I can't answer the question directly, though I can point you to the sub's reading list. Most specifically, the one on Russia. Link

Apologies to the mods if this violates.

I'll repost something I wrote recently on what 'bias' is in terms of historical study, as it is misunderstood, and the quest for the mythical 'unbiased source' is a wild goose chase. The short of it is that all sources are biased in their own way, and what you really are looking for isn't the lack of bias, but how that bias is handled. As a side note, the thread this was written for was about Soviet history, specifically the Russian Revolution, so it is at least tangentially related, but not directly. the issues you raise and don't know what to trust, many of them are covered in this subreddit, such as this response from /u/kochevnik81 which is, frankly, one of the best summaries you'll find on the Holodomor and the current state if historiography, in my humble opinion.

I would additionally express some caution in your own apparently unexamined assumptions, as you repeat, for instance, as assumed truth the at best unsettled theory about the "FBI and crack in ghettos", among other things (such as apparently disbelieving the level of anti-Polish animus in Soviet policy). In any case, I cover it below, the you as the read are an active participant in this. Partly in needing to be discerning and weighing evidence, but also in examining your own biases and ensuring that you don't inherently believe a source because it conforms to what you want to be 'the truth'.

The answer to "Is xxxxxxxxx a biased source?" will always be yes. There is no perfect source out there. Some are better than others for a variety of reasons, but every source has bias, and there are two broad ways that in this especially applies for any source!

First, is the author. To be sure, saying that all sources are biased doesn't mean that all sources are heavily slanted ideologically. It simply gets to the factors in play with any work of history. Every historian is bringing a perspective, shaped by their life experiences and education, and that will impact how they view their topic and how they present it. As face noted, with someone like Trotsky, in this situation, that results in a book by a man with a grudge. But even had he not been ousted of course, Trotsky, by virtue of being a strong, active participant in the events, would be hard pressed most likely to sit and write with any appreciable degree of remove. In any case though, he was, and this only enhances matters there.

Most historians of course are not also subjects of their work, but they also need to be able to stand back and try to view things objectively. The key word there is try, as if you think they can truly succeed, I have a bridge in Brooklyn up for sale if you're interested. There are a lot of other factors here of course, such as how they use sources, whether in engagement with earlier secondary works, or how they utilize primary sources. In most cases, it is quite impossible to utilize every relevant source on a topic, which means they must make decisions on which ones to make use of, which ones to skip over. All of this is, in the end, going to create bias. This is why, in the end, two works can reach startlingly different conclusions even though they might use the same data. One of the most famous examples of this perhaps being the debate seen over the dueling works of Browning and Goldhagen, as their respective books Ordinary Men and Hitler's Willing Executioners staked out very different arguments in Holocaust studies as to why people participated, yet used as core parts of their work the the same German Reserve Police Battalion and the post-war interviews conducted with the members. The two came at it from different angles, contextualized the sources differently, and presented different conclusions.

Now on the one hand we can't say one or the other was automatically, inherently wrong, but that doesn't mean that we say "Its all biased so one is as good as the next!" Being able to be cognizant of ones biases though is very important in doing good history, and often in the introduction of a work, or else in an appendix, there will be a brief meta-sketch which lays out methodology used and the author's approach, which helps give the reader the tools to understand how some of those biases shaped the work, and to weigh them.

This feeds into the second thing to consider, which is the reader! You, or whomever is reading a history book, are an active participant. Any and all sources need to be read critically to truly get everything out of it. All of the above should be in the back of your mind. Consider the arguments made to reach a conclusion, consider the evidence presented, weigh who the author is. And you aren't the only person doing this of course, as almost any academic book worth its salt has a few reviews out there which you can check out and see how others did the same thing, which then can form another piece of the puzzle for your own analysis (with something old like Trotsky of course, you'll also find plenty of works which aren't reviews, per se, but engage heavily with it).

Which comes back to where I said 'we can't say one or the other was automatically, inherently wrong', because I don't want to leave you with the wrong impression. You'll often hear that Browning won that debate, or rather, that Ordinary Men continues to be heavily praised while Hitler's Willing Executioners is often castigated, and this is, in essence, because of the above. /u/commiespaceinvader discusses the controversy here so I won't rehash it, but the take away we are concerned about here is that the broad consensus within the academy was that Browning made a compelling argument that stands up to scrutiny, while Goldhagen's was quite flawed, and undermined by serious methodological issues. This wasn't decided by looking at their covers though, but rather by critical engagement with both.

