Hi all, I'm looking to get a feel for the political/intellectual history of the modern Russian state, about from the reforms of Peter the Great all the way through the fall of the Soviet Union. It can be a big door stopper like the Spence book referenced in the title, or perhaps a list of titles, or maybe even a series like the Oxford Series on U.S. History. Thanks!
Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.
i'd like to recommend "Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia" by Suzanne Massie, "Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia" by Orlando Figes, and "The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture" by James Billington.
all three books are well-written, well-versed, thorough reads with lots of background information, cultural insights, and extensive bibliographies.
enjoy!
I'm a little surprised that nobody's mentioned Geoffrey Hosking's Russia and the Russians yet. I haven't read it very recently, so I won't try to tell you what I thought other than that it was a real doorstopper and I remember being very impressed by it. Instead, let's hear some reviews.
Michael Pursglove was generally quite happy with the book, saying it was "the most authoritative work to appear on this subject" since the 1960s, and felt that it did a very good job explaining Russia's historical path and current state through common-sense explanations, and without falling into any exoticizing tropes. He found "some slips", mostly minor and a result of having to cram so much information into one book, but nothing truly objectionable.
Gregory Freeze was also approving, and for similar reasons. He was particularly happy with the attention paid to the Orthodox Church and the pre-Petrine period, which he felt were often overlooked, but was concerned that the Imperial period gets a little bit less focus than you might hope. In retrospect, I do remember it taking an awful while to get to the stuff I care about — the late Empire and the USSR. And on that note, being written in the 1990s and 2000s, it does only barely include some of the newer scholarship that has come out since the end of the USSR. But again, nothing really to get mad about.
Norman G. O. Pereira was particularly happy with Hosking's "balance" and his ability to treat sensitive issues without getting into the weeds of the political and historiographical debates surrounding them, such as questions about totalitarianism. As a result, Hosking may come off as a little insufficiently critical of Russia's episodes of anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and political violence, but hardly because of any approval. Sympathy being a very important and often overlooked part of historical writing, that's a victory.
Lastly (for our purposes), David Goldfrank was pleased with Hosking's decision to orient his narrative around a couple of major themes, which he thought were "excellent vantage points for a general history of Russia within a global framework." He was a little dissatisfied with what he felt was insufficient attention paid to the international background of a lot of important events in Russian history, and felt that the period before 1600 was a little higher on factual inaccuracies than one should tolerate — but again, was generally quite satisfied.
So I'd recommend Russia and the Russians, by Geoffrey Hosking, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. A little long, and a little slow to pick up if you're reading to understand later events, and of course any historian can find a gripe with any other's work. But on the whole, it's the book to beat.
Reviews of Hosking:
Pursglove, Michael. International Affairs 78, no. 1 (2002): 193–94.
Freeze, Gregory L. The Historian 66, no. 1 (2004): 189
Pereira, N.G.O. Canadian Slavonic Papers 46, No. 3/4 (September-December 2004): 539.
Goldfrank, David. The International History Review 24, No. 2 (Jun., 2002): 393–394.