Collections of documents include Stalin, I. V., O Velikoi otechestvennoi voiny Sovetskogo soiuza [On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union] (Moscow: OGIZ, 1946). An English translation is available at www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/USSR/GPW/index.html. Kynin, G. P. and Laufer, J. (eds.), SSSR i germanskii vopros, 1941–1949. Die UdSSSR und die deutsche Frage, 1941–1949, 4 vols. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2003–12), includes postwar planning papers from 1944 by M. M. Litvinov and I. M. Maiskii.

A general overview is Roberts, Geoffrey, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Relevant articles include Pons, Silvio, “The Soviet Union and the International Left,” in Bosworth, Richard and Maiolo, Joseph (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), vol. II, 68–90, and Pechatnov, Vladimir O., “The Soviet Union and the World, 1944–1953,” in Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), vol. I, 90–111.

Mawdsley, Evan, Thunder in the East: The Nazi–Soviet War 1941–1945 (2nd edn., London: Bloomsbury, 2015), covers operational aspects. Mastny, Vojtech, Russia’s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), is still important; the sequel is Mastny, , The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Zubok, Vladislav and Pleshakov, Constantine, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), provides an important post-Soviet view.

For the period to June 1941, see Pons, Silvio, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936–1941 (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002), and Gorodetsky, Gabriel, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Also important is Pons, Silvio, “In the Aftermath of the Age of Wars: The Impact of World War II on Soviet Security Policy,” in Pons, Silvio and Romano, Andrea (eds.), Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914–1945 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000), 277–307.

Naimark, Norman and Gibianskii, Leonid (eds.), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1948 (Boulder: Westview, 1997), provides a useful collection of articles on the general situation in the region. Of works on Western Europe, Aga-Rossi, Elena and Zaslavsky, Victor, Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), is valuable for communist policy in the West. On Germany there is Naimark, Norman M., The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Soviet relations with the Chinese communists are covered in detail by Heinzig, Dieter, The Soviet Union and Communist China 1945–1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004).

On Stalin, see Tucker, Robert C., Stalin in Power, 1928–1941: The Revolution from Above (New York: Norton, 1990), and van Ree, Erik, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002). Works on senior comrades include Roberts, Geoffrey, Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012), and Boterbloem, Kees, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896–1948 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004).

Among the most important memoirs and diaries are Banac, Ivo (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), and Gorodetsky, Gabriel (ed.), The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, 1932–1943 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Conversations with the elderly Molotov, written down by Chuev, Feliks, are in Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, ed. Resis, Albert (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993).

There are a number of peculiarities in compiling a bibliography of the anti-fascist resistance. The field still lacks a broad comparative history that covers both Europe and Asia. There is not even an up-to-date synthesis on the resistance in Europe. Judt, Tony, Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe, 1939–1948 (London: Routledge, 1989), is one of the few comparative studies, stressing both the unity and the diversity of the national movements. Over the past two decades, historians have moved in the opposite direction, toward local studies, especially in France. The country coverage is very uneven. France again is heavily overrepresented, despite the fact that active résistants were much less numerous there than in Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia and Greece. The most recent attempt to synthesize a rich literature is Gildea, Robert, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (London: Faber and Faber, 2015). Pavone, Claudio, A Civil War: A History of Italian Resistance, trans. Levy, Peter (New York: Verso, 2013), is a monumental work by a former partisan who identifies three wars: civil, class and for liberation. Delzell, Charles, Mussolini’s Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), is still valuable as a positive evaluation of resistance on the spiritual renewal of democracy in postwar Italy. For Poland, Davies, Norman, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (London: Macmillan, 2003), is sympathetic but not uncritical. The most comprehensive study of the Home Army is Williamson, David G., The Polish Underground 1939–1947 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2012). But see also Borejsza, Jerzy, “La résistance polonaise en débat,” Vingtième Siècle 67 (Jul.–Sep. 2000), 33–42. For Yugoslavia, Djilas, Milovan, Wartime, trans. Petrovich, Michael B. (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1977), remains indispensable. An outstanding local study is Hoare, Marko Attila, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941–1943 (Oxford: British Academy and Oxford University Press, 2006). For Greece, Mazower, Mark, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), is a masterful and balanced account placing resistance in context of occupation and international politics. For Albania, see Fischer, Bernd, Albania at War, 1939–1945 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999). For the Soviet Union, Slepyan, Kenneth, Stalin’s Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), is a social history based on Moscow archives. Valuable materials on the resistance are embedded in studies of its dark twin, collaborationism, such as Kedward, H. R., Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), or else may be found in monographs on national communist parties. A full accounting of the resistance would also have to take into account contacts with external agents. For the most active of these, see MacKenzie, William, The Secret History of SOE: Special Operations Executive 1940–1945 (London: St. Ermin’s Press, 2000), an in-house survey with full access to the SOE files. Studies on the Chinese resistance have also moved on – from the foundation works of Johnson, Chalmers, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), comparing the nationalist motivation with the Yugoslav partisans; Selden, Mark, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), perceiving resistance as a social revolution; and Kataoka, Tetsuya, Resistance and Revolution in China: The Communists and the Second United Front (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), emphasizing party leadership – to provincial and then local studies to further refine geographical differences. More recently the resistance in Europe has become increasingly intertwined with memory studies linked to current political controversies that threaten to shunt aside the historian in favor of the moralists. Too late to be cited is the important work by Batinić, Jelena, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Three classic studies have defined the contours of Western scholarship on the formation of the Soviet bloc and the Sovietization of East Central Europe: Seton-Watson, Hugh’s The East European Revolution (London: Methuen, 1950); Fejtő, François’s History of the People’s Democracies: Eastern Europe Since Stalin, trans. Weissbort, Daniel (New York: Praeger, 1971); and Brzezinski, Zbigniew’s The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). The conclusions of all three books were roughly the same: Moscow designed and executed the communist seizure of power in East Central Europe for the purpose of extending its sphere of influence in Europe and the world. The takeover was performed in stages, though with some variation from country to country. The patterns of Sovietization followed a similar template in each country, and the influence of Soviet models and advisors was both extensive and consequential.

