Hello! I welcome you on your adventure into Soviet History! I am commissar /u/Facepoundr and will be glad to tour you around the wonderful Soviet Union.

Actually, I am going to forward you to look at our book list which is found here. Or if you're not the clicking type I will quote what I wrote for the Wiki I just linked to.

A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891 - 1924 by Orlando Figes (1996) is an incredibly broad, well-researched and well-written book covering almost every facet of the Russian Revolution from its roots in the late empire to the Bolsheviks' attempt to create a new communist society. It's also extremely long due to the amount of content and detail it covers.

Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization by Stephen Kotkin. The book takes the building of Magnitogorsk, an industrial city built from scratch, as a way to show how people learned to "speak Bolshevik" and thus both survive within and use the regime; thus it complicates hugely the usual top-down view of the Soviet Union.

Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick. The tome for the fall of the Soviet Union. This New York Times reporter goes into detail about the collapse of USSR with depth, but also with a human aspect. A must read.

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum. A harrowing book about one of the worst aspects of Soviet society; the prison work camps known as the Gulag. Applebaum seeks to clear the untruths and reveals the more vivid account of the Gulag's inner workings.

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Anthony Beevor. A good reading account of the Battle of Stalingrad during WW2. Beevor does a great job describing in detail the way Stalingrad was won by the Red Army, and what they had to go through to achieve that victory.

Furthermore, I you have any specific topics you can ask them here or submit it in a new thread. Also, I don't know if a single person can learn all about the Soviet Union. I have been studying Soviet and Russian history for close to 8 years on and off, and I have not been able to really scratch the surface of all the inner workings of the Soviet Union and every possible subject. However, do not let that discourage you. In fact, I think it sets Russian History apart being that it is not a simple story, instead it is widely complicated, incredibly nuanced, and one that changes rapidly. I would quote Winston Churchill who said "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

I took a USSR class in college and have some books I can recommend you.

• Magnetic Mountain
• The Myth of the Eastern Front
• Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
• A History of Modern Russia

I would highly recommend "The Myth of the Eastern Front" if you want to learn about USSR and WW2. It is an amazingly interesting book about the topic and it shows how USSR was seen during and after the war in America.

Welcome to the club buddy :-)

I'm not historian, I'm just some high school dropout, community college degree having Joe Schmoe who's always loved history. I passed three classes in all my high school years (two PE's and a keyboarding, I was a bad kid) but I damn sure read the history textbooks cover to cover as soon as I got them. Just love it.

So a few years ago, for some reason, like you, I became infatuated with the Cold War. Almost everything I've read since has been related to that. My big go-to are biographies. So with that said, I'm going to recommend the three I started my journey with and enjoyed immensely. Hopefully you'll enjoy them the same:

"Lenin: A Biography" by Robert Service

"Young Stalin" by Simon Sebag Montefiore

"Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar" by Simon Sebag Montefiore

If you do end up reading those, be awesome if you kept in touch and let me know how you liked them. Also to recommend any other books you may read and enjoy. It's not easy finding people I can bore with Cold War talk.

Some additional books not mentioned yet:

Christopher Read - From Tsars to Soviets

Sheila Fitzpatrick - Russian Revolution

Evan Mawdsley - Russian Civil War

Sheila Fitzpatrick - Everyday Stalinism

J. Arch Getty - Origins of the Great Purges

Stephen Wheatcroft - the Industrialisation of Soviet Russia

Wendy Goldman - Women at the Gates

These should help give you a start at a more in depth understanding of the early USSR from revolution to war with Germany.

One thing I would strongly urge is that you spend some time also getting to now about the Imperial System which the Soviet system replaced. There can be a tendency for people to compare the USSR with other contemporaneous nations with more democratic and equitable hinterlands and thereby to be mystified by the motivations of those who supported the Revolution. When one considers that Serfdom in Russia officially ended in the same decade as slavery ended in the US it brings home how distinct Russia was from Europe and how promising and attractive a brand new system must have seemed to many.

I want to instruct you to read ALL of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to get a feel for the period, but you're going to do that anyway of course.