Unlike the Third Reich (which thankfully lasted only 12 years), it is very hard to distill the seven decades of Soviet rule into a single book or project. The differences between the different Soviet epochs is quite vast, so most historians hew to specialized accounts with a more narrow timeframe. One book that bucks this trend is Ronald Suny's The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. Geoffrey Hosking's Rulers and Victims - The Russians in the Soviet Union is a much more sharply argued book, examining the anomalous position Russian ethnicity had in the USSR and very much a sequel to Hosking's earlier work on the Romanov empire. For the origins of the USSR, Sheila Fotzpatrick's The Russian Revolution is a landmark text, especially since at its publication Fitzpatrick took the then-fairly unprecedented step of extending the history of 1917 into the 1930s.