Between the late 1960s and 1989, a period that can be considered the height of Sovietology in Western academic circles, a number of books were published that refined, although they did not fundamentally change, the underlying theses of the earlier works. Some studies were general to the area, like Lendvai, Paul’s Eagle in Cobwebs: Nationalism and Communism in the Balkans (New York: Doubleday, 1969); Simons, Thomas W.’s Eastern Europe in the Postwar World (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); and Rothschild, Joseph’s Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). The largest number of books focused on individual countries of the region, for example, Shoup, Paul, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Gati, Charles, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986); Suda, Zdenek L., Zealots and Rebels: A History of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1980); Jowitt, Kenneth, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, 1944–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and Oren, Nissan, Revolution Administered: Agrarianism and Communism in Bulgaria (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

The fall of communism in 1989 in Eastern Europe and 1991 in the Soviet Union provided an important impetus to the historiography of Sovietization. A number of Soviet and East European archive collections were opened to historians for scholarly research. Historians and archive administrators collaborated in the publication of crucial document collections. Among them were a series of Russian document collections that bear directly on the history of Sovietization: Volokitina, T. V. et al. (eds.), Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentakh rossiiskikh arkhivov, 1944–1953, 2 vols. (Moscow: Sibirskii khronograf, 1997–98); Volokitina, T. V. et al. (eds.), Sovetskii faktor v Vostochnoi Evrope, 1944–1953. Dokumenty, 2 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999–2002); and Bordiugov, Gennadii et al. (eds.), SSSR–Pol’sha. Mekhanizmy podchineniia, 1944–1949 gg. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1995). Four volumes of documents on the German question, which illuminate the history of the Sovietization of East Germany and its fellow people’s democracies, were published by Kynin, G. P. and Laufer, Jochen, SSSR i germanskii vopros, 1941–1949. Die UdSSSR und die deutsche Frage, 1941–1949, 4 vols. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2000–12). Document collections published in the individual languages of the East European countries are too numerous to list here. But it is important to mention crucial English-language translations of documents, including Banac, Ivo (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), and Procacci, Giuliano et al. (eds.), The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences, 1947/1948/1949 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994). In addition, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) and the National Security Archive, both headquartered in Washington, DC, translated and made available online many documents on Sovietization from East Central Europe, which are readily accessed on their respective webpages.

The availability of new materials has stimulated the publication of a number of valuable collections of articles on the dynamics of Sovietization throughout the region, with country specialists providing contributions on their own areas of interest. Examples of these kinds of collections in English include: Naimark, Norman and Gibianskii, Leonid (eds.), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Boulder: Westview, 1997); Apor, Balazs et al. (eds.), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Apor, Balazs et al. (eds.), The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period (Washington, DC: New Academic Publishing, 2008); Gori, Francesca and Pons, Silvio (eds.), The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943–1953 (London: Macmillan, 1996); Tismaneanu, Vladimir (ed.), Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009); Snyder, Timothy and Brandon, Ray (eds.), Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). For the Russian historiography of Sovietization in the same period, see Naimark, Norman M., “Post-Soviet Russian Historiography on the Emergence of the Soviet Bloc,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, 3 (2004), 561–80.

New archival materials have also prompted the publications of a number of monographs on Soviet actions in East Central Europe. Those that relate directly to the Sovietization question include: Naimark, Norman M., The Russians in Germany: The History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Connelly, John, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1946 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Kenez, Peter, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Hungarian Communist Regime, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Applebaum, Anne, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012). Among the books that explore the social and cultural dynamics of Sovietization are the recent studies on Poland: Lebow, Kate, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–1956 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Fidelis, Malgorzata, Women, Communization, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Babiracki, Patryk, Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Mëhilli, Elidor, Albania and the Socialist World from Stalin to Mao (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

Of the many noteworthy English-language studies of Soviet relations with East Central Europe in the postwar period, only a few can be mentioned here: Zubok, Vladislav and Pleshakov, Constantine, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Mastny, Vojtech, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). For the Gorbachev period, see Kramer, Mark, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions Within the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War Studies, part 1: 5, 4 (2003), 178–256; part 2: 6, 4 (2004), 3–64; and part 3: 7, 1 (2005), 3–96; Sarotte, Mary Elise, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Stokes, Gale, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Collapse and Rebirth in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Early scholarship on the subject, at a time that scholars had only limited access to original documentation, was scarce. Several works had played a pioneering role in establishing the foundation for the field: Whiting, Allen S., Soviet Policies in China, 1917–1924 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951); Schwarz, Benjamin, Chinese Communism and Rise of Mao (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951); Johnson, Chalmers, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); and Chen, Jerome, Mao and the Chinese Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). A three-volume collection, China in Crisis, edited by Ho, Ping-ti and Tsou, Tang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), presented a systematic effort by a group of leading scholars in the field to explore the historical genesis of the Chinese age of crises and revolutions.

From the late 1960s to the 1980s, the field witnessed substantial growth against the background of major changes such as the rise and fall of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, China’s total split with the Soviet Union and, after twenty years of hostility and confrontation, rapprochement with the United States, and the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” project.

A refined general history of the Chinese Communist Revolution is provided in Bianco, Lucien, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949, trans. Bell, Muriel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971); Harrison, James P., The Long March to Power: A History of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1972 (New York: Praeger, 1972); and Fairbank, John King, The Great Chinese Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1986).

In Li Tachao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), Maurice Meisner offers an insightful account of Marxism’s introduction into China and the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party. Martin Wilbur, together with Julie-Lien-ying How, summarized achievements of his four decades of study of the Soviets and the early development of the Chinese Revolution in Missionaries of Revolution: Soviet Advisers and Nationalist China, 1920–1927 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Also noteworthy is Thornton, Richard C., in The Comintern and the Chinese Communists, 1928–1931 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969).

The development of the Chinese Communist Revolution and its external policies are covered by Van Slyke, Lyman, Enemies and Friends: The United Front in Chinese Communist History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), and Garver, John W., Chinese–Soviet Relations, 1937–1945: The Diplomacy of Chinese Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Selden, Mark, in The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), provided a highly positive perspective of the rise of the Maoist pattern of the Chinese Revolution. Esherick, Joseph, by editing and publishing Lost Chance in China: World War II Dispatches of John S. Service (New York: Random House, 1974), introduced the “lost chance” thesis, arguing that Washington might have lost a “chance” to pursue accommodation with the Chinese communists in the 1940s. The thesis’s impact was reflected in Reardon-Anderson, James, Yenan and the Great Powers: The Origins of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy, 1944–1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), and Borg, Dorothy and Heinrichs, Waldo H. (eds.), Uncertain Years: Chinese–American Relations, 1947–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Levine, Steven, in Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria, 1945–1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), portrays the CCP’s political and social revolutions in the northeast and US responses to them.

