--- title: History of Russia & the Soviet Union description: Russia's history runs from Kievan Rus through the tsars, revolution and Soviet rule to the present. You will learn its turning points and the historians who explain them. category: humanities subcategory: history difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/history-of-russia --- # History of Russia & the Soviet Union Russia's history runs from Kievan Rus through the tsars, revolution and Soviet rule to the present. You will learn its turning points and the historians who explain them. ## Available Resources 5 Books • 1 Courses • 1 Websites ## Podcasts ### 1. 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-books-in-russian-and-eurasian-studies/id422306010 **Tags:** russian-history, soviet-history, eurasian-studies, author-interviews, historiography ## Books ### 1. Gulag: A History **Author:** Anne Applebaum 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400034094?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** soviet-history, gulag, stalinism, forced-labor-camps, political-repression ### 2. Stalin, Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 **Author:** Stephen Kotkin 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. **Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143127861?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** joseph-stalin, soviet-history, russian-revolution, political-biography, soviet-state-formation ### 3. A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 **Author:** Orlando Figes 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. **Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/014024364X?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** russian-revolution, bolsheviks, russian-civil-war, fall-of-tsarism, social-history ### 4. Russia and the Russians: A History (2nd Edition) **Author:** Geoffrey Hosking 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674061950?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** russian-history, kievan-rus, tsarist-russia, soviet-history, state-building ### 5. Russia: A History **Author:** Gregory L. Freeze Oxford survey in which nine specialists trace Russia from Kievan Rus through Muscovy, the empire, revolution, and the Soviet collapse. Readers come away with a chronological framework and a sense of scholarly debate over each period. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192158996?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** russian-history, soviet-union, muscovy, russian-empire, kievan-rus ## Courses ### 1. Russian History: from Lenin to Putin **Author:** Peter Kenez 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. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/russian-history-lenin-putin **Tags:** russian-history, soviet-union, stalinism, cold-war, post-soviet-russia ## Websites ### 1. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History **Author:** James von Geldern and Lewis Siegelbaum 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://soviethistory.msu.edu/ **Tags:** soviet-history, primary-sources, soviet-culture, digital-archive, russian-history --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/history-of-russia