I'm studying it this year and I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for me. Good documentaries to watch would also help me.
Although it stops at 1945, Ted Weeks's Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861-1945 is a brief and very thorough survey of Russian/Soviet history.
Despite the absence of the Soviet period, Geoffrey Hoskings's Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 is also an excellent introduction to notions of Russian identity and empire.