The best books on The Soviet Union

Coming into this interview, I was aware that some people, including my children, weren’t born when the Soviet Union ended. Could you maybe start with a quick summary of what the Soviet Union was?

The Soviet Union was the country that was set up after the Bolshevik Revolution—which was a communist revolution in 1917—and it replaced the Russian Empire. Now, the Soviet Union didn’t think of itself as an empire, but it included not only Russia but many of the territories that had been in the Russian Empire—such as Ukraine, Georgia, and so on.

So it was set up by revolution with the intention of establishing socialism—whatever that means—but it was certainly something established by the state. The state was going to help do this from above.

The first leader was Vladimir Lenin, who died quite quickly. The revolution was in 1917, and he died in 1924. Then there was a succession struggle. The person who succeeded him was Joseph Stalin. Stalin stepped forward, essentially with more revolution.

So you’d had a political revolution and a transfer of power after 1917, but that hadn’t changed the basic economic setup. It hadn’t nationalized everything, and it hadn’t collectivised agriculture. That’s what Stalin set out to do. There was wide-scale disruption in those territories as rapid modernization went forth. There was the Terror in the 1930s.

Then came another tremendous upheaval, which was the Second World War. The Soviet Union was brought into that by Germany invading in June 1941. To the surprise of many, the Soviet regime was not overthrown, and they basically won. In 1945, the Soviet Union had half a century or so to go, and that victory in the Second World War became a sort of foundation myth comparable with the revolution.

Now, after Stalin came Khrushchev and Brezhnev. There was a bit of criticism of the Terror and the Stalin period. There was a backing off from terror and a normalization. By the time you get to Brezhnev, it’s a very boring society, not at all revolutionary. It’s a welfare state, but not very highly capitalized. So it’s a poor welfare state. It’s not equal, despite the socialist hopes of that, but it’s more equal, and the disparities of income are less than in most Western societies.

But, as I said, it’s boring and it’s not progressing economically as hoped. That’s when Mikhail Gorbachev comes in with the notion of perestroika. It’s going to be reform from above, democratic reform, but also to improve the economy. That reform has disastrous consequences, namely, that the Soviet Union falls apart. What had been its constituent national republics depart—Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, you name it—leaving Russia as the core. That happened in 1991, and that’s the end of the Soviet Union—a big surprise to most of the people living there, and indeed to the rest of the world.

I’ve read two excellent books on the Soviet Union that you’ve written in the past couple of years. Could you tell us a bit about your books and how you’ve approached the history of the Soviet Union?

If I’m going to tell the history of my histories, it’s quite long, because my first book was published in 1970! But to summarize, I started off being a cultural and institutional historian. Then I moved into social history: I got interested in the view from below. I did a book on Everyday Stalinism, which was, to me, very interesting, to see the patterns of life. It was based on the 1930s, but could be applied more broadly. After a while, I did a bit of political history too, On Stalin’s Team—Stalin as seen through the eyes of his politburo.

I also wrote a book called Tear Off the Masks! which is about how people adapt to revolutionary change. One of the things that happens when you have a revolution—and that applies both to 1917 and 1991—is that you need to present yourself in a different way. You develop a different sense of yourself, a slightly new self in this new situation. So I wrote about that.

More recently, I’ve written about Soviet displaced persons, people left outside the Soviet Union, who settled elsewhere after the Second World War.

Then, in 2020 or so, I was commissioned to write The Shortest History of the Soviet Union. That was really interesting to me, because I had been around for quite a lot of the Soviet Union, maybe about half. I first went there as a graduate exchange student in 1966.

Wow.

The Soviet Union had then collapsed in 1991, and thirty years later seemed a good time to look back at it and reflect on, ‘What was all that about?’

That was a big challenge, I can tell you. Not only did I have to get in all the important things that happened in the Soviet Union, but because of the way it collapsed into constituent national republics—which became countries like Ukraine and Georgia—I had to run that theme through the whole book. There are 16 different republics!

The final thing to say about writing The Shortest of the Soviet Union is that, as historians, when we offer a historical explanation, we tend to suggest that things had to happen. Whether or not we think that or not, we imply that things are inevitable, because we’re giving this great explanation of how they happened. With the collapse in 1991, you had something that surprised everybody, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. That is prima facie evidence that contingency played a big part in the collapse. So I was examining the question, ‘Can you explain to readers why something happened without implying—which, in this case, I felt would be really quite wrong—that it had to happen and no way it couldn’t happen the way it did?’

