Having gone through a dozen or so monographs, textbooks and biographies on Hitler, the politics of Nazi Germany and the evolution and nature of the Holocaust, I feel that it is only appropriate to move on to that other great tyrant of the 20'th century.
The problem I've had in tracking down what to read is that the issue of Stalin's regime and its crimes appears to still be fairly politicized. Especially when it comes to the various mass executions and imprisonment, a lot of people are very happy to draw broad-brush parallels to the Holocaust, usually more in serving their own political agenda than for any serious concerns for the facts and memories of the crimes. Comparing and contrasting is of course important, but I often find that people invoke clumsy comparisons with Nazi Germany at the expense of understanding the USSR and its crimes in their own right.
Essentially, I'm looking for works that use sources in reasonably conservative ways, that compare and contrast different approaches and perspectives in analysing various aspects of Stalin's (and Lenin's) USSR - politics, hierarchies, ideology, and so forth.
Something like the following:
1. An introduction to Soviet historiography discussing available sources, their limitations, etc. If it explains the general political structure of the USSR as well, that would help too.
2. Perhaps some kind of biography of Stalin that focuses on his motivations and means of attaining power.
3. A book or books with serious documentation of Soviet crimes.
4. Books about Soviet propaganda, ideology, its relationship to Imperial Russia, etc.
I'm thankful for any tips. I prefer works of a more scholarly type, but good popularizations by serious historians are welcome too.
Most of what you have been recommended would be considered popularisations - Applebaum is a journalist, Sebag Montefiore a professional author.
1) historiography: a good buy would be the 'Beyond Totalitarianism' collection, edited by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, which paired historians of Nazi Germany with historians of Stalinist USSR in literal mash-ups; the whole thing is an excellent guide to the kinds of work that has been done since glasnost on Stalinism and Nazism.
2) biographies: I am looking forward to reading - when I have the chance - Sheila Fitzpatrick's On Stalin's Team, which is more of a group biography and reconstruction of how Stalin fused politics and socialising. The recent biography by Oleg Khlevniuk of Stalin is also supposed to be quite good, and Khlevniuk's previous work was heavy-duty GULag history.
3) documentation: the easiest way to get your head around the archival revelations of the 1990s is to read all the articles on
this website. You will swiftly realise that Conquest refused to fully accept the new documentation as it reduced the death tolls.
If you can read French, Nicolas Werth's Ivrogne et la marchande des fleurs is the best short paperback introduction to the Terror of 1937-38. Werth contributed the USSR chapter to the Black Book of Communism, although he distanced himself from Stephane Courtois' introduction; Werth's chapter is an excellent overview of Soviet crimes from the Civil War onwards.
4) Soviet propaganda/ideology: a somewhat outdated view of the subject.
I suggest instead reading Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, which was published in 1997 and blew historians' minds entirely. The book is ostensibly about the building of Magnitogorsk as an industrial city from literally nothing in the middle of nowhere (or rather the Urals), but is actually a brilliant guide to how Soviet citizens actually lived and experienced Stalinism. The chapter 'Speaking Bolshevik' especially is quite incredible.
A short study that is another must-read is Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism. Indeed, every Fitzpatrick book is worth reading. Tear Off These Masks! is essayistic but utterly fascinating, and shows how Soviet citizens reinvented themselves and played with identities - indeed, how in many cases they had the space to play with identities.
Since the USSR was a multinational society and state, another classic is Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire. Like Kotkin and Fitzpatrick, Martin spends quite a lot of time on the Terror, and also covers the 1932-3 famine plus dekulakisation in 1930 in depth, showing how nationalities policies proved to be a massive influence on the course of Stalinist violence.
A couple of other works are also worth a look. Sarah Davies' Popular Opinion in Stalinist Russia covers 1934-41 and shows that opposition continued despite terror. Robert Thurston's Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia covers the same time-frame and is even more radical, arguing fairly persuasively that the purges were often very popular with the population, because the bigwigs seemed to be getting it in the neck, whereas the chance of being caught up in a purge were low if one was a Russian worker (as opposed to a Korean living on the wrong side of the border, or a Pole in Belorussia, who were both suspect groups). This argument is echoed in Sheila Fitzpatrick's Stalin's Peasants, which uses a Russian folk woodcut 'How The Mice Buried The Cat' as a metaphor for how peasants often detourned the purges to take revenge on local party bosses; this meant for example that local show trials proved wildly popular for reasons the regime had not really anticipated.
I also really like Lynne Viola's work, both Peasant Rebels under Stalin (about resistance to collectivisation) and The Unknown Gulag (about the 'special settlements' created after dekulakisation and filled up with other exiles through to the 1950s, outside the actual camp system of the GULag) are well worth reading.
There is some work on continuities but it tends to be in essays. Peter Holquist had a pathbreaking chapter entitled 'To Count, To Extract, To Exterminate' in a collection entitled A State of Nations edited by Ronald Suny and Terry Martin which outlines a genealogy of violence from Imperial Russian colonial expansion in the Caucasus and Central Asia in the mid-19th Century, through WWI, to the 'decossakization' campaign of the Civil War and the suppression of the Tambov rebellion in 1921 (Antonovshchina) on through to Stalinism.
For an elegant narrative bridging Tsarism to the 1917 revolutions and to the end of the Civil War, Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy is still hard to beat. It justifiably sold by the truckload in the 1990s.
My top 10 recommendations, then:
1. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism
2. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain
3. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire
4. Fitzpatrick/Geyer (eds), Beyond Totalitarianism
5. Werth, Ivrogne et la marchande des fleurs, or the Black Book of Communism, reading Werth's section
6. Fitzpatrick, On Stalin's Team
7. Figes, A People's Tragedy
8. Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin
9. Fitzpatrick, Tear Off These Masks!
10. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia
Many of the authors of articles linked
here, like Wheatcroft or Ellman, are economists or economic historians, and do not write readable books, but are very cogent over the length of an article.
All of the works above engage one way or another with the 1990s archival data and revelations.
For some truly hardcore but still comprehensible work on the terror,
Marc Junge and Rolf Binner are two of the leading names in German-language historiography, and also tied in closely with Russian document collection editing teams.
Disclosure: I read Russian so have seen most of the edited source collections and the pioneering glasnost/post-glasnost publications. That translates to about 3GB of ebooks. A few are translated but the writing can be turgid. Oleg Khlevniuk (History of the Gulag)and Pavel Polian (Against Their Will) are some of the more usable/readable authors, but the English-speaking historians named above are much more engaging to read.
I specialise in the Nazi occupation of Russia and Belorussia during WWII, but teach Stalinism at 2nd year university level. Indeed, I just had a student presentation on the Terror of 1937-38 this afternoon, after two presentations on the Civil War, and a seminar earlier in the term on Soviet nationalities policies and the interpretation of the 1932/33 famine. Separately, two MA students chose Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain for a methodology course book review exercise, and evidently not only got the book but enjoyed it.