Quite useful are several memoirs: The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, 2 vols. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1972), by Kuo-tao, Chang, a founder of the Chinese Communist Party and once a main leader, who later defected from the party; A Comintern Agent in China, 1932–1939 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), by Braun, Otto, a German military advisor dispatched by the Comintern to work in the innermost decision-making circles of the CCP and the Red Army in the 1930s; and The Vladimirov Diaries: Yanan, China, 1942–1945 (New York: Doubleday, 1975), by Peter Vladimirov, the Soviet representative in Yan’an who worked closely with Mao and other top CCP leaders.

With the end of the Cold War, and China simultaneously embarking upon the “reform and opening” process, scholars have gained access to previously inaccessible primary sources in China, the former Soviet Union and other communist countries. In the meantime, the end of the Maoist era and China’s sharp departure from its revolutionary past also pushed scholars to reconsider how better to understand the Chinese Communist Revolution’s complex relations with the world.

Esherick, Joseph W., in “Ten Theses of the Chinese Revolution,” Modern China 21, 1 (Jan. 1995), 45–76, highlighted the necessity of revisiting a series of widely accepted notions in narrating and interpreting the Chinese Revolution, so as to take the study of China’s revolutionary era, including relations between the Chinese Revolution and the world, to deeper levels.

Fresher, more solid and more critical studies on the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party have been offered in Van de Ven, Hans J., From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and Ishikawa, Yoshihiro, The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party, trans. Fogel, Joshua A. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). With the support of newer Russian documentation, Pantsov, Alexander wrote The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005).

The Yan’an years, as a defining period for both the Chinese Communist Revolution and its relationship with the world, have received scholars’ fresh attention. Selden, Mark revisited his 1971 study and published China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995). The best study on the subject, in my view, is Hua, Gao, Hong Taiyan shi zenyang shengqi de [How Did the Red Sun Rise?] (Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 2000). The book’s English translation, after many years of work, is now in press by the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong.

On the making and development of Chinese communist policies, notable studies include: Hunt, Michael H., Genesis of the Chinese Communist Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Jun, Niu, From Yan’an to the World: The Origins and Development of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy (Norwalk, CT: EastBridge, 2005); and Sheng, Michael M., Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). On the Chinese Civil War of the late 1940s, two books by Westad, Odd Arne, Cold War and Revolution: Soviet–American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1945–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), offer narratives both insightful and informative.

Scholars found the need to reconsider the once-prevailing “lost chance” thesis. For a symposium on the subject (organized by Warren I. Cohen, and with the participation of Chen Jian, Michael Sheng, John Garver and Odd Arne Westad), see “Symposium: Rethinking the Lost Chance in China,” Diplomatic History 21 (Winter 1997), 71–115.

Jian, Chen, in Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), discusses China’s encounters with the Cold War world. On the CCP and Mao’s China’s changing relations with Moscow, good studies include: Heinzig, Dieter, The Soviet Union and Communist China 1945–1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance (New York: Routledge, 2003); Westad, Odd Arne (ed.), Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance (Washington, DC, and Stanford: Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 1998); and Zhihua, Shen and Yafeng, Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945–1959 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were central figures of the Chinese Communist Revolution and Chinese communist foreign policies. A systematic analysis of Mao Zedong Thought was offered in Schram, Stuart, The Thought of Mao Zedong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The three most important Mao biographies published in the past twenty years are: Short, Philip, Mao: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1999); Chang, Jung and Halliday, Jon, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); and Pantsov, Alexander V., with Levine, Steven I., Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). These last two were written with insights gained from post-Cold War Russian archives. On Zhou, two biographies are most useful to date: Wenqian, Gao, Zhou Enlai, the Last Perfect Revolutionary: A Biography (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007); Suyin, Han, Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, 1898–1976 (New York: Kodansha International, 1994). The author of the former was once head of the Zhou biographical group of the CCP Central Institute of Documentation. Also useful is Jian, Chen, “Zhou Enlai and China’s ‘Prolonged Rise,’” in Guha, Ramachandra (ed.), Makers of Modern Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 147–71.

For reviews of the state of the field, see Hunt, Michael H. and Westad, Odd Arne, “The Chinese Communist Party and International Affairs: A Field Report of the New Historical Sources and Old Research Problems,” China Quarterly 122 (Summer 1990), 258–72; see also Hunt, Michael H., “CCP Foreign Relations: A Guide to the Literature,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 6–7 (Winter 1995–96), 129, 136–43; and Yafeng, Xia, “The Study of Cold War International History in China: A Review of the Last Twenty Years,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10, 1 (Winter 2008), 81–115.

The most recent study on Nikita Khrushchev is Taubman, William, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). Taubman argues that Khrushchev’s politics of de-Stalinization were not only enforced from above but also formed a moral project. Older studies see Khrushchev’s reforms also as a product of the power struggle after Stalin’s death and of pressures from below. See Tompson, William J., Khrushchev: A Political Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995); Medvedev, Roy and Medvedev, Zhores, Khrushchev: The Years in Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Medvedev, Roy, Khrushchev (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1983).

The best overviews are Taubman, William, Khrushchev, Sergei and Gleason, Abbott (eds.), Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); McCauley, Martin (ed.), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Ilic, Melanie and Smith, Jeremy (eds.), Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (London: Routledge, 2011); Filtzer, Donald, The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinisation and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1993).

On the effects of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the de-Stalinization process on Soviet society, see the archive-based studies of Zubkova, Elena, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); Aksiutin, Yurii, Khrushchevskaia “ottepel’” i obshchestvennye nastroenia v SSSR v 1953–1964 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004); and Jones, Polly (ed.), The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge, 2006).

On the end of the Gulag system, the returnees from the camps and the social and cultural consequences of de-Stalinization, see Dobson, Miriam, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Toker, Leona, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Adler, Nanci, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002); Adler, Nanci, Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); Smith, Kathleen, Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

There are only a few studies on the reform of the judicial system under Khrushchev. See, among others, Ginsburgs, George, “Soviet Court Reform 1956–1958,” in Barry, Donald D. et al. (eds.), Soviet Law After Stalin, vol. I (Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1977), 77–104.

