Does such a book exist?
I’ve considered and/or read everything in previous answers and the faq/book list, I think (though I’m prepared to be embarrassed to find that I missed something).
Everything I’ve found seems to be on particular eras and aspects of the nation. But I’d really like something that traces the large-scale forces and trends and changes from revolution to dissolution. My ideal would be something like a Hobsbawm “Age of ...” book just covering the lifetime of the USSR.
Probably the closest thing is Ronald Grigor Suny's The Soviet Experiment, which covers the whole period from late tsarist Russia to about the year 200p (in the second edition, at least). Suny is a respected historian and this book is often used as a text for introductory university classes. It doesn't have footnotes or endnotes, which is kind of a pain, but each chapter has a bibliography, and it goes pretty deeply into cultural topics as well as politics and society.
A couple other books that might fit the bill are Orlando Figes' Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History or Robert Service's A History of Modern Russia from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin. These are both a little more narrative style than Suny, and are also both two British historians who have worked on Russian history (both have their critics but that's largely from other works).