Neither was free of bias, and depending how we define the term, both were exactly as biased as the other, by which I mean bias in the sense that both authors brought a perspective and methodology that shaped the end result of their respective works. But bias can make a book good just as it can make a book bad. What is important is how the author is cognizant of it, and someone with good awareness can interrogate their own biases to try and improve the book, even.

So I've spent a lot of (e)ink gabbing on and on here, and the conclusion I'm driving at is that we shouldn't be asking "Is a source biased?" but rather "In what way is it biased?" because that tells us so much more. If you compared Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, and Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924^1 , and this article I just Googled from "theamericanconservative.com", each one has its biases, some more obvious than others: one a participant later ousted, one a generally respected secondary work, one where the url says a lot all on its own. If approached well, and for the right reasons, each tells you something, but as a general reader, you're likely looking for the one that most seeks balance (this is what people generally mean when they say "unbiased"), and of the choices thrown up there, the choice between an embittered participant, a conservative and presumably anti-communist website, or a generally well-reviewed and award-winning secondary source, I hope it is fairly obvious... but perhaps that is just my own biases showing, of course!

1: As a side note, I don't want to make it seem like Figes is the best book out there on this! There are a lot of works on the Russian Revolution, such as Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Figes was just what first came to mind. Don't consider this a unqualified recommendation.

The problem here is going to be bias in either direction. Critics and proponents of Marxism are seldom without self interest and bias.

I'd recommend going straight to the source. Das Kapital is a good, if dense, starting point. It's a work of considerable thought that takes a while to read and comprehend. Engel's Condition of the Working Class in England is another good source. Marx and Engel were heavily influenced by Hegel and his famous dialectic, which can be read and understood through his Philosophy of History. This differs in many respects from the work of Marx and Engel in that it's very much a work of passion instead of an attempt at unbiased observation. It's worth noting, one of Hitler's main influencers, H.S. Chamberlain (interestingly, nephew to Neville Chamberlein) was also influenced by Hegel. So, suffice to say, interpretations of Hegel run the gamut.

After that, try Lenin's State and Revolution, keeping in mind most of this is political rhetoric with very little attempt at impartiality. Nonetheless, it's a good source for getting into the head of one of the prime movers of the October Revolution.

Trotsksy's Revolution Betrayed is another work from someone who was 'in the trenches', so to speak, written after he was exiled. He attempts to describe what went right and went wrong with the Russian Revolution. It's insightful, in so far as it reveals what the main players were thinking when the Revolution and subsequent civil war were occurring.

I think that should be enough to at least come to a general idea of why the Revolution happened and what the principal players were hoping to achieve.

It's also a good idea to read some more historical works, removed from the passion and heightened emotion of the actual players. Wendy Goldman's Terror and Democracy in Age of Stalin is an excellent work that examines the dynamics in Russia from about 1920s, when Stalin was pursing his dekulakization policy, until the late 30s and early 40s, during the Great Terror. It goes into great detail about the life of the average worker and how they were caught up in the hysteria of exposing of 'wreckers' and how the purge was far more complex than just Stalin ordering the NKVD to execute dissidents.

The Gulag Archipelago is an autobiographical work of a soldier who was imprisoned in one of Russians gulags. The work, like others I've mentioned, is only historical in the sense it's from someone who directly had experience with Russian society. The author makes no attempts at impartiality and his prose is, well, let's just say, it's obvious he values a sentence that sounds good to the ears over one that's entirely factual.

Lastly, some of the NKVD archive has been made public. I'd consider looking into things like NKVD Order 00447, which ordered the establishment of troikas to persecute enemies of the state. This led to anywhere from 300,000 to 600,000 people being sentenced to death by shooting.

The USSR is recent history and the Russian government still has a vested interest in keeping it's secrets. There's also the problem that the possibility exists of American propaganda. The extent of things like Operation Mockingbird is still hid behind a veil of secrecy. The declassified Family Jewels report mentions wiretapping of two journalists and that's about all we know.

Honestly? You've already found probably the best single online resource to get accessible, quick and reliable historical information on any given aspect of history. While nothing beats doing your own research on a subject, this takes time and resources that many of us can't commit to every possible subject we're interested in. Here, you have access to a community of people who have for the most part already done that research, and really enjoy talking about it. This includes the history of twentieth century socialism, which has quite a few active flaired users with established expertise in the area, myself included for some of the more obscure chapters of that history. The FAQ section has dozens of answers that may be relevant to your interests. The booklist has plenty of suggestions for places to start doing your own research, if that's what you prefer.

