Although it is frequently used as a textbook for the history of the USSR, Ronald Suny's The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States does not rally read like one. Sheila Fitzpatrick is another Russianist whose writing is often quite lively. Fitzpatrick's The Russian Revolution is one of the standard introductory works for 1917. Her Everyday Stalinism and On Stalin's Team are also worth checking out for the Stalin era.

Biographies of Soviet leaders are sometimes problematic, veering to either apologetics or jeremiads. James White's Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution is a good intellectual biography of Lenin and is useful because it attempts to parse out both not only what Lenin thought, but also how his ideas adjusted to circumstances. Stephen Kotkin's first volume of his Stalin biography is a doorstopper of a book, but also has valuable insights of the man and his era. For Khrushchev, William Taubman's Khrushchev: The Man and His Era is an excellent piece of work that fits into a more standard biographical format.