On the Soviet Experiment
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. pp. 540. Paperback.
This is a sweeping history of the Soviet Union, from its origins to approximately 1996 (there is an updated edition that brings the reader nearly up to the present, but that’s not the version I saw). The book emphasizes the early USSR and the Stalinist period, giving each of these portions around 40% of the text each (especially the Revolution itself), whereas the USSR after 1953 is only given ~20% of the space. Although I understand these decisions, I wish more space was given to the later period, as this was the portion I was most interested in.
Suny goes into a great deal of detail on early political decisions made by early revolutionaries and leaders during the first decade of the Soviet Union, but as the narrative gets closer to the present, less detail is given and the book becomes more broad sweeps (which is actually what I expected from the whole text). Nevertheless, I’m glad I read this because it allows me to better place other books on the USSR, both temporally and thematically.
Recommend