I'm talking here about internal Soviet history specifically, not just the whole Cold War diplomatic game.
It seems like every book I come across on Soviet history has an ENORMOUS bias. Either they're pro-Soviet "everything bad is just propaganda" or it's pro-Western "the Soviets killed people because that's what Socialism means". Or at least, that's how it feels.
Obviously, every history book has a bias, but the biases on Soviet history are just so distracting and make me question them in both directions.
My own biases are towards Libertarian Socialism, so I'm not a fan of either the pro-Soviet or pro-Western approaches. I just want to know what happened and come to my own conclusions.
Hello there! I am by no means an expert on current research on the Soviet Union. However, I did come across a couple of books on the subject during my grade studies which struck me as incredibly insightful and informative. As far as I know, in all cases these have been written after the fall of the Soviet Union itself, which means the authors had access to (at least some) until then classified soviet documents, which helps paint a more truthful picture of what the inner workings of the soviet state and society really were. If anyone more informed than me can complete/correct my suggestions, please feel free to do so! Hope this helps!
The Russian Revolution, by Sheila Fitzpatrick: a concise history of the revolution that gave birth to the Soviet Union, and the early years of the new state, up until 1937. Great read as an introduction to the subject.
The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov: and incredibly insightful read on the inner workings of the soviet state at the height of stalinist terror.
The Soviet Century, by Moshe Lewin: this book is an overview of the whole soviet experience, up until the dissolution of the union in 1991. The author draws primarily from declassified documents and Russian historiography not avaliable in english to analize several key aspects or periods of soviet history, from Stalin's rise to power to the demographic and economic changes and challenges that rapid industrialization and urbanization brought about on to the new state. I highly recommend you familiarize yourself with the general history of the Soviet Union before diving into this one!
While the historian has a bias (I think he is basically a moderate conservative I think), he is obsessed with having great sources from the newest material that came out of the archives:
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941
These books give you the inside view from Stalin perspective on how the state and the party operated.
This book I found interesting because it takes a bit of a new look at the revolution based on original research and just having a different perspective.
Ronald Grigor Suny's The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States is something of a standard introductory text for studying the period in graduate schools, as I understand it, and is definitely thorough in that it covers the entire Soviet period, which most histories either do not, or do in a very concise manner.