I’ll be quite honest, I know very little about the Western treatment of Russian history, aside from the mainstream approach to the Norrmanist/Anti-Normanist controversy in the West is completely opposite to the consensus here and that their treatment of Iosif Stalin’s leadership is less nuanced. However I did attend a lecture about Russia in the Western literary imagination that I found very interesting, it was mostly focused on the past but for what discussion there was on more modern times the lecturer said that during the Soviet era western depictions Russia mostly fluctuated between that of Russia as a nation of simple people under the communist yoke (implying that we needed to be “liberated” and “modernized”) and of Russia as a barbarian nation, a Mongol horde wearing the mask of a white man, but that more modern depictions treat Russia as having a deficient national character for diverging from Western norms, something not dis-similar from the Sonderweg idea about Germany, where a retarded social structure and backward culture are blamed for us not becoming a “modern” Western state, ignoring that we are not Western and we are only not modern by a narrow Western-centric definition of modernity.

However, it is my hope that such things are limited to certain kinds of consumer literature and that serious academic work gives us fairer treatment and regards the nation on it’s own terms rather than to a Western standard. I would like to know what the most reputable and standard Western work of Russian history is and what particular topics that would be of interest to a Russian history student.

Also, I did use a translating web site for all of this post aside this sentence, so my apologize if things are not clear.