Broadly speaking, the answers you get on this subreddit will reflect mainstream academic consensus (and/or debates), to an extent greater than most crowdsourced information (such as Wikipedia). While this doesn't eliminate issues of bias, for the history of socialism this is less acute than you might think - more than a few prominent twentieth century historians were socialists or communists, so at least you'll get a spectrum of biases to work with. Yet despite our own ideological differences, what we all share is a fidelity to the historical record - while our opinions and interpretations might differ, we all believe in the necessity of grounding our work in evidence from the past. This means that the spectrum of debated views is not unlimited - we debate why, for instance, Stalin carried out such massive internal purges in the late 1930s, but there is more than enough hard evidence that we do not debate whether he did.

History is not a perfect discipline, and I don't want to present AskHistorians as some idyllic Garden of Eden, where unbiased truth holds sway. If nothing else, there's no guarantee that anyone will have the knowledge or desire to answer your specific question. But as an easy, go-to resource for informed perspectives, it's a hell of a lot better than most of the other options out there. If you don't trust or agree with an answer, the person answering should be able to give you the tools you need (sources, references etc) to follow it up yourself and make up your own mind if you want to. If they can't, then they aren't following the rules of the subreddit. Historians, including the ones who populate this sub, don't expect you to take our views on trust - we expect to have to convince you, by presenting evidence to substantiate our claims.

Someone else posted the booklist, and that is a great idea:

University press historical monographs are a reliable way to get peer reviewed, well sourced discussions of the past. Non-university press books can be very good as well, but the nice thing about university press is that they generally have attracted a number of book reviews by other historians.

There are caveats, naturally. Historical analysis takes time, and our dominant narratives of the past adapt and change. My Historian Skills class in college used the competing books Ordinary Men and Hitler's Willing Executioners as one of the major periods of debate over the past. I always like to check out the book reviews of the books I want to read to see what critiques other historians have raised, and while those are behind a paywall unless you are in a university setting, some colleges offer free access for local residents (your mileage may vary, my school does this but others may not).

When you are looking for discussions of topics that have become "loaded" in popular culture, historical monographs are probably going to be a more reliable source.

This is a good question, and I'm going to preface my response by revealing my own bias- as a Marxist (although, an anti-Stalinist one).

When it comes to socialism, as /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov mentions, it's basically impossible to escape extremely blatant biases, more so than other topics. Many anti-communists in popular media rarely bother to actually engage with Marxism, but there are a few ex-communists that actually do engage in good faith, your fellow Pole Leszek Kołakowski's three-volume Main Currents of Marxism is among one of the better studies.

On the other hand, for an introduction to Marxism by actual socialists I'd recommend three short works; Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels, Value Price and Profit by Marx, The Class Struggle by Karl Kautsky (and maybe add State & Revolution by Lenin). Although these don't actually answer your questions, these three (or four, if you want to continue on) short-ish works will give you a better understanding of the political-economic context and background for the history you're hoping to understand.

As far as the history of socialist states goes, I would take what the "Marxist-Leninist" (i.e. Stalinist) activist crowd tells you with a healthy grain of salt. Most of them rely on the same few sources to obfuscate the historical record- what Trotsky called the "Stalinist school of falsification" is alive and well today. For example, the recent three-hour Revolutionary Left Radio episode on Stalin is often touted by these types, but it relies heavily on quacks like Ludo Martens, Douglas Tottle, and Grover Furr (r/badhistory has addressed these types head on several times) and the more reputable historians they cite, like J. Arch Getty, are taken out of context to suit the narrative that Stalin did nothing wrong.

Again, on the other hand, the narrative that cold warriors like Robert Conquest portrayed also doesn't square with the historical record since the opening of the Soviet archives. Unfortunately, there's no shortcut around engaging with the historiography- especially the recent (and peer-reviewed!) historiography. My personal favorite historians on the Soviet Union are Sheila Fitzpatrick, E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Jack Reed, Lars Lih, and China Mieville.

If I may insert my personal opinion (with pre-emptive apologies if this paragraph starts breaking the rules), the Soviet Union was a failure- it failed to achieve a society of democratically planned production according to the principle 'to each according to their need, from each according to their ability'- but more than that it was a failure in that Stalin's bureaucratic regime actively made the lives of millions of people worse through a combination of paranoid deliberate suppression and bad policy. However- its dismantling was one of the greatest human tragedies of the latter half of the 20th century, it's indisputable that privatization killed countless thousands, millions of people lost their livelihood, and the loss of a geopolitical bloc not operating via the law of value unleashed the full force of global US hegemony, capitalist imperialism, and neoliberalism on the world.