If you want something which focuses on Stalin and his inner circle, court of the red tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore is a good read.

Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s is a social history of life in Soviet cities during Stalinism. If you want the peasantry's half of the equation, check out her Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization.

Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture is an anthology on the 1920s and covers the period between the Revolution and the Stalin turn towards dictatorship.

David Brandenberger's books Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927-1941 and National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 examines the issue of a Soviet identity and the fractious of the state's attempts to inscribe the tenets of the new Soviet man onto its citizens.