Reading Russia

On the topic of reading, the following sources (short and long) are informative of Russia today and very reflective of what we are studying:

The Economist - Smoke and mirrors

The BBC - The Putin Project

The New York Times - Now Comes the Tough Part

Two books that I am currently reading may well be of interest for your summer reading list. These are for the generalist, if you are a history teacher I suspect that none of this will be new, although the presentation is provocative.

The first is Niall Ferguson's - The War of the World

Part 1 of the book deals with Stalin's USSR and extends and explains in depth the extent of the cultural, economic and legal impact of the command system on Russian society. Much of these deals with the period of WW II, although Ferguson does an excellent job of providing an historical context.

As you know, Ferguson is controversial and the reviews of this book were mixed, I suspect based upon ideological considerations. Part of a negative review from The New Yorker:

Ferguson's eight-hundred-page reevaluation of the Second World War presents itself as a grand theory about ethnic conflict, the end of empire, and the postwar triumph of the East. The exact contours of the theory, however, remain unclear. Ferguson argues that the central story of the twentieth century is "the descent of the West," but he never really clarifies what "the West" means - Russia sometimes qualifies, sometimes not, depending upon what point Ferguson is trying to make. Ferguson is a skilled storyteller, and he offers many striking reflections on the bloodiest years of the past century, including a compelling analysis of appeasement.

Jan Winik's - The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 takes an interesting and in the end very enlightening view of this critical period. Winik organizes his book with alternating chapters on The United States, France and Russia. The result is a set of connections that the general reader may never have made and a perspective that the historian may find useful.