The most recent book on the emergence of the intelligentsia, which portrays the thaw as an era of liberty, is Zubok, Vladislav, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); see also Spechler, Dina, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: “Novyi Mir” and the Soviet Regime (New York: Praeger, 1982); Frankel, Edith Rogovin, Novj Mir: A Case Study in the Politics of Literature, 1952–1958 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Bittner, Stephen, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2008). On terror and memory, see Jones, Polly, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

Most books on the economy and social welfare agree that Khrushchev tried to improve living conditions but failed in his agrarian policy. See McAuley, Alastair, Economic Welfare in the Soviet Union: Poverty, Living Standards, and Inequality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); and Schröder, Hans-Henning, “‘Lebendige Verbindung mit den Massen.’ Sowjetische Gesellschaftspolitik in der Ära Chruščev,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 34, 4 (1986), 523–60.

On Khrushchev’s housing policy, see Smith, Mark, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). The memoirs of Khrushchev, Mikoian and Shepilov tell us about the political debates in the leading circle: Khrushchev, Sergei (ed.), Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 3 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004–07); Mikoian, Anastas, Tak bylo. Razmyshleniia o minuvshem [How It Was: Reflections on the Past] (Mosow: Vagirus, 1999); Shepilov, Dmitrii, The Kremlin’s Scholar: A Memoir of Soviet Politics Under Stalin and Khrushchev (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

Memoirs of ordinary citizens and artists on the thaw are included in Raleigh, Donald (ed.), Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk About Their Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Alexeyeva, Ludmilla and Goldberg, Paul, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993).

In recent years, many collections of documents on de-Stalinization have been published, among others: Artizov, A. N. et al. (eds.), Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. Dva tsveta vremeni. Dokumenty iz lichnogo fonda N. S. Khrushcheva [Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. Two Colors of Time. Documents from the Private Files of N. S. Khrushchev], 2 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009); Kovaleva, N. et al. (eds.), Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich. 1957: Stenogramma iiunskogo plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty [Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich. 1957: Report of the June Plenum of the CC CPSU and Other Documents] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998); Fursenko, Andrei (ed.), Prezidium TsK KPSS 1954–1964 [Presidium of the CC CPSU 1954–1964], vol. I, Chernovye protokol’nye zapisi zasedanii Stenogrammy [First Draft Notes for the Official Reports] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003), and vol. II, Postanovleniia 1954–1958 [Resolutions] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006); Artizov, A. N. et al. (eds.), Nikita Khrushchev 1964. Stenogrammy plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty [Nikita Khrushchev 1964. Report of the CC CPSU Plenum and Other Documents] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007).

Useful studies published since 1991 that draw on archival materials and memoirs include Volokitina, T. V. (ed.), Moskva i vostochnaya Evropa: Neprostye 60e – ekonomika, politika, kul’tura [Moscow and Eastern Europe: The Complicated 60s – Economy, Politics, Culture] (Moscow: Institut slavanovedeniia RAN, 2013); Novik, F. I., V lovushke kholodnoi voiny: Sovetskaia politika v otnoshenii Germanii, 1953–1958 gg. [In the Cold War Trap: Soviet Policy in Relations with Germany] (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii, 2014); McDermott, Kevin and Stibbe, Matthew (eds.), Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule (Oxford: Berg, 2006); and Crump, Laurien, The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–1969 (New York: Routledge, 2015). Perceptive essays on the Soviet bloc in the larger East–West context during the first few years after Stalin’s death can be found in Larres, Klaus and Osgood, Kenneth A. (eds.), The Cold War After Stalin’s Death: A Missed Opportunity for Peace? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

On the hegemonic relationship between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, as well as comparisons with other highly unequal relationships, see Triska, Jan B. (ed.), Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin America and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986); Keal, Paul, Unspoken Rules and Superpower Dominance (London: Macmillan, 1983); Kaufman, Edy, The Superpowers and Their Spheres of Influence: The United States and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and Latin America (London: Croom Helm, 1976); Kramer, Mark, “The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: Spheres of Influence,” in Woods, Ngaire B. (ed.), Explaining International Relations Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 98–125; Kramer, Mark, “The Soviet Bloc and the Cold War in Europe,” in Larres, Klaus (ed.), A Companion to Europe Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 67–96; Zimmerman, William, “Dependency Theory and the Soviet–East European Hierarchical Regional System: Initial Tests,” Slavic Review 37, 4 (Dec. 1978), 604–23; Clark, Cal and Bahry, Donna, “Dependent Development: A Socialist Variant,” International Studies Quarterly 27, 3 (Sep. 1983), 271–93; Reisinger, William M., “The International Regime of Soviet–East European Economic Relations,” Slavic Review 49, 4 (Winter 1990), 556–67; and Ray, James Lee, “Dependence, Political Compliance, and Economic Performance: Latin America and Eastern Europe,” in Kegley, Charles W. Jr., and McGowan, Patrick (eds.), The Political Economy of Foreign Policy Behavior (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981), 111–36.

Among many useful works on Soviet–East European economic relations are Smith, Alan H., The Planned Economies of Eastern Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1983); Murrell, Peter, The Nature of Socialist Economies: Lessons from Eastern European Foreign Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Holzman, Franklyn D., The Economics of Soviet Bloc Trade and Finance (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988). For hundreds of additional sources on Soviet–East European economic relations, see the annotated bibliographic compilation in Brine, Jenny, Comecon: The Rise and Fall of an International Socialist Organization (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992).

On the crises within the Soviet bloc in 1953, 1956 and 1968, the most useful studies published before documents from communist-era archives became accessible include Baring, Arnulf, Der 17. Juni 1953 (Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1965); Gati, Charles, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986); Vali, Ferenc A., Rift and Revolt in Hungary: Nationalism Versus Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961); Kecskemeti, Paul, The Unexpected Revolution: Social Forces in the Hungarian Uprising (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1961); Lomax, Bill, Hungary 1956 (London: Allison & Busby, 1976); Zinner, Paul E., Revolution in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962); Dawisha, Karen, The Kremlin and the Prague Spring (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and Skilling, H. Gordon, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

The availability of archival materials and memoirs since 1991 has facilitated a wealth of new scholarship on the crises of 1953, 1956 and 1968 and the Soviet responses. With regard to 1953, see Kramer, Mark, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal–External Linkages in Soviet Policymaking,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, 1 (Winter 1999), 3–54 (part 1); 1, 2 (Summer 1999), 3–38 (part 2); and 1, 3 (Fall 1999), 3–65 (part 3); Kramer, Mark, “Der Aufstand in Ostdeutschland im Juni 1953,” in Greiner, Bernd, Müller, Christian Th. and Walter, Dierk (eds.), Krisen im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2008), 80–127; McDermott, Kevin, “Popular Resistance in Communist Czechoslovakia: The Plzeň Uprising, June 1953,” Contemporary European History 19, 4 (Nov. 2010), 287–307; and Bruce, Gary, Resistance with the People: Repression and Resistance in Eastern Germany, 1945–1953 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). For an overview of German literature on the East German uprising, see Bruhn, Peter, 17. Juni 1953: Bibliographie (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2003), which lists 2,345 items.

