Ivan's War: The Red Army 1939-1945 by Catherine Merridale (Faber, 2005)A magnificent book on the Soviet experiment and the twisted nature of Stalin's propaganda in which Merridale rescues the Red Army from accumulated myth and propaganda. Over a period of years she interviewed Red Army veterans, travelled to their battle sites and dredged documents from "sensitive" sources.
With imaginative empathy she recreates the lives of ordinary Russian soldiers. While many were reluctant to reveal their inner selves to a foreigner (and a woman at that), with admirable patience Merridale coaxes out stories of everyday fear, depression and desertion. In the course of her search for the "real Ivan" she found not the cast-iron stalwart of Stalinist myth, but a very human creature prone to drinking, belting out Kalinka Kala and devising anti-Stalinist burlesques.
Khruschchev: The Man and his Era by William Taubman (The Free Press, Simon & Schuster, 2003)
With its diligent archival research and narrative verve, this ranks as one of the finest books ever written on the Soviet Union and the man who bravely denounced Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. A scholarly, authoritative biography running to almost 900 pages, but with never a dull moment.
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2007)
A magnificent new history of life in the USSR between the Revolution of 1917 and Stalin's death in 1953. In pages of harrowing detail, Figes builds a picture of a time in Russia when the disappearance of innocent citizens was a fact of life. What did people really think and feel in the years of Stalin's rule? What traumas did they endure? An extraordinary labour of devotion and scholarship, that demands to be read by all who are interested in the totalitarian condition.