Then your most recent book is The Death of Stalin. It’s a really nice way of approaching the history of the Soviet Union as well, because he was such a key figure. Reading about his death actually teaches you quite a lot about what came before and what came after, in fewer than 100 pages.

Yes, that was an even shorter book. It’s part of a series where you take some big event, and look at the consequences that flow from it. That was interesting because, first of all, I like the death scene. We have eyewitness reports about it, which we might get to later. But we also have a recent film by Armando Iannucci called The Death of Stalin, which covers the ground of my second chapter. I found it fun to play off that.

Then I have a look at how the death played internally. What are the reactions to it? How did it play externally? What does the West think about it?

The chapter that was maybe the most fun to write was about Stalin’s ghost. What are the arguments about the legacy of Stalin and Stalinism? This became a central political issue: how much do we want to keep of Stalinism, and how much do we want to get rid of?

Let’s turn to the five books you’re recommending. What were your criteria for picking them? Are these your favourite books on the Soviet Union?

No, probably if I were to pick my favorites, it would be a slightly different list. Basically, I picked books that are either always in my mind as representing a particular take or aspect of the Soviet Union, or else that I’m often going back to. I was not going for historical work. I was looking for memoirs and literature, and I wanted things that had a very distinctive voice. I was also trying to get a range of voices: I didn’t want them all to have the same kinds of insights on the Soviet Union.

Well, it’s a wonderful list. First up is The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in English in 1974. I read an abridged version—it was still over 500 pages—and I couldn’t stop reading it. It’s such a detailed account, isn’t it?

It is, and it’s relentless. That’s one of its qualities. It piles detail on detail on detail, and all with this very highly charged and often sarcastic tone. I was, of course, extremely interested in the content when it first came out, but I was also tremendously struck by the way it was written. I remember giving a paper called “The Humour of Solzhenitsyn.” It was not thought to be funny at the time‚ or now, probably, but I was very struck by it. It’s in that tradition of Marxist-Leninist polemic, which is odd to say about Solzhenitsyn, because one sees him as an anti-communist. But his style of polemic is one that runs, to my mind, through Marx and through Lenin. Then there was a loyal opposition journal called Novy Mir (New World) in the 50s and 60s that used the same kind of tremendous, relentless sarcasm. Lots of words, always very long—longer than you would think you could bear to read—and, yet, you do read it.

With Solzhenitsyn, there is also the informational content. By now, much of that has been absorbed by us; it’s not got the surprise element. But he calls it ‘an experiment in literary investigation,’ and it is a remarkable work of literature. I’m not saying its factual content isn’t excellent, but other people have taken it up and explored it in more detail, archives have emerged, and all of that. But nothing is going to replace the sheer flair and vigour of The Gulag Archipelago as a literary work.

It’s true we know Gulag existed, but I was still shocked at the scale of it. Part I of the book is called “The Prison Industry” and, in my edition, there’s a map at the beginning showing the camps. They were everywhere.

Yes, that’s true. He has this wonderful image of a parallel continent, this ‘archipelago’, which is unseen until you accidentally cross into it and you realize it’s there. That’s one of the remarkable aspects.

He has a wonderfully systematic and obsessive way of setting it all out. There’s “Arrest.” We get a long discussion of arrest, including the description of his own, which is fascinating. He insists on being treated as an officer—in other words, more important than the other people arrested—something that, later on, he’s quite ashamed of. Then there’s a chapter headed “First Cell, First Love.” We go through it all in vivid detail, as experienced by him, but also as gathered by him from the memoirs of all those people he interviewed and solicited manuscripts from.

So we go through all the steps, because the journey itself takes a long time: you get arrested, you go to prison, you get interrogated, you get sent to Gulag. Then you’re in Gulag. You’re given some work, and you try to find a place in Gulag where you can survive. Then there’s the trip back when you finally get released. That’s not a big part of this book, but he has wonderful descriptions of it in his novel, Cancer Ward. 

One thing I was curious about after reading it was—to what extent was the Soviet economy being driven by prison labor?

In a way, that’s a question for economists, but by the late 1940s, as the numbers in Gulag got so big, it was decided that it was far too expensive for the output. On the face of it, convict labor is really cheap, but actually it isn’t, because of the maintenance cost and the very low productivity. That was part of the rationale for really cutting back Gulag after Stalin’s death.

Prison labor was very useful in some areas, like timber, but I don’t think it was driving the economy.

Okay, next up is the memoir by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which I didn’t even know existed. I started reading it and found it completely fascinating, because his life spans all these major world events. Like the chapter when von Ribbentrop arrives in Moscow in 1939. And they’re all like, ‘Why is he here?’

