Marx(ism) the Russian Revolution and the USSR
Explore the definitive reading list on Marxism, the Russian Revolution, and the USSR. Featuring seminal works like Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror*, Anne Applebaum's *Gulag*, and Solzhenitsyn's *August 1914*, this curated collection dives deep into Soviet history, communism, and its brutal legacy. Discover essential books on the Gulag, Stalinist terror, and revolutionary fiction.
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Cancer Ward
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the "cancerous" Soviet police state. --Publisher
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August 1914
by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitď¸ s︡yn
Expanded by Solzhenitsyn to almost twice the length of the original edition, this novel reconstructs the assassination of tsarist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolupin and the outbreak of the First World War
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Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler
An aging revolutionary is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. He recalls a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a totalitarian government.
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Gulag
by Anne Applebaum
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. “A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.
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The Great Terror
by Robert Conquest
"The definitive work on Stalin's purges, the author's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Provides accounts of on everything form the three great 'Moscow Trials' to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, on life in the labor camps, and many other key matters. On the fortieth anniversary of thew first edition, it is remarkable how many of the most disturbing conclusions have born up under the light of fresh evidence." --
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The Harvest of Sorrow
by Robert Conquest
Chronicles the events of 1929 to 1933 in the Ukraine when Stalin's Soviet Communist Party killed or deported millions of peasants; abolished privately held land and forced the remaining peasantry into "collective" farms; and inflicted impossible grain quotas on the peasants that resulted in mass starvation.