Diane P. Koenker

University of Illinois Department of History

Fall 1997

Under reconstruction in September 2002

Preliminary Examination Reading List in Post-1917 Russian and Soviet History


The following is a reasonable although not exhaustive list of works that can provide a good coverage of the history of Russia and the Soviet Union after 1917. Books marked with an asterisk (*) are especially helpful for those preparing minor fields. The list does not include useful novels, memoirs, and other primary sources, and students are encouraged to obtain a copy of the syllabus for History 328, which does include these items.


1. General

Black, Cyril E., ed., The Transformation of Russian Society, 1967.
Cohen, Stephen F., Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917, 1985.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, History (Short Course), 1976 (1939).
Nation, Craig, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1992.
*Nove, Alec, An Economic History of the USSR, 1969.
Schapiro, Leonard, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1971 (2d ed.)

2. Social and Economic

*Bailes, Kendall, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, 1978.
Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union, 1967.
Buckley, Mary, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union, 1989.
Clements, Barbara Evans, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds., Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, and Transformation, 1991.
Edmondson, Linda, ed., Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1992.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934, 1979.
Gitelman, Zvi Y., Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 1972.
*Goldman, Wendy Z., Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936, 1993.
Lapidus, Gail Warshovsky, Women in Soviet Society, 1978.
*Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia, 1985.
Olcott, Martha Brill, The Kazakhs, 1987.
Rorlich, Azade-Ayse, The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience, 1986.
*Siegelbaum, Lewis H., and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity, 1994.
Stites, Richard, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930, 1978.
Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1988.

3. Cultural and intellectual

Boym, Svetlana, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia , 1994.
Brown, Edward J., Russian Literature since the Revolution (1982, rev. ed.)
*Clark, Katerina, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, 1995.
Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 1985.
Curtiss, J.S., The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950, 1965.
Dunham, Vera, In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, 1976.
*Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia, 1992.
Graham, Loren, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1974 (1966).
Heer, Nancy Whittier, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, 1971.
Gleason, Abbott, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites, eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, 1985.
Gray, Camilla, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, 1962.
Joravsky, David, The Lysenko Affair, 1970.
Kenez, Peter, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953, 1992.
Rosenberg, William G., ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, 1984.
*Slezkine, Yuri, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, 1994.
*Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, 1985.
Stites, Richard, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900, 1992.
Trotsky, Leon, Literature and Revolution, 1957.
*Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life, 1973.
Vucinich, Alexander, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Science of the USSR (1917-1970), 1984.

4. Political

Boffa, Giuseppe, The Stalin Phenomenon, 1992.
*Bukharin, N.I., and E. O. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, 1969 (1922)
*Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1973.
Clements, Barbara, Bolshevik Women, 1997.
*Daniels, Robert V., The Conscience of the Revolution, 1960.
Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Armed
Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929, 1959.
Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940, 1963.
*Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin, 1966.
Fainsod, Merle, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, 1958.
Farnsworth, Beatrice, Alexandra Kollontai, 1980.
Harding, Neil, Leninism 1996.
*Tucker, Robert C., Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929, 1973.
Tucker, Robert C., Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1929-1941, 1990.
*Tucker, Robert C., ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, 1977.

5. Revolution, Civil War, and NEP

*Carr, E. H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 (3 vols.), 1950-53.
Carr, E. H., The Interregnum, 1954.
Carr, E. H., Socialism in One Country (3 vols.), 1958-64.
Carr, E. H. with R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy (3 vols.), 1969-78.
Carrere d'Encausse, Helene, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917-1930 , 1992.
Chamberlin, William H., The Russian Revolution, (2 vols.) 1935.
Danilov, Victor P., Rural Russia under the New Regime, 1988.
Erlich, Alexander, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928, 1960.
Figes, Orlando, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917-1921), 1989.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP, 1991.
Getzler, Israel, Kronstadt, 1917-1921: Fate of a Soviet Democracy, 1983.
Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917, 1981.
Hovanissian, Richard, Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1967.
Jacobson, Jon, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, 1994.
Kenez, Peter, The Birth of the Soviet Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilizatio, 1917-1930, 1985.
Kerensky, Alexander, Russia and History's Turning Point, 1965.
Koenker, Diane P., William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War, 1989.
*Koenker, Diane, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, 1981.
Mally, Lynn, Culture of the Future: The Proletcult Movement in Revolutionary Russia, 1990.
Massell, Gregory J., The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929, 1974.
*Mawdsley, Evan, The Russian Civil War, 1987.
McAuley, Mary, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd 1917-1922, 1991.
*Pipes, Richard, The Formation of the Soviet Union, 1968.
*Rabinowitch, Alexander, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, 1976.
Raleigh, Donald J., Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov, 1986.
Rosenberg, William G., Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 1974.
*Siegelbaum, Lewis H., Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929, 1992.
Smith, S. A., Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1983.
Sukhanov, N.N., The Russian Revolution 1917, 1984 (1922).
Trotsky, Leon, The History of the Russian Revolution, 1980 (1935)
Ward, Chris, Russia's Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy: Shop Floor Culture and State Policy 1921-1929, 1990.
Wildman, Allan K., The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols., 1980, 1987.


6. Stalin period (1929-1953)

Barber, John, and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II, 1991.
*Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror, 1968 (rev ed 1990).
Davies, R.W., The Industrialization of Soviet Russia, (2 vols.), 1979.
Davies, R.W., The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-30, 1980.
Dunmore, Timothy, Stalin's Command Economy, 1980.
Erickson, John, The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin's War with Germany, 1984 (1976)
*Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization, 1994.
Getty, J. Arch, and Roberta Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror
Holloway, David, Stalin and the Bomb, 1994.
*Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, 1995.
Kuromiya, Hiroaki, Stalin's Industrialization: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932, 1988.
*Lewin, Moshe, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, 1968.
Medvedev, Roy, Let History Judge, 1973.
Siegelbaum, Lewis H., Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941, 1988.
Solomon, Peter H., Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin, 1996.
*Timashev, Nicholas, The Great Retreat, 1946.
Trotsky, Leon, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1937.
Viola, Lynne, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: ,Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance ,1995.
Werth, Alexander, Russia at War 1941-1945, 1964.

7. Post-Stalin

Aslund, Anders, Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform, rev. ed. 1992.
Breslauer, George W., Khrushchev and Brezhnev As Leaders, 1982.
Brown, Deming, Soviet Literature since Stalin, 1978.
*Carrere d'Encausse, Decline of an Empire: Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt, 1980.
Hosking, Geoffrey, Beyond Socialist Realism: Soviet Fiction since Ivan Denisovich, 1980.
Karklins, Rasma, Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below, 1985.
Lane, Christel, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society, the Soviet Case, 1981.
*Lewin, Moshe, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: An Historical Interpretation, 1988.
Lieven, Dominic, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Path to Democracy, 1992.
Marples, David, Ukraine under Perestroika, 1992.
Medvedev, Roy, and Zhores Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, 1978.
White, Stephen, After Gorbachev, 1993.