On 1956, see Kramer, Mark, “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, 2 (Apr. 1998), 163–215; Kramer, Mark, “New Evidence on Soviet Decision-Making and the 1956 Polish and Hungarian Crises,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 8–9 (Winter 1996–97), 358–410; Kramer, Mark, “Soviet–Polish Relations and the Crises of 1956: Brinkmanship and Intra-Bloc Politics,” in Engelmann, Roger, Großbölting, Thomas and Wentker, Hermann (eds.), Communism in Crisis: The 1956 De-Stalinization and Its Consequences (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 61–127; Makowski, Edmund, Poznański Czerwiec 1956: Pierwszy bunt społeczeństwa w PRL [The Poznań June of 1956: The First Popular Rebellion in the People’s Republic of Poland] (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2001); Orekhov, A. M., Sovetskii soiuz i Pol’sha v gody “ottepeli”: iz istorii sovetsko-pol’skikh otnoshenii [The Soviet Union and Poland in the Years of the Thaw: The History of Soviet–Polish Relations] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Indrik, 2005); Gati, Charles, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006); Stykalin, A. S., Prervannaia revoliutsiia. Vengerskii krizis 1956 goda i politika Moskvy [Interrupted Revolution: The 1956 Hungarian Crisis and Moscow’s Policies] (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2003); Horváth, Miklós and Györkei, Jenő (eds.), The Soviet Military Intervention in Hungary, 1956, trans. Evans, Emma Roper (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999); Horváth, Miklós and Kovács, Vilmos, Hadsereg és fegyverek, 1956 [The Army and Weaponry, 1956] (Budapest: Zrínyi, 2011); and Gyáni, Gábor and Rainer, János M. (eds.), Ezerkilencszázötvenhat az újabb történeti irodalomban: Tanulmányok [New Historical Literature on 1956: A Survey] (Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2007).

On 1968, see Kramer, Mark, “The Kremlin, the Prague Spring, and the Brezhnev Doctrine,” in Tismaneanu, Vladimir (ed.), Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, Utopia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), 276–362; Kramer, Mark, “The Czechoslovak Crisis and the Brezhnev Doctrine,” in Fink, Carole, Gassert, Philipp and Junker, Detlef (eds.), 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 111–75; Bischof, Günter, Karner, Stefan and Ruggenthaler, Peter (eds.), The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); Williams, Kieran, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Kramer, Mark, “New Sources on the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 2 (Fall 1992), 1, 4–13; Kramer, Mark, “The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia: New Interpretations,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 3 (Fall 1993), 2–13, 54–55; Kramer, Mark, “Ukraine and the Soviet–Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 (Part 1): Revelations from the Diaries of Petro Shelest,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 10 (1998), 353–66; Kramer, Mark, “Ukraine and the Soviet–Czechoslovak crisis of 1968 (Part 2): New Evidence from the Ukrainian Archives,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 14–15 (Winter 2003–Spring 2004), 273–368; Latysh, Mikhail V., Prazhskaia vesna 1968 g. i reaktsiia Kremlia [The 1968 Prague Spring and the Kremlin’s Reaction] (Moscow: Obshchestvennyi nauchnyi fond, 1998); Karner, Stefan et al. (eds.), Prager Frühling: das internationale Krisenjahr 1968, vol. II, Beiträge (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2008); Benčík, Antonín, Operace “Dunaj”: Vojáci a Pražské jaro 1968 [Operation “Danube”: Soldiers and the Prague Spring, 1968] (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 1994); and Homor, György, Hívatlan vendégként északi szomszédainknál, 1968 [Uninvited Guests in the Northern Neighbors, 1968] (Pápa: Jókai Mór Városi Könyvtár, 2010).

On the military dimension of Soviet–East European relations, including the formation of the Warsaw Pact in May 1955, useful works produced during the Cold War include Johnson, A. Ross, Dean, Robert W. and Alexiev, Alexander, East European Military Establishments: The Warsaw Pact Northern Tier (New York: Crane, Russak, 1982); Völgyes, Iván, The Political Reliability of the Warsaw Pact Armies: The Southern Tier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982); Holloway, David and Sharp, Jane M. O. (eds.), The Warsaw Pact: Alliance in Transition? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Alexiev, Alexander and Johnson, A. Ross, East European Military Reliability: An Émigré-Based Assessment (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1986); Broadhurst, Arlene Idol (ed.), The Future of European Alliance Systems: NATO and the Warsaw Pact (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982); Nelson, Daniel N., Alliance Behavior in the Warsaw Pact (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986); Jones, Christopher D., Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe: Political Autonomy and the Warsaw Pact (New York: Praeger, 1981); Nelson, Daniel N. (ed.), Soviet Allies: The Warsaw Pact and the Issue of Reliability (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984); Faringdon, Hugh, Strategic Geography: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Superpowers (New York: Routledge, 1989); Holden, Gerard, The Warsaw Pact: Soviet Security and Bloc Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); and Fodor, Neil, The Warsaw Treaty Organization: A Political and Organizational Analysis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

For analyses of Soviet–East European military relations and the Warsaw Pact based on declassified archival documents and memoirs, see Hoffenaar, Jan and Krüger, Dieter (eds.), Blueprints for Battle: Planning for War in Central Europe, 1948–1968 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2012); Mastny, Vojtech, Holtsmark, Sven G. and Wenger, Andreas (eds.), War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War: Threat Perceptions in the East and West (London: Routledge, 2006); Kramer, Mark, “Warsaw Pact Military Planning in Central Europe: Revelations from the East German Archives,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 2 (Fall 1992), 1, 13–19; and Heuser, Beatrice, “Warsaw Pact Military Doctrines in the 70s and 80s: Findings in the East German Archives,” Comparative Strategy 12, 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1993), 437–57. On the role of Czechoslovakia in the Warsaw Pact’s war plans, see Luňák, Petr, Plánováni nemyslitelného: Československé válečné plány 1950–1990 [Planning for the Unthinkable: Czechoslovak War Plans, 1950–1990] (Prague: Dokořán, 2007); and Fučík, Josef, Stín jaderné války nad Evropou: ke strategii vojenských bloků, operačním plánům a úloze Československé lidové armády na středoevropském válčišti v letech 1945–1968 [The Shadow of Nuclear War over Europe: On the Strategy of Military Blocs, Operational Plans, and the Role of the Czechoslovak People’s Army in the Central European Military Theater in 1945–1948] (Prague: Mladá fronta, 2010).

