I can see I'm late to the party, but I came here from the digest, and I can add a little bit about Bobrick's Labyrinths of Iron, specifically the part where he talks about the Moscow Metro.

So, to be nice to him, it's not actually a terrible book. In part, I think it's because he's dealing with a much more narrow topic than "all of the Islamic Golden Age" or "all of Siberia". When talking about Moscow, he does a surprisingly good job of using sources from the Soviet Union as opposed to Western "experts", the shortcomings of whom have already been discussed in this thread. However, he really only uses about five books as sources for his narrative, and he treats them as secondary sources, when he really should have been treating them as primaries.

I mean, imagine you see a book called The Metropolitan Railway of Moscow, published in Moscow by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in 1935. Are you going to trust that as a secondary source? Frankly, Stories of the Metro Builders, which he claims to have drawn some information from, shouldn't even be analyzed as a primary historical source as such — it's much more of a literary source, and that's how I'm analyzing it in some work right now. But Bobrick just accepts it almost unconditionally.

In addition to methodological issues, there are some factual errors and mischaracterizations as well. For one, he starts his narrative in 1931. Now, starting in 1931 is fine — I do that in the work I'm writing right now about the Metro. But I do that in order to discuss how the narrative of the Metro was shaped, what got left out, and what political purposes it served. Bobrick just... doesn't engage with that.

A lot of his narrative is actually very cold-warrior-ish, which paradoxically also means he takes the Soviets at their word way too much. He simultaneously accepts the Soviet narrative that the Metro was a superhuman feat of faith and willpower (and, I mean, it was pretty impressive, don't get me wrong) and also the Cold War narrative that Kaganovich and Khrushchev were almost comically evil bosses (and, I mean, they could be pretty harsh, don't get me wrong) — but it's so much more complex than those simplifications.

He also completely leaves out the fascinating debate over subway and urban planning that was running in the 1920s and reached a head in 1928 with the purge of the Moscow Right Opposition — and for more on that, this answer of mine may be of interest.

Generally, when it comes to the aesthetic and political intent of the Metro, he's also guilty of a lot of simplification. For example, he falls into the dichotomy that I described in that other comment, saying that the Metro was intended to show off to the West and also to improve the lives of the people travelling in it. And those things are, strictly speaking, true. But again, he misunderstands exactly why the Metro was so beautiful, because I think he doesn't really have the best understanding of Socialist Realism or of the great value Stalinism placed on brightness. Basically, he thinks the Metro was designed looking backwards into the past, when I would argue that it was just as much designed to look forward towards the end-point of historical development.

So, to put it short, it's an okay-ish introduction to the Metro if all you know is that Moscow has a public transit system and nothing more. But it's not even really accurate to call it "outdated" — it just kind of sits there, entirely unaware of all the actual scholarship on the issue. And I think, based on what others have said, that you can probably extrapolate that to all of his work. If you know literally nothing else about the topic he's writing about, you could do worse. It's not fiction, but it's really not history either.

For a better book on the Metro, I'd point you to William Wolf's Russia's Revolutionary Underground — online free here. It's much more reflective of recent scholarship and of a more nuanced understanding of the USSR, though, to be fair, it is also 25 years old and has a few factual inaccuracies. If you read German, Dietmar Neutatz' Die Moskauer Metro is even better, but it's... well, it's in German. And it's like a billion pages.

Ooh. Benson Bobrick. I will share some thoughts.

I have only read one of his books, East of the Sun, so my analysis is completely based off of that. Much like the OP says, he is a rather entertaining writer. He is absolutely not a historian. I would argue not even really a pop historian (although that standard is obviously a loose one).

His history of Siberia is very much focused on the parts that make sexy copy. There is a lot about the Bering expeditions, for example, and quite a bit about the Russian Civil War. Much of the rest of the period, however, tends to get blown through at breakneck speed - there is actually very little in the book about the Soviet period, and practically nothing after Stalin's time.

A very major issue, from my perspective, is that he has very little firsthand experience either with the area, or with its historic sources, let alone the actual histories written about the area. A vast amount of his history is his reading of and retelling of English-language primary sources. By this I mean, for example, you will get a lot of travelogues from the 19th century by Western travelers through the region, which are pretty much treated as unvarnished truth. There is much less from even a Russian perspective, and nothing from a native Siberian perspective.

And this is something in particular that I found particularly infuriating about the book. Bobrick tries to be sympathetic to native Siberians, but they consistently stand in mute silence as victims and passive figures acted on, rather than individuals and peoples with their own voices or actions. As a result (and again, in no small part because of relying on Western primary sources), we hear an awful lot about the miserable conditions, poverty and squalor that native Siberians live in - and to be sure, often their material circumstances during Russian conquest and down to the present day can be quite bad - but nothing else of them. They are just objects to be pitied. Sometimes this reliance on primary sources can veer into racist language - for example, there is a mention of "wild-eyed Kazakhs" outside Omsk. It can go the other way too, when necessary, and local peoples can be exoticized.

As far as I can tell, Bobrick has little-to-no Russian language experience (the bibliography he lists has barely any Russian sources, and those that are there tend to be tertiary Soviet reference works and journals). He isn't really engaging with anything modern historians have written about the region or its peoples. And that work in particular feels like it was cashing in on a period (it was published in 1992), when Westerners with the slimmest of credentials were able to present themselves as some kind of "authority", whether in Russia itself or in representing Russia abroad. As far as I could make out, Bobrick's claim to expertise on the region is mostly based on his mother traveling the Trans-Siberian Railroad once on the way to mission work in the 1920s, and his grandfather telling him stories of the area. Literally.

I can't really speak to his other works. And to reiterate, for what it is, East of the Sun is entertaining, I guess. But as for a single volume history, of the area, and one that deals with the people of the region as a whole, and does not focus on expeditions and wars, there are better volumes out there, even from the period Bobrick published his book. A good one to start with is probably Yuri Slezkine's Arctic Mirrors, James Forsyth's History of the Peoples of Siberia or W. Bruce Lincoln's Conquest of a Continent. Igor Naumov's The History of Siberia or Janet Hartley's Siberia: A History of the People would be much newer additions. If you really wanted something that was based on a Westerner spending a lot of time in Siberia, and lets native Siberians speak about themselves, then Piers Vitebsky's The Reindeer People is a bit more of anthropology (based on fieldwork among the Even people), but gets into history as well.