.
Red Famine by Anne Applebaum: A horrific account of Stalin's War on Ukraine by one of the best journalists of our time. Approach with caution. She also wrote a history of the Gulags. I'm just not ready.... Speaking of approach with caution...
Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder: Approach with caution, an account of all the terrible horrors of the era between Poland and Western Russia from which my family hailed, and all the unprecedentedly horrific things done during the 30s and 40s in this most awful of world regions.
Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen: Nobody in the English-speaking world has done more important journalistic work in the last few years than Masha Gessen. This book is a review of all the relevant facts about Putin, the blank face about whom the world knew nothing, along with a kind of biography of the Russian people and how their hopes for a new era that were mercilessly dashed.
Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol: A short novel by Gogol about Ukrainian cossacks who go to war against Poland. The father is so filled with nationalist passion that he kills his own son for falling in love with a Polish girl.
Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov: Look, these are tough books, they operate at fever pitch and continually make emotional demands until you're exhausted and perhaps a little bored at the contant intensity, but if you want to understand the mentality of people who support Putin, this is ground zero.
From the House of the Dead and Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky: House of the Dead is Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical account of his time in a Siberian prison camp, and it is his most digestible work. Notes from the Underground, on the other hand, is pure nihilism as prose. It is the point of view of everyone from Vladimir Putin to every troll on social media.
The Great Terror by Robert Conquest: An account of the late 30s, when Stalin ruled by fear of the disappearance. It's a little dry and takes a while to get into gear, but the detail and the horror is obviously astounding. He also wrote Harvest of Sorrow, which I haven't begun, about the enforced Ukraine famine of the early 30s.
Life and Fate and Stalingrad by Vassily Grossman - THE great of the Second World War, done, obviously, from the Soviet perspective. No novel is greater than this, and I don't have the authority to say so, but if anyone called this the greatest novel written in the 20th century I would never complain. I love every one of Life and Fate's 886 pages, but the prequel book, Stalingrad, a novel about the largest battle in human history, I have never even attempted though it sits on my shelf.
The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin: Another of my favorites. A tragically bloody and funny tale about a pretender Czar supported by the Cossacks and the very bitter losses the battles entail.
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak: Should explain itself, but it's ultimately an account of how life for privileged liberal intellectuals was shocked into realization of Russia's depravity and forced submission into the new reality.
Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam: An account by the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam of her marriage and of the Great Terror in which her husband disappeared forever.
To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson: An account of Marxism from the French Revolution to Lenin's founding of the Soviet Union. It is therefore also an account of the complacently repressive 19th century conservatism that lead to the explosion of radicalism, and also of the reactionary counterrevolution which would so soon thereafter become fascism.
The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore: A very dishy, hilariously strange and bloody account of Russian Czar's ruling family and how their whims controlled this out of control country. This is the world to which Putin wants to bring us back.
The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The first is the gulags on the micro-level, which I read at seventeen, and is an astonishing account of dignity and resilience. The second is the three-volume account of the Gulags on the macro level. Very difficult emotionally and monotonous acts of oppression, and I couldn't keep going through even fifty pages.
Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor: Beevor is kind of notorious as the historian that never skimps on 'the wet stuff', and this is an account of the most lethal battle in world history (so far). Handle with care.
Odessa Stories and Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel: Babel too was shot in the Great Terror. The first is stories organized Jewish crime in 1900s Odessa, the second a journalistic account of the brutally violent life in the Russian Civil War.
Requiem by Anna Akhmatova: A long account in poetry to bury the victims of Soviet tragedies.
Sevastopol Sketches and Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy: The first is Tolstoy's semi-autobiographical fiction about the brutalities of the Crimean War. The second is Tolstoy's last book. A novella about Chechan resistance to Czarist occupation and oppression.
War and Peace I guess...: explains itself...
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