I’m not personally a communist, but I am still very fascinated by learning about how these countries that called themselves communist have operated in the past. I don’t want to read far right or far left sources that will distort the history of what happened in these countries to fit their narratives, but I’d like to read about them from someone who holds them accountable for the awful things they’ve done, while also showing what communist countries were able to do well.
I’ve really enjoyed listening to Stephen Kotkin’s lectures on Stalin, wherein he acknowledges that Stalin was a tyrant with blood on his hands, but he also emphasizes that Stalin really believed in the ideology behind these awful actions, and that Stalin wasn’t a cynical fascist, but someone who genuinely thought they were making the world a better place (even though he failed miserably, and allowed his unchecked power to corrupt him).
So I guess ultimately I’m really just looking for historians/sources that don’t do communist apologia but that also don’t give into the red scare narrative that communists want to eat your babies and communalize your toothbrushes.
Thanks!
Sheila Fitzpatrick has done some really interesting works on the Soviet Union
Diane Koenker writes on the same topic but she’s a bit more feminist (not to an extreme extent, she just brings some stories of women to light that others tend to forget). She’s also done some writing on tourism in the USSR, which I personally think is such an awesome an obscure topic that no one really ever thinks about
(Avoid anything by Richard Pipes, he’s definitely anti communist and it shows quite strongly in his works)
Eric Hobsbawm was a pretty ardent defender of the Soviet Union, but he is definitely one of the most prolific historians regarding the history of socialism and the development of both socialist and capitalist systems from the industrial revolution onwards. He makes great use of historical statistical information in his books, great resource if you are concerned with gaining a more broad and comprehensive understanding of socioeconomic developments through the period.
For my money, the best work on the subject is David Priestland's The Red Flag: A History of Communism (Grove Press, 2010), which covers not only the development of Communism as an ideology through Marx in Europe, but also Russia, China, and the international Communist movement as a whole. Comprehensive, readable, and can't be beat. My copy is well worn. For articles on individual subjects, check out The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford, 2014).
A few other books I recommend for understanding Russian Communism during the Cold War are A. A. Fursenko's Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (Norton, 2006), as well as Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov's Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Harvard University Press, 1996). These are all based on Russian sources and give great a more in-depth account of Communist leadership, which you seem interested in.
For Communism outside Russia, and especially understanding the dynamic between Chinese and Russian Communism, I really recommend Lorenz Luthi's The Sino-Soviet Split (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Jeremy Friedman's Shadow Cold War (Princeton University, 2011). China itself is a huge topic, but you can get a good overview from Keith Schoppa's Revolution and It's Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History, and focus on the sections that cover the Communist period. For Mao, I recommend Rebecca Karl's Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History, which is both well researched and relatively neutral. A really great recent book too is Julia Lovell's Mao: A Global History, which focuses on the impact Maoism had abroad.
For North Korea, a really fascinating subject, check out Andrei Lankov's From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945-1960 (Rutgers University Press, 2003), which uses Russian sources and to my mind is the most authoritative work on the subject, although it's been some time since I checked out scholarship on North Korea.
I can provide additional recommendations about subjects/countries on request.
EDIT: For some extra suggestions on Post-Stalin Soviet Union history, check out this comment I made elsewhere.
If you're interested in the economic history of the USSR, Alec Nove's An Economic History of the USSR is a classic, and a slightly more modern (though also a shade rosy in places) take is Robert (Bob) Allen's Farm to Factory.
Anne Applebaum has a few fantastic books. Gulag is obviously, about the gulag, Iron Curtain is about the communist takeover of post-WW2 Eastern Europe, and Red Famine follows the Holodomor. Not necessarily about communist countries so much as the goings-on in those countries, but I'd recommend all three. She's got a great way of blending the sometimes dry historical events with the incredibly personal stories of the people living through them, and her writing is very accessible for hobby historians.