A History of Twentieth-Century Russia

Robert Service's A History of Twentieth-Century Russia is a good piece of narrative history. His perspective focuses on those at the top: the power struggles among the leaders and the policies they pursued. He spends less time discussing Russian society and the lives of typical people. That kind of analysis explains the functioning of the Soviet state, though it's less illuminating about how the Communist revolutionaries gained power in the first place.

He doesn't emphasize the horrors of the Russian Civil War, World War II, and Stalin's purges, which seems a little odd but keeps the book from being depressing to read. I was most interested to learn how people like Stalin and Gorbachev came to power, topics that were covered in great detail. It's a worthwhile history, though the big picture was sometimes lost in all the details. Note that an updated version of the book, A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin, was published several months ago.