Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (New York: Doubleday, 2017) (From the book jacket: "In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization--in effect a second Russian revolution--which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief, the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately sought to kill them.").
Milan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Frederick A. Pra eger, 1957) ("It is the bureaucracy which formally uses, administers, and controls both nationalized and socialized property as well as the entire life of society. The role of the bureaucracy in society, i.e., monopolistic administration and control of national income and national goods, consigns it to a special privileged position. Social relations resemble state capitalism. The more so, because the carrying out of industrialization is effected not with the help of capitalists but with the help of the state machine. In fact, this privilege class performs that function, using the state machine as a cover and as an instrument." "Ownership is nothing other than the right of profit and control. If one defines class benefits by this right, the Communist states have seen, in the final analysis, the origin of a new form of ownership or of a new ruling and exploiting class." "In reality, the Communists were unable to act differently from any ruling class that preceded them. Believing that they were building a new and ideal society, they built it for themselves in the only way they could. Their revolution and their society do not appear either accidental or unnatural, but appear as a matter of course for a particular country and for prescribed periods of its development because of this, no matter how extensive and inhuman Communist tyranny has been, society. In the course of a certain period--as long as industrialization lasts--has to and is able to endure this tyranny. Furthermore, this tyranny no longer appears as something inevitable, but exclusively as an assurance of the depredations and privileges of a new class." "In contrast to earlier revolutions, the Communist revolution, conducted in the name of doing away with classes, has resulted in the most complete authority of any single class. Everything else is sham and an illusion. Id. at 35-36. "This new class, the bureaucracy, or more accurately the political bureaucracy, has all the characteristics of earlier ones as well as some new characteristics of it own. Its origin had its special characteristics also, even though in essence it was similar to the beginnings of other classes." Id. at 38).
Elaine Feinstein, A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetayeva (New York: Dutton, 1987).
Elaine Feinstein, Pushkin: A Biography (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1999).
Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing. On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until his death in 1953.").
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017) ("Alexander Dugin enjoyed a period of international fame of sorts as a Putin whisperer: for a couple of years some analysts and journalists believed that we was the mastermind behind Putin's wars. Dugin continued to insist that the had great influence but negligible power. Still, his star rose ever higher in unexpected ways. With the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the neo-Nazi movement know as the 'alt-right' gained public prominent, as did its leader Richard Spencer, an American married to Nina Kouprianova, a Russian woman who's served as Dugin's English translator and American promoter." Id. at 482.).
Julie Lekstrom Himes, Mikhail and Margarita: A Novel (New York: Europa Editions, 2017) ("History came late to Russia. Geography isolated her and isolation defined her. In the ninth century, pagan Vikings discovered her from the north; Muslim Khazars ruled her from the south. The Cyrillic alphabet, which was to craft her story, made its way across the Carpathian Mountains on the backs of Macedonian monks only in the winding years of the tenth century. Even nine centuries later, Pushkin and Tolstoy were yet inventing those words which in Russian did not exist: gesture and sympathy, impulse and imagination, individuality." Id. at 13.).
Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1942 (New York: Penguin Press, 2017) (This is the second volume in what may well be the definitive biography os Stalin.).
Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Burharin's Widow, introduction by Stephen F. Cohen, translated from the Russian by Gary Kern (New York & London: Norton, 1993).
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, translated from the Russian by Max Hayward, with an introduction by Clarence Brown (New York: Atheneum, 1970) ("People always clutch at straws, nobody wants to part with his illusions, and it is very difficult to look life in the face. To see things as they are demands a superhuman effort. There are those who want to be blind, but even among those who think they are not, how many are left who can really see? Or rather, who do not slightly distort what they see t keep their illusions and hopes alive?" Id. at 63. "I never hid the fact that I am Jewish, and I must say that among the ordinary people I have yet to encounter any anti-Semitism. In working-class families and among collective farmers I was always treated as one of them, without the least hint of what one found in the universities after the war--and now too, for that matter. It is always among the semi-educated easily take root. Anti-intellectual feelings are a greater threat than crude anti-Semitism as such, and they are rampant in all the overstaffed institutions where people are furiously defending their right to their ignorance. We gave them a Stalinist education and they have Stalinist diplomas. They naturally want to hang on to what they feel entitled to--where would they go otherwise?" Id. at 342.).
Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2017) ("The crazy twists an turns of the Russian Revolution should give us pause in drawing pat historical lessons form it. Far from an eschatological 'class struggle' borne along irresistibly by the Marxist dialectic, the events of 1917 were filled with might-have-beens and missed chances. The most critical mistake of the starts government was the decision to go to war in 1914, a decision warmly applauded by the Russian liberals and pan-Slavists but lamented by conservative monarchists. For this reason, it is hard to fault Nicholas II for refusing to take liberal advice during the war, to surrender power to ambitious politicians who had already shown poor judgment. Strange as it may seem to modern sensibilities that the tar preferred the counsel of the peanut faith healer Rasputin to that of the elected Duma leaders such as Rodzianko, the fact is that, had he listen to Rasputin instead of Rodianko in 1914, he night have died peacefully on his throne instead of being butchered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918." Id. at 345.).
Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s, where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. . . . [T]here is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous . . . ; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the 'Soviet experiment.' But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, other by the horrifying truths.").
Alec Nove, Stalinism and After (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975) ("The Renaissance passed Russia by. Until the nineteenth century Russian culture was as backward as the way of life of the bulk of her people. Hardly anything was written which can be read with pleasure today, Then with dramatic suddenness came the flowering of Russian literature, which made it one of the world's finest: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov. With them there came on the scene that most Russian of phenomena, the intelligentsia, Some of them were of the gentry, conscience-stricken at the sight of serfdom, privilege, oppression. Some rose from below. . . The intelligentsia combined in themselves a number of features: they were opposed to the Tsarist system, but this did not lead most of them to harbour any sympathy for Western liberalism. On the contrary, they disliked the 'merchant' culture of western Europe, and dreamt of finding some new Russian road. Some believed that the old Russian peasant communal traditions pointed the way, others like Lenin thought that Russian capitalism was destroying the old institutions . . ." Id. at 13.).
Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation From 1470 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2017) ("September11, 1854, became a day of humiliation for the Russian navy, later to be recast as a day of Russian glory and sacrifice. On that late summer day, the commanders o the Russian Black Sea Fleet were ordered to sink five battleships and two frigates in Sevastopol harbor, their home base. That was just the beginning. In August 1855, all the remaining Russian ships went to the bottom of the harbor. The Russian army soon left Sevastopol, marking the empire's defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-1856. "The Russian fleet was sunk because it turned out to be of little use in stopping the joint French-British-Ottoman invasion of the Crimea--sails were no match for the steam engines of the British and French battleships, and the empire had no steam-powered battleships on the Black Sea. On the day of the allied landing there in September 1854, there was no wind to fill the sails, and the Russian ships couldn't move. All that remained was to sink them in order to block the access of the allied fleet to Sevastopol harbor. To the embarrassment of the rulers of the empire and the amazement of future historians, the occupying powers got around the problem by building the first railroad in the Crimea, so that they could bring supplies from the port of Balaklava to the town of Sevastopol. "The peace treaty signed in Paris in 1856 was viewed in Russia as humiliation at the hands of the West. The conquerors of Paris in 1814, the Russians returned to that city forty years later to sign an arrangement that violated the territorial integrity of their empire. St. Petersburg was forced to abandon imperial possessions in the Caucasus and the Danube area, and eleven years later, the cash-strapped government sold Alaska to the United States, lacking the resources to defend it. It kept the Crimea but was banned from maintaining a fleet or fortifications on the Black Sea littoral. Even more significant was the empire's loss of face as a great power." Id. at 121-122.).
Elizabeth Pond, From the Yaroslavsky Station: Russia Perceived (New York: Universe Books, 1981).
Leon Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, translated from the Russian by Ronald Wilks, Anthony Briggs & David McDuff, with an Introduction by Anthony Briggs (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008).
Mikhail Zygar, The Empire Must Die: Russia's Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017) ("The tragedy of the early twentieth century is imprinted in Russia's cerebral cortex. Even a century later, the middle class unconsciously expects a recurrence. Russia in the early twenty-first century looks nothing like its early twentieth-century counterpart: society today is incomparably more educated and prosperous than hundred years ago. Nevertheless, the psychological trauma is still felt. The experience of the civil war and the Red Terror forces new generations of Russians to repeatedly ask themselves: Should I leave? Will it soon be too late? [] To this day, sections of Russian society continue to wage war on each other and on their historical predecessors. For the country as a whole, this is yet another tragedy. The cleansing of the intellectual and business life is eroding its future. Russia has never come to terms with its past; the historical traumas are still raw; the psychological hang-ups persists. Russian story is an illness. Russian history has made us all sick. I do not want to die for this illness." Id. at 518-519.).