Many important collections of declassified documents have appeared relating to this phase of Soviet–East European relations, including Ostermann, Christian (ed.), Uprising in East Germany 1953: The Cold War, the German Question, and the First Major Upheaval Behind the Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001); Islamov, T. M. et al. (eds.), Sovetskii soiuz i vengerskii krizis 1956 goda: dokumenty [The Soviet Union and the Hungarian Crisis of 1956: Documents] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998); Murashko, Galina P., Volokitina, Tat’yana V. and Stykalin, Aleksandr S. (eds.), 1968 god: “Prazhskaia vesna”–Istoricheskaia retrospektiva [1968: “The Prague Spring.” A Historical Retrospective] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010); Velichanskaia, Lyudmila A. et al. (eds.), Chekhoslovatskii krizis 1967–1969 gg. v dokumentakh TsK KPSS [The Czechoslovak Crisis of 1967–1969 in CC CPSU Documents] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010); Karner, Stefan et al. (eds.), Prager Frühling: Das internationale Krisenjahr 1968, vol. I, Dokumente (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2008); Tomilina, Natal’ya G., Karner, Stefan and Churbar’yan, Aleksandr (eds.), “Prazhskaya vesna” i mezhdunarodnyi krizis 1968 goda, vol. I, Dokumenty [“The Prague Spring” and the 1968 International Crisis, vol. I, Documents] (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 2010); Prameny k dějinám československé krize v letech 1967–1970 [Sources on the History of the Czechoslovak Crisis in 1967–1970] (Brno: Doplněk, 1993–2009); Komisia vlády SR pre analýzu historických udalostí z rokov 1967–1970, Slovensko v rokoch 1967–1970: Vyber dokumentov [Slovakia 1967–1970: Selected Documents] (Bratislava: n.p., 1992); and Mastny, Vojtech and Byrne, Malcolm (eds.), A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005).

A useful introduction to the Prague Spring is the rich memoir literature by the main protagonists. Several of these are available in English and German, including Mlynář, Zdeněk, Nightfrost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism (New York: Karz Publishers, 1980); Pelikán, Jiří, Ein Frühling, der nie zu Ende geht (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1976); Šik, Ota, Prager Frühlingserwachen. Erinnerungen (Herford: Busse Seewald, 1988); Sviták, Ivan, The Czechoslovak Experiment, 1968–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971); Dubček, Alexander, Hope Dies Last: The Autobiography of Alexander Dubček (New York: Kodansha International, 1993); Tigrid, Pavel, Why Dubček Fell (London: Macdonald & Co., 1971); Hájek, Jiří, Begegnungen und Zusammenstösse. Erinnerungen des ehemaligen tschechoslowakischen Aussenministers (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1987); and Gorbachev, Mikhail and Mlynář, Zdeněk, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). The volume edited by Mlynář, Zdeněk, Der Prager Frühling. Ein wissenschaftliches Symposion (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1983), offers a post-Solidarność perspective on East European exile; and the chapter by Agnes Heller, in particular, is critical of reform socialism.

Skilling, H. Gordon’s monumental Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) remains the most exhaustive overview of events and debates based on published sources. A lucid, well-balanced introduction to the intellectual contexts comes in the form of Kusin, Vladimir V., The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), and his edited volume The Czechoslovak Reform Movement, 1968 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1973). For an overview of 1960s debate in the press, see Kaplan, Frank, Winter into Spring: The Czechoslovak Press and the Reform Movement, 1963–1968 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1977). From the point of view of political science, see Williams, Kieran, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics 1968–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

For the international and global context, see Navrátil, Jaromír (ed.), The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), which gives a selection of the most important sources. Skoug, Kenneth N., Czechoslovakia’s Lost Fight for Freedom, 1967–1969: An American Embassy Perspective (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), offers titillating insider insights. The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, edited by Bischof, Günter, Karner, Stefan and Ruggenthaler, Peter (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), and 1968. The World Transformed, edited by Fink, Carole, Gassert, Philipp and Junker, Detlef (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), are collections of essays on international politics and protest movements that cover Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Third World. A comprehensive overview of protest movements including a contribution on Czechoslovakia by Pauer, Jan is provided by 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977, edited by Klimke, Martin and Scharloth, Joachim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). For analysis of the repercussions of the Prague Spring in the French and Italian Communist Parties, see Bracke, Maud, Which Socialism? Whose Détente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis, 1968 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007).

The Prague Spring is placed within the broader chronological context of state socialism in McDermott, Kevin, Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989: A Political and Social History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 121–51. For economic policy, see the programmatic Plan and Market Under Socialism (Prague: Academia, 1967), written by the main protagonist Ota Šik. On the economic reform in state socialism and the plan vs. market dilemma, see Myant, Martin, The Czechoslovak Economy, 1948–1988: The Battle for Economic Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Adam, Jan, Planning and Market in Soviet and East European Thought, 1960s–1992 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). Very helpful for understanding the broader East European context are Swain, Geoffrey and Swain, Nigel, Eastern Europe Since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 114–69; Berend, Ivan T., Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94–221; and Pittaway, Mark, Eastern Europe 1939–2000 (London: Arnold, 2004), 63–86. German and Czech research has been particularly productive on the history of the working class; see the chapters in Arbeiter im Staatssozialismus. Ideologischer Anspruch und soziale Wirklichkeit, edited by Hübner, Peter, Klessmann, Christoph and Tenfelde, Klaus (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005); Brenner, Christiane and Heumos, Peter (eds.), Sozialgeschichtliche Kommunismusforschung. Tschechoslowakei, Polen, Ungarn und DDR 1948–1968 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005); and 1968 und die Arbeiter: Studien zum “proletarischen Mai” in Europa, edited by Horn, Gerd-Rainer and Gehrke, Bernd (Hamburg: VSA-Verl., 2007), especially contributions by Peter Heumos and Lenka Kalinová. On youth, see Pospíšil, Filip, “Youth Cultures and the Disciplining of Czechoslovak Youth in the 1960s,” Social History 37, 4 (Nov. 2012), 477–500.

