Pipes has some... interesting views on Bolshevik history, to say the least. Personally, I'd not rely on his work too much.

That comment aside, what aspects of the Revolution are you hoping to focus on? There's an extensive field of literature out there on a number of topics - would you like to look at the onset of Stalinism? Changes in culture? Women? Major political figures?

To go alongside your primary documentation and personal works, it might be useful to read some more specialised works on those areas. For Solzhenitsyn, I'd recommend something on the Terror (maybe J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror; Steven Barnes, Death and Redemption; Michael Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag).

For Kollontai, you might want to read Communism and the Family, or her novel Red Love. To go along side this, perhaps Barbara Clements' Daughters of Revolution, or her biography of Kollontai, Bolshevik Feminist.

To go alongside works relating to Trotsky, you might want to have a look at something about the power struggle of the 1920s and the slow emergence of Stalinism, like Graeme Gill's The Origins of the Stalinist Political System or Rodger Pethybridge's The Social Prelude to Stalinism.

Generally, I think you might also be interested to read Bukharin and Preobrazhensky's The ABC of Communism (1920) and Aleksander Bogdanov's novel Red Star (1908). The latter isn't about the revolution per se, but it did provide a rather utopian blueprint of what a socialist society might look like.

As for films, I'd recommend anything by Eisenstein's October (and any of his other films), Puvodkin's Mother and The End of St. Petersburg, Dovzhenko's Earth. If you want to read about film, try David Gillespie's Early Soviet Cinema.

So I would like to second Llamastingray's post - I would be more than happy to recommend books to you if you could specify a particular type of history you might be interested (cultural / feminist / social / military / etc etc etc).

I focus specifically on the cultural / intellectual history of the period, and I would like to suggest a few key works relating to this field. The tremendous political upheavals of the Russian 1920s were accompanied by parallel revolutions in art, literature, film, fashion, poetry, and the conduct of everyday life: one cannot engage the history of this period without diving into its explosive creative energies.

Must-read cultural histories of this period include:

• Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution [Really a fantastic introduction into the political imagination & cultures of Utopia in the first decade of the Soviet Union].

• Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution [Another foundational cultural history of Russia's first revolutionary decade - centered in the space of St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad but casting its eye over the revolution as a whole].

• Camille Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922 [The classic work on Russian avant-garde art - I would definitely read the last chapters to give you a sense of the visual culture of the time].

• Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond [A thought-provoking work on visual culture of the first decades of the Soviet Union. There's a standard argument that Stalinism is an utter break with Soviet life in the 1920s - that Stalin either "betrayed" the revolution (Trotsky's hypothesis), instituted a "Great Retreat" from previous radicalisms, or otherwise warped the revolution into a more conservative, reactionary form. Groys' provocative thesis in this work is that, at least in the realm of culture and aesthetics, Stalinism was actually a radicalization of Leninism. Forgot everything you thought you knew about Soviet Realism and read this book].

• Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 [OK, this isn't a cultural history, but I would argue that it is one of the most important works written on Modern Russia in the last 15 years. Holquist examines 1917 not as an absolute historical rupture, but rather as a phenomenon growing out of the mobilizational politics, institutional cultures, and social militarization of the Great War. An absolute classic - and one that challenges the periodization of 1917, which your syllabus seems to be based on. I can't recommend it highly enough].

Finally, I would like to again support Llamastingray in terms of what not to read. Historians such as Pipes, Malia, Figes, and Service are very, very old school. They can definitely help as basic introductions to this revolutionary period, but their methodologies (diplomatic history, one-dimensional political history, etc) can be rather problematic & are far less interesting than historiographical methods being pursued by scholars today. Even worse, all four of these historians were trained during the Cold War, and their analyses of the Soviet Union are implicitly (and at worse explicitly) framed by their political commitments. Read with caution.

Let me know if this helps. I can recommend more, if you'd like to narrow down the sort of topics and themes you're interested in. Just let me know.

Have you considered adding some fiction to the slate? Mayakovsky's play "The Bedbug," and Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," are both allegorical works that offer a genuine insight into the state of Soviet affairs, including the purges and show trials, at that time.

A few books I'd recommend:

Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy - the book encompasses the whole of Soviet period but it has good chapters on the revolution and the Civil War

Robert Service, he's written biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, each of which of course discusses in detail their roles in the revolution and early Soviet Union

The Cambridge History of Russia Vol. 3, while varied in its overall quality (as is anything that comes from a bunch of different authors) has good chapters specifically on the revolution and civil war.