Khrushchev has such an original voice. He talked it all into a tape recorder. I have heard some of those tapes, because when I was at Columbia University in the 1970s, they’d already published the volume that I recommended to you, but were doing more volumes from the very extensive tapes that he’d recorded and smuggled out. So I could hear his voice on the other side of my office wall booming away.

The informational content is extraordinary because it’s very rare that you get a national leader who gives you, with such immediacy and in such detail, his take on a whole range of things. There’s the Stalin period, his own dealings with the West, his own policies, his relationships with colleagues, etc.

It’s often unexpected, because Khrushchev really was a non-standard kind of person. He has his own take on things, and he doesn’t feel a great need to wrap things up and smooth things down. That wasn’t his style. And so you get an awful lot of unvarnished observations and reactions, which I find fascinating, in that book.

What were the circumstances of his recording it? Was this after he’d been ousted by Brezhnev?

Yes, he’d been ousted in the Politburo by due process: he’d been voted out. Brezhnev was the organizer and successor. There was a bit of a tradition that when Russian politicians were forced out, they were also forced out of life, or at least sent very far away from the capital.

That didn’t happen with Khrushchev. As he put it when interviewed, he was living the usual life of a pensioner in Moscow. But he was doing what not a whole lot of pensioners do—which is recording his memoirs of high politics and then smuggling them out to the West.

One of the funny things about Khrushchev in his retirement is that, although he was a non-intellectual and he’d never really liked intellectuals, he met some when he was in disgrace. People who worried about who they met with didn’t go and see him, but a few intellectuals didn’t care. Khrushchev got very friendly with, for example, the artist Ernst Neizvestny, who came to make a bust of him. That was an eye-opener to Khrushchev. He’d had his run-ins with intellectuals, trying to discipline them and so on, but now he gets to know them and hears what they think. Khrushchev puts it all down, his reactions. I found that fascinating.

Let’s turn to the next book you’ve chosen, which is a novella called The Trial Begins by Andrei Sinyavsky. Tell me more.

Andrei Sinyavsky was a writer in the post-Stalin period. He was actually a friend of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana (who we’ll come to: there are some internal connections in my choices). Sinyavsky got in trouble for his writing and was put on trial in the mid-1960s for publishing abroad without permission.

The novella is set just before Stalin’s death. It’s at the height of the Stalin cult, which is all around. It’s fascinating, but it’s quite an unpleasant piece of work. All the adult characters are corrupt in their different ways. There’s a prosecutor and his horrible, on-the-make wife, Marina. Then there are two young people who take communism seriously, but the trouble is that they then draw conclusions that are not acceptable to the regime. One of them, Seryozha, is the son of the prosecutor and finds himself arrested and under interrogation for his views, which he tries to explain.

There is a magnificent moment in the book when the prosecutor is talking to the young, idealistic boy, and Seryozha refers to himself as being under investigation. And the prosecutor takes him to the window and says, ‘Look out there, those people on the street. Those are the people who are under investigation. You have been convicted.’ The whole point is that the judicial process is a farce.

So I chose this book in part because it fits with my theme of the death of Stalin, but also because of this quality of… it alienates you. The language is spare. You read it and you have difficulty identifying with anybody because, other than the two young people, they’re all so unpleasant.

This is a considerable literary work, but not one that you would take to bed and read for a pleasant experience. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that if I’m recommending it for people to read!

Is it about the Doctors’ Plot specifically?

The Doctors’ Plot is in there. It’s hard to reproduce the convoluted plot, but the prosecutor’s wife, Marina, has gotten pregnant when she didn’t want to. She only cares about her looks and her attractiveness, so she has an illegal abortion. Simultaneously, the prosecutor is prosecuting a doctor, who is strongly identified as Jewish in the way he’s presented, for performing illegal abortions. It doesn’t say, ‘This is about the Doctors’ Plot,’ but we have a Jewish doctor accused of doing this thing that, if not the prosecutor, at least his wife has connived in. So that’s how it fits in.

Sinyavsky published the book abroad under a pseudonym, so it took a while for people to figure out who wrote it and for him to be punished. Is it this book that turned him into a dissident?

Sinyavsky wasn’t identified as a dissident. He was a member of the Union of Soviet Writers and was working in the Institute of World Literature. But reading what he writes, you cannot feel that he was a happy Soviet citizen who was looking forward to the advent of socialism. No, you must feel that, privately, he wasn’t too happy.

He probably got angrier and more hostile as a result of being prosecuted. But I think he had to have been, at the very least, a very cynical member of the Union of Writers. That’s a privileged status. It both acknowledges you’re a writer and admits you to elite privileges.