On emerging “normalization,” see the classic essay by Šimečka, Milan, The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia, 1969–1976 (London: Verso, 1984), and Kusin, Vladimir V., From Dubček to Charter 77: A Study of Normalisation in Czechoslovakia, 1968–1978 (Edinburgh: Q Press, 1978). Bren, Paulina, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism After the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), focuses on the post-1968 “normalization” through popular culture, especially family television series.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communist regimes led to the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Western and Chinese scholars. Most of the resulting publications focused on the international aspects of Sino-Soviet relations, but the domestic impact on China of the Soviet model and the controversies that it precipitated within China also received a good deal of attention. For instance, Luthi, Lorenz M.’s excellent book, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), engages with the conflicts over ideology and politics. It contains a helpful “Essay on the Sources,” 353–62. Russian archives have not, however, been fully opened, and access has been further constrained under Vladimir Putin’s rule. A major new biography of Mao Zedong by Pantsov, Alexander V. with Levine, Steven I., Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), is based to a significant extent on “unique” access to Soviet archives but Pantsov also notes that he had to rely on “personal relations” with archivists to secure access to closed ones.

Among publications based on Soviet archives and in which domestic issues are treated include Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance 1945–1963, edited by Westad, Odd Arne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Kaple, Deborah A.’s chapter on “Soviet Advisors in China in the 1950s,” 117–49, is a well-done update of her book, Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China, 1949–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Sergei Goncharov’s chapter examines “Sino-Soviet Military Cooperation,” 141–64, while the chapter by Chen Jian and Yang Kuisong is on “Chinese Politics and the Collapse of the Sino-Soviet Alliance,” 246–94. Shen, Zhihua, a Chinese researcher, published the most detailed available account, Sulian chuanjia zai Zhongguo, 1948–1960 [Soviet Advisors in China, 1948–1960] (Beijing: Zhongguo guoji guangbo chubanshe, 2003). Shen and another Chinese scholar, Danhui, Li, also edited Zhan hou Zhong-Su guanxi ruogan wenti yanjiu [Study of Certain Questions of Postwar Sino-Soviet Relations] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2006), in which there are three chapters on Soviet advisors and three on Soviet aid, all making extensive use of Soviet and Chinese archives, national and local. Jersild, Austin, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), relies on archives from several East European states and Russia. His book focuses on the more informal aspects of the relationships as well on organizations below the diplomatic horizon, such as the Sino-Soviet friendship societies.

As for Chinese primary sources, during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution the public assault on “capitalist-roaders” in the leadership enabled Red Guard organizations to publish a wide range of classified documents informally, including speeches by Mao Zedong. When stripped of their polemical editorial content, these materials provide much insight into the politics of the 1950s, including the fate of the Soviet model. A major collection of Mao, ’s hitherto-unpublished writings was made available in Taipei as Mao Zedong sixiang wan sui [Long Live Mao Zedong Thought] (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1969 and 1974). An entire generation of Western scholars has made use of this and other Red Guard materials. A major example was Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters, 1956–1971, edited and introduced by Schram, Stuart (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974). The more accurate title of the British edition, Mao Zedong Unrehearsed, reflects the fact that Mao spoke to elite audiences, not to the “people.” MacFarquhar, Roderick’s magisterial three-volume study, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, made use of Red Guard material. They are: vol. I, Contradictions Among the People, 1956–1957 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); vol. II, The Great Leap Forward, 1958–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); and vol. III, The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961–1966 (New York and Oxford: Oxford and Columbia University Presses, 1997). Walder, Andrew G., China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), is another outstanding book that relies heavily on Cultural Revolution sources. The author, a sociologist, analyzes structural and institutional borrowings from the Soviet Union.

During the reform era that began in 1978 and continues to this day, work on many formerly taboo subjects was allowed, resulting in an immense outpouring of publications on the 1950s and 1960s.These included multivolume works by Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and other leaders; collections of Central Party and government documents, chronologies of leaders’ activities (nianpu), national and local statistics, and recollections and memoirs by some retired top leaders. An important example of the latter is Yibo, Bo, Ruogan zhongda juece yu shijian de huigu [Recollections About Some Major Decisions and Events] (Beijing: Zhongong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1991), 2 vols. A fine book by Jian, Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2001), analyzes – using the new sources – Mao’s domestic goals in the emerging conflict with the Soviets.

The ruling communist party restricts what can be said in mainland publications. Its legitimacy is bound up with how CCP history is presented to the Chinese public. Mao Zedong’s image as the great leader of the revolution, the founding father of the state and the builder of socialism must, in its view, be protected. But, in order to justify the break with radical Maoism, reform leaders also found it necessary to blame Mao in broad terms for the twin disasters of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) and the Cultural Revolution.⁷⁰ His individual role in these tragic events can be scrutinized but not in depth. An example is a two-volume official biography, Mao Zedong Zhuan, 1949–1976 [Biography of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976], edited by two party researchers, Pang, Xianzhi and Jin, Chongji (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2003). Certain topics such as his responsibility for precipitating the Sino-Soviet conflict also continue to be taboo. Lengxi, Wu, a top-ranking journalist, published Shinian lunzhan, 1956–1966 – Zhong-Su guanxi huiyi lu [Ten Years of Recollections of the Polemics in Sino-Soviet Relations] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1999), 2 vols. This important source offers a straightforward account of meetings of Chinese leaders and between the two sides. Several authors have used Soviet, Chinese and Hungarian archives. Foreign Ministry archives for the 1950s have become accessible to foreign scholars. Some have also been able to use subnational, provincial government and party archives.

Informal factors play a role. Informal access to knowledgeable party historians greatly helped Teiwes, Frederick C. with Sun, Warren to write their excellent books on top-level politics. See their China’s Road to Catastrophe: Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the GLF, 1955–1959 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), for example. The political status of researchers and their “guanxi” – personal relationships – also affect access. Yang Jisheng, a senior journalist and long-time party member was able to gain access to rich material on the famine during the Great Leap in a dozen provincial party archives. This led to the publication of an authoritative two-volume study: Yang, Jisheng, Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai da jihuang jilu [Tombstone: A Record of China’s Great Famine] (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 2008), but it could only be published in Hong Kong. An abridged version was published in English, edited by Edward Frieman et al. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

Finally note should be taken of a conference volume edited by Bernstein, Thomas P. and Li, Hua-yu, China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949–Present (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). Three chapters cover Sino-Soviet relations; sixteen are on Soviet influences on Chinese ideology, the military, the Soviet economic model, society, science and education, and the lessons Chinese leaders drew from the Soviet collapse.

