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The story of an empire made and an empire undone by one of the world’s leading authorities on Soviet Russia.
Soviet Russia arrived in the world accidentally and departed unexpectedly. More than a hundred years after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics.
Here is an irresistible entree to a sweeping history. From revolution and Lenin to Stalin’s Great Terror, from World War II to Gorbachev’s perestroika policies, this is a lively, authoritative distillation of seventy-five years of communist rule and the collapse of an empire.
Sheila Fitzpatrick shows us the fate of non-Russian republics often left out of discussions of Soviet history, provides vivid portraits of key Soviet figures and traces the aftermath of the regime’s unexpected fall, including the rise of Vladimir Putin, a product of the Soviet system but not altogether a Soviet nostalgic.
The Shortest History of the Soviet Union is a small masterpiece, replete with telling detail and peppered with some very black humour.
Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick
Paperback Published 1 March 2022 256 pages
‘Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Shortest History of the Soviet Union comes as close to a miracle as an academic book can. It is written for the general public that wants a clear overview of the topic, but offers at the same time a concise and well-balanced synthesis of decades of Soviet Studies. It is an immensely readable overview of the entire history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991, full of anecdotes and lively detail, but also meeting the highest academic standards. It avoids all extreme political passions, but its pages are nonetheless permeated by a gut moral sense. When things get really horrible, only black comedy can adequately render the situation – every pathetic sense of tragedy is already a fake. In this vein, I would add that if I were a Stalinist, I would have said that those who ignore this book deserve … if not a Gulag sentence, then at least a year or two of harsh re-education!’—Slavoj Žižek