Let’s move on to the fourth book you’ve recommended, Twenty Letters to a Friend. This is the memoir of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter.  Do you want to say a bit about the book but also about her, because maybe not everybody knows her trajectory?

Stalin had three children, but the one he was closest to when she was young was Svetlana. She was born in 1926, so there are many early pictures of her with him and other members of the Politburo, out at the dacha, and so on. Her mother died by her own hand—evidently after a quarrel with Stalin—when Svetlana was about six.

The Letters are written after Stalin’s death, but also after Khrushchev’s dethronement of Stalin in 1956, when he criticized the excesses of Stalinism. Svetlana herself shares these criticisms. But she still loves her father, though she was estranged from him in adult life, mainly. For her, he’s a very problematic father, but also a beloved one. So she’s trying to deal with both a father who was Stalin and a mother who was very severe, not a cuddly mother at all, but is idealized by Svetlana after she dies. She becomes a saint, basically, in Svetlana’s memory, and everything goes wrong when she dies. If only she hadn’t died then everything would be okay, is the general sense you get from this memoir.

In terms of Svetlana’s own trajectory and what led to her writing such a book, she had a fairly tumultuous love life and was connected with a number of men. Sometimes she married them, sometimes not. One of them, in the 1960s, was an Indian communist who was living in Moscow. He got sick and after he died, she asked permission to take his ashes to Delhi for burial. After a certain amount of toing and froing, she was allowed to go. While she was there, evidently on an impulse, she went to the American embassy and defected. She then gave press conferences saying that things were not great in the Soviet Union, and she wanted to live in the United States. That was a tremendous scandal within the Soviet Union, as you can imagine, Stalin’s daughter defecting.

Now, she didn’t stay defected. After 17 years, she re-defected and came back to the Soviet Union, where her adult children had been left. This didn’t work out either, and she defected again. This makes her sound like a total fool, which she was not. But she was obviously an impulsive person who made some bad choices.

Anyway, this book was written after the first defection. It was her arrival present to the West, as it were.

It’s fascinating to read it. It was a New York Times bestseller in 1967. How interested in it were people when it came out?

It was a big sensation here, too. It was read out on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. It was great propaganda stuff for the West. And while Khrushchev says he didn’t read it, he must have heard excerpts of it. There are some parts of his memoir—notably the death of Stalin—where he and Svetlana are so much on the same page that I can’t help thinking that he, to some degree, remembered her account as he was writing.

So it was a bestseller in the West. It was not a bestseller in the Soviet Union, because it wasn’t available—legally, at any rate. But the whole thing was a sensation on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

She wanted to be a writer, is that right? She had a literary sensibility…

Yes, she was a literary scholar. That was her education. She was in the same institute as Sinyavsky and even had an affair with him, at one point. He was senior to her. I think he was her head of department, or something like that. Being a literary scholar doesn’t necessarily mean you want to write, but it does mean that you’re keenly interested in literature.

It’s hard to imagine a childhood being the daughter of Stalin—and amazing that you can actually read a book written from her point of view. 

Another interesting thing to mention about Svetlana is that she and a number of the other Politburo children formed a sort of tribe. Most of them grew up in the immediate post-war period, and their favorite thing to study at university was American Studies. She had studied Hemingway, and they were all in love with American cinema.

Lots of references to Hamlet, too, in her memoir.

Yes.

Let’s turn to your final choice, A Precocious Autobiography by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Could you maybe start by saying a bit about him and why he was writing an account of his life ahead of time?

Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a poet and the equivalent of a rock star in the 1960s in the Soviet Union. When Khrushchev made his qualified denunciation of Stalin in 1956, it was a bit like perestroika decades later, a moment of very excited discussion about ‘What kind of society are we?’, ‘Where should we be going?’ And, specifically, ‘Let’s purify communism.’ In other words, communism is still a great idea, but there have been failures of implementation. We’re ashamed about that, and we want to make it better. Yevtushenko is of the generation that wants to make it better.

He’s from a curious background. He was born in Siberia, but brought to Moscow as a child. His parents separated. His mother went off to the war, and he describes himself as an eight year old living on his own in Moscow. So he grew up very rough and tumble. He was always like that, but he had this passionate wish to be a poet, which, in Western terms, is a little bit strange. But in Russian terms, a poet is a tremendously attractive thing to be.

Yevtushenko was the kind of poet who read out poems calling for people to be truthful and sincere. He read them with great emotion, and big crowds started to gather. He ended up reading his poetry in football stadiums.

