Books by Nikita Khrushchev
“Khrushchev has such an original voice. He talked it all into a tape recorder…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.” Read more...
The best books on The Soviet Union
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Historian
Interviews where books by Nikita Khrushchev were recommended
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1
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy -
2
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler -
3
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky -
4
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
by Vladimir Nabokov -
5
A Hero of Our Time
by Mikhail Lermontov & translator Vladimir Nabokov -
6
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
by Nikolai Leskov
Books by Russian Authors
Books by Russian Authors
From the Enlightenment onwards, Russian authors have produced a vast and influential literary canon, including historic epics, absurdist classics, and tortured reflections on the human condition. Russia’s political turmoil also led to the writing of many moving memoirs and political works that sought to find solutions in spite of censorship and, for some authors, exile.
The best books on The Soviet Union, recommended by Sheila Fitzpatrick
The Soviet Union was the world’s first communist country and lasted around seven decades. It played a key role in defeating Nazism in Europe and became a global superpower before collapsing unexpectedly in 1991. Sheila Fitzpatrick, a leading historian of the Soviet Union, recommends books that bring to life different aspects of it, from forced labour in Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey (GULAG) to the heady days of the Khrushchev thaw and including the memoir of Stalin’s beloved daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.
