Seventeen Moments in Soviet History
by James von Geldern and Lewis Siegelbaum · Michigan State University / Macalester College
A primary-source archive of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991, organised around seventeen selected years. Holds over 600 translated texts, 1,400 images, 270 video clips, music and scholar-written essays on more than 200 subjects.
More resources on History of Russia & the Soviet Union
New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies
Hour-long interviews in which academic authors discuss newly published research on Russian, Soviet and Eurasian history with another scholar in the field. Running since 2011 on the New Books Network, with several episodes a week.
Gulag: A History
A history of the Soviet forced-labour camp system from its origins after 1917 through its Stalin-era expansion to its dismantling, built from newly opened archives and survivor testimony on arrest, transport, camp economics and release. Covers a pillar of Soviet history that survey books compress into a chapter, and does it from documents rather than memoir alone.
Stalin, Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
The first volume of a biography covering Stalin's birth to 1928, using post-Soviet archives to place his rise inside the geopolitics of the late empire, the First World War, the revolution and the construction of the Soviet state. Reads the Stalin era as state formation rather than personality, which separates it from the popular Stalin books.
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924
A narrative of the revolutionary period from the 1891 famine to Lenin's death, following the collapse of tsarism and the Bolshevik seizure of power through the lives of individual participants alongside the political and military events.
Russia and the Russians: A History (2nd Edition)
A single-volume survey from Kievan Rus through Mongol overlordship, Muscovy, the tsarist empire, revolution and the Soviet era to the Putin and Medvedev presidencies, organised around how state-building shaped and strained Russian society.
Russian History: from Lenin to Putin
Thirty-three video lectures by Peter Kenez tracing Russia from 1917 to the present: revolution, civil war, Stalinism, the Second World War, the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, collapse and the Putin period. Gives a beginner the twentieth-century spine in roughly twelve hours from a career Soviet historian. Free to audit.