It was in this context of being a rock-star poet that he wrote his autobiography at a very young age. It gives fascinating details about his life, which is not quite what you would have expected it to be. But it’s also a manifesto in favor of what would later be called ‘socialism with a human face.’ There are a lot of statements in the book saying, ‘I will never hide the wrong things that have gone on here, but I’m still an absolute patriot of the Soviet Union, and I believe in the socialist future’—as no doubt at the time, and perhaps always, he did.

The memoir is a kind of monument to a particular way of thinking that didn’t survive the Khrushchev period. When Khrushchev was overthrown, and you get into the Brezhnev period, there’s a backing off from that. It’s not a repudiation of the reform impulse, but more of a ‘Let’s not get too excited about this thing.’

What period is he covering in the autobiography?

He was born in the 1930s, and it was published in the early 60s—so he gets to what was then the present.

So you chose it as a snapshot into that worldview?

Yes. What is so striking is the conviction with which he believes that it can all be reformed, and the excitement. There is this “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” feeling which was characteristic of that period of the thaw, the Khrushchev thaw. It was also a characteristic of perestroika, and had there been a perestroika memoir of similar power, I could have chosen that. But I couldn’t think of one that fitted—perhaps it will show up at some future time.

I’m struck by the importance of literary culture in the Soviet Union. Literature seems so central to politics.

Well, they took it so seriously. The intelligentsia, of course, took it seriously, but the regime took it seriously as well. In general, the regime was very wedded to high culture. The aspect of that we most often notice is that they want to control it, so they would discipline people when they stepped out of line.

But the other part of it is they really wanted to bring high culture to the masses, and they did that relentlessly for 70 years. Literature is the very quintessence of high culture in the Russian approach. That’s why you can have a street kid like Yevtushenko, who thinks it would be a great thing to be a poet.

At the time of your first trip to the Soviet Union, was Brezhnev already in power? Tell me a bit about how you first came to the Soviet Union in 1966.

Yes, Khrushchev had been pushed out. I decided I had to go there because some people said the Soviet Union was like this, and other people said it was like that. I thought, ‘If I’m going to work on it, I have to go and see for myself.’ I wrote about this in my memoir, A Spy in the Archives. It was not easy because of the Iron Curtain. But I finally got myself on a British exchange, and I had the great good fortune to become friendly with people in the circle of the in-system reform journal I referred to, Novy Mir, from which I learned an enormous amount.

But the atmosphere that I arrived in was not that atmosphere of hope. It was 5-7 years after that, and everybody remembered that they had had that feeling of hope and excitement, and they didn’t have it anymore. They were probably prone to excessive pessimism about how far Brezhnev was going to go back to Stalinism. He wasn’t really going to go back to Stalinism, but they had the feeling he was.

So the air had really been let out of that balloon before I arrived. But it was totally fascinating to be there. Before I went, I had read the Western, Sovietological accounts, which basically said, ‘This is a very bad, tyrannical, totalitarian state.’ Then there was the other line that went, ‘No, this is a socialist state in the making.’ When I arrived, I remember my first reaction was, ‘This is the Third World.’ In other words, it’s neither of those things. It’s a backward place trying to become more modern. They didn’t have plastics yet: when you bought something in a shop, they just put it on a piece of butcher paper, and you took it away in your string bag. In many ways, what came across was an aspiration that hadn’t been realized. Things were getting better materially in the Soviet Union, but they were coming from a very low base, and my goodness, they had a long way to go.

The other fascinating thing was that we had been told that as British students, nobody would speak to us because they thought we were spies. We were told we would have to accept that we were going to have a lonely year. Nobody had a lonely year. Everybody made really close friends in the Russian manner. Russian friends support each other totally. Almost all of us found a group and had a lovely time. That, of course, had nothing to do with the regime or approval of the regime, but had to do with the way Russians conduct their social lives.

Were you just in Moscow, or were you able to travel around?

Yes, I lived in the big Moscow University dormitory. It’s one of those wedding cake buildings in Moscow near the river.

Travel was difficult. We were not allowed to go more than 40 kilometers out of the center of Moscow. You could apply for what was called the ‘komandirovka’—a work trip to somewhere. I went to Leningrad, for example. But Moscow was my world.

And did you go to dachas (that Svetlana Stalina describes so nostalgically in her memoir) with friends?

Later, in the 1980s, yes, but the first 15 years I was there, it was difficult to go to dachas. Many of the close friends we had did have dachas. But to actually take us there was iffy. Most people didn’t have cars yet. When they invited us over, it was to their crowded, sometimes communal apartments in Moscow.