I’m American so the idea of the Soviet Union and socialism being in general being bad have been taught to me since I was born. I’m curious about the reality of the Soviet Union so does anyone have any recs that speak on both the good and the bad from a neutral perspective?
by jbearclaw12
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Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed
Socialism Betrayed by Roger Keegan
Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan
Stalin by Domenico Losurdo
You’re not going to find a neutral account on this, nor should you want one anyway. Anything that posits itself as “neutral” is almost certainly going to be anti-Communist and anti-Soviet, even if it presents itself in a dry, matter of fact style.
Read something by someone who’s open about their biases and provides thoughtful analysis based on extensive research.
All that said, I recommend the following:
*Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend* by Domenico Losurdo
*Blackshirts and Reds* by Michael Parenti
*Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union* by Vladislav M. Zubok
No impartial historian is going to have much to say “good” about the Soviet Union. Any historian who worked within the USSR would likely have been a tool of state propaganda. I highly recommend Lenin’s Tomb by David Remnick and that book’s bibliography. Whatever “good” you might propose came out of the USSR should be considered alongside the tens of millions of starved and murdered victims of the regime.
*The Gulag Archipelago* by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Eyewitness accounts of Soviet life from a Russian, written between 1958-68.