farm, causing even the lice to flee in terror. Jokes also touched on policy issues such as five-year plans, repression, and even the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, showing how people thought about and discussed these issues. Furthermore, Waterlow looks at the social aspects of telling jokes, which could have dire consequences if told to the wrong person. He studies how jokes helped create and reinforce trust circles, challenging old notions of atomization in the USSR. This witty,… show more.

Known in Scandinavia mainly for her intense poetry, the Swedish author Karin Boye wrote this novel in 1940, recently published in a new English translation. It is a dystopian novel written in the shadow of Stalinism and Nazism, depicting an authoritarian society where the individual is seen as a threat to the common good.

The protagonist, Kall, invents a drug which has an enormous impact. This novel defends its place between Huxley and Orwell, chronologically and thematically.

In some ways, it is superior to them, by incorporating gender relations and family life, neglected by the more famous authors. 

Lea Ypi is a political philosopher and she has, in effect, written a sly and subtle piece of political philosophy, but you only realise that when you close the book at the end.

It’s a memoir of her early life in Albania: under the ersatz Stalinism of Enver Hoxha’s regime as a small child; the sudden realisations when the regime fell that she had been surrounded by lies, not least the lies of her dissident family who could not take the risk of their child learning the truth about them; and the sickening stories of how ‘free’ Albania in the 1990s was overtaken by crooks and dangerous idealists.

She is unsparing on the evils of both the communist and post-communist worlds, without succumbing to any kind of cheap moral equivalence between them. But the story itself is also hugely compelling: you will remember her father in particular. The kind of… show more.

This is a collection of diaries written by a wide range of individuals during the Stalin era. The diaries address the terror in a variety of surprising ways, demonstrating the diversity of Soviet citizens in this time.

I love Akhmatova for her talent and her immense courage. Considered to be the ‘Soul of the Silver Age,’ the greatest modernist Russian woman poet, Akhmatova was a brilliant master of conveying raw emotion in her portrayals of everyday situations. She began to write poetry at age eleven and was first published in her late teens. Her father considered this to be an unsuitable and even shameful occupation and forbade her to write using the family name so she chose the surname of her great-grandmother, Akhmatova. Her works range from short lyric love poetry to longer, more complex poems, such as Requiem, a tragic depiction of the Stalinist terror, and written as a testament to the hardship and suffering of the people during this time, particularly women whose husbands and sons were imprisoned and executed. 

One of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century, Anna was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965. Her distinctive work ranging from short lyric poems to intricately structured pieces set her apart from her contemporaries. Her work deals heavily with the struggles of living and writing under the Stalinist era.

In this elegy, written over three decades, between 1935 and 1961, Anna relates details of her personal struggles together with the reflection of other voices during the "Great Purge". In an emotional call to help, she offers empathy to others faced with the same, dire predicament. Feel the gravity of suffering, pain, and mourning, ultimately teaching you one of the most important lessons in healing, which is acceptance and letting go. 

As a Russian, Lankov has a particular affinity for North Korea; he intuits how such economic systems work. A historian with some of the best work on the politics of the 1950s, he has more recently turned to projects interviewing refugees including on the economy of the North. He introduces the country’s weird political system, but also analyzes daily life, from personal status badges to schools, food and surviving in the underground market economy as well. 

Many language stories have sad endings. I don’t like to over-personalize a language; it’s primarily the users that put the spice into a language or let it ‘die’. Or in the case of Yiddish, murdered in their millions.

Dovid Katz’s title evokes the extraordinary vitality of Yiddish – for centuries the language of Europe’s Jews and one of the major literary languages of the 20th century, until Nazism and Stalinism consumed all. Many survivors reached Israel, where Hebrew has taken its place. But Yiddish lives on. To me that matters.

For tens of thousands (and thriving) survivors’ descendants in the US and Europe, Yiddish is still a first language, preserving a traditional religious lifestyle  Many more, whose grandparents (like mine) migrated and raised children in other tongues, still cherish Yiddish for its songs and jokes. As do I. Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry David – scratch the surface and… show more.

Mary Leder was an American teenager in the 1930s when her Jewish socialist immigrant parents, poverty-stricken by the Great Depression, decided to return to Russia to build a Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan. After a brief period of difficulty, they left the Soviet Union and returned to the United States, but Leder was detained due to passport difficulties.

In this moving memoir, she discusses her life in Moscow as a student, a factory worker, an editor, and a young wife and mother. She provides a tragic and compelling account of the repressions of the 1930s, the chaotic evacuation of Moscow in 1941 as the Germans approached the city, the death of her baby girl in evacuation, and the growing anti-Semitism after the war.  At one point she shared a communal apartment with a young, very kind Vietnamese revolutionary who she later learned was Ho Chi Minh. The journey she narrates, from… show more.