I've gotten back into reading recently and am looking for some recommendations. I don't have much knowledge of the USSR besides the absolute basics. I'd prefer a book that paints a general picture of the Soviet Union, from what life was like for the common people to the general history of the various regimes that held power and important events in the country. I know I'm already asking a lot but most importantly I would like a book that doesn't read like a textbook, but has some character and soul to it. And also, preferably not textbook sized (ie not over 500 pages). I'm not entirely sure such a book exists, or perhaps multiple books covering different parts of the USSR would be better.
edit: also part of my reason for asking this question here is I'm looking for an unbiased source. It's sort of hard to cut through the noise and bias when so many people are extremely biased against or for the USSR.
I'd you're interested in a short book that looks at Soviet history and society from a variety of angles and themes, a good starting place would be Stephen Lovell's The Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction from the Oxford University Press series. Sheila Fizpatrick's Everyday Stalinism meets your page length requirements and looks at aspects of city life in the 1930s. Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time is based on oral accounts from the last years of the Soviet Union.
Ronald Grigor Suny's The Soviet Experiment is the closest thing to a book that will cover all social and political events from beginning to end, but it's used as a textbook and I think exceeds the page requirement (Suny is a great historian and a good writer though, his work isn't dry). Orlando Figes' Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 meets the page max and is a good narrative history (Robert Service's A History of Twentieth-century Russia covers the same material in the same manner).