To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko, 2024
In this panoramic new history of the conflict that defined the postwar era, Sergey Radchenko provides an unprecedented deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the US and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution.
The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction by Alan Barenberg
A vast system of prisons, camps, and exile settlements, the Gulag was one of the defining attributes of the Stalinist Soviet Union and one of the most heinous examples of mass incarceration in the twentieth century, combining the functions of a standard prison system with the goal of isolating and punishing alleged enemies of the Soviet regime.
A brilliant and bitingly funny collection of stories united around a single, crumbling apartment building in Ukraine.
A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva's ingeniously intertwined narratives, nine stories which span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union.
I've recently been cataloguing the papers of Frank Wise, a Labour MP, ILP member, and civil servant who worked as Director of the Soviet Union's Trade Office Centrosoyuz in the 1920s.
Amongst his papers is this photograph of an unidentified man (it isn't Frank!)