Prior to the 1990s publications on the Cultural Revolution relied heavily on émigré interviews in Hong Kong, scattered copies of student and worker handbills and newspapers, national newspapers and other official publications, and a great deal of supposition. In the post-Mao era much larger volumes of unofficial publications and inner-party documents found their way abroad, even though the national and regional archives remained inaccessible to all but the most trusted party historians. In the 1980s many individuals published memoirs of their experiences in China, shedding new light on personal experiences. Notable examples in English include Yang, Rae’s Spider Eaters: A Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), by a high school student in Beijing subsequently sent to the countryside, and Yuan, Gao’s Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), by a Red Guard in a provincial high school. Daiyun, Yue’s To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman (with Carolyn Wakeman; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) chronicles the decade from the perspective of a faculty member at Peking University. One of the first studies to draw extensively on materials in municipal archives was Perry, Elizabeth and Xun, Li, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Boulder: Westview, 1997). The currently definitive account of national politics during the entire decade, drawing deeply on the full range of new documentation that became available in the post-Mao era, is MacFarquhar, Roderick and Schoenhals, Michael, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Walder, Andrew’s Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), chronicles the influential Red Guard movement in the nation’s capital, drawing extensively on large runs of newspapers and handbills produced by students across a range of universities. Chinese historians have also made notable contributions. Two recent examples are Weihua, Bu, Zalan jiu shijie: Wenhua da geming de dongluan yu haojie (1966–1968) [Smashing the Old World: The Chaos and Catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1968)] (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2008), and Xun, Li’s monumental study of Shanghai, Geming zaofan niandai [Decade of Revolutionary Rebellion], 2 vols. (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2015). A condensed overview and narrative of the Cultural Revolution can be found in chapters 10 to 13 of Walder, Andrew, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), which also covers the earlier years of the People’s Republic as a prelude to this final decade of Mao’s life.

Few Cold War topics have received more generous scholarly attention than the Sino-Soviet relationship. There has been sustained interest in the subject since the early 1960s, when the split between Moscow and Beijing first became public knowledge. Among the early treatments were the classic studies by Zagoria, Donald, The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956–1961 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962) and by Gittings, John, Survey of the Sino-Soviet Dispute (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). The former sought the middle ground between the proponents of the “they are just faking it” school and the sober-minded camp that deemed the split as final and irreversible. The latter dissected the Sino-Soviet polemic under as good a microscope as Western Kremlinology could muster. The 1970s and the 1980s witnessed the rise of theoretical approaches to the troubled relationship. Partly because the deep hostility between two ostensibly communist powers offered such a useful case study for billiard-ball conceptions of international politics, realists of all stripes embraced the subject with gusto. Examples include Pollack, Jonathan D., The Sino-Soviet Rivalry and Chinese Security Debate (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1982), and Ellison, Herbert J., The Sino-Soviet Conflict: A Global Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). Improvements in Sino-Russian relations in the 1990s prompted scholars to reassess previous approaches, with some – e.g. Wishnick, Elizabeth, Mending Fences: The Evolution of Moscow’s China Policy from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001) – striking a cautiously positive note, while others, such as Lo, Bobo in his Axis of Convenience: Moscow, Beijing, and the New Geopolitics (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), maintained a degree of skepticism about the relationship, which, in just half a century, went from unbreakable friendship, to primordial enmity, to friendship once again.

In the meantime, the study of Sino-Soviet relations – formerly the subject of diplomatic gossip and conferences of political scientists – was handed over to historians. Armed with newly released archival documentation, they scrutinized the story of the rise and fall of the alliance and came up with answers to please theorists of all persuasions. One of the earliest was the still relevant Westad, Odd Arne (ed.), Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Washington, DC, and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 1998), which, being an edited volume, offered a usefully multicausal explanation but specifically emphasized ideology as an important factor. Coming in the wake of many a realist study that perceived ideology as a cover-up for “real” national interests, Brothers in Arms represented an important new departure for Cold War historiography. By contrast, Heinzig, Dieter’s The Soviet Union and Communist China 1945–1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004) erred on the side of geopolitics. Some of the same themes were picked up in Luthi, Lorenz’s seminal Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), which put great stress on ideological factors in the alliance and in Radchenko, Sergey’s Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967 (Washington, DC, and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2009), which rehabilitated realist ideas about Sino-Soviet relations, diluting them in anecdotes about pride, arrogance and cultural prejudice. A similar approach was adopted also in Shen, Zhihua and Xia, Yafeng, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945–1959: A New History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), a panoramic overview of the early years of the relationship, which highlights the struggle for leadership between Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev.

Matters of culture and ideology were broached in Jersild, Austin, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) – which looks at, among other things, the low politics of cultural, scientific and economic exchange between China and the USSR – and in Li, Mingjiang, Mao’s China and the Sino-Soviet Split: Ideological Dilemma (London: Routledge, 2012), which highlights the centrality of Chinese domestic politics in the Sino-Soviet relationship. Meanwhile, Friedman, Jeremy opens new vistas to scholars of Sino-Soviet relations by exploring why and how Moscow and Beijing competed for influence in the Third World. His Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015) highlights the divergence between Chinese and Soviet revolutionary experiences. Still, for all the new evidence that has come to light since the 1990s, scholars remain as deeply divided as they have ever been. Every new study tilts the pendulum of opinion this way or that; yet it seems to be destined to swing perpetually between fuzzy conceptions such as “national interests,” “ideology,” “culture,” “equality” and “leadership,” dismaying and delighting generations of historians who today know so much and yet so little about the inner dynamics of the love/hate relationship between Beijing and Moscow, which never fails to surprise.

The biographical literature on Mao Zedong has assumed gigantic proportions. The most up-to-date account with unique Russian sources, especially for the pre-1949 period, is Pantsov, Alexander V. with Levine, Steven I., Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). A collective biography of Mao Zedong and his times by Chinese and Western researchers is presented in Cheek, Timothy (ed.), A Critical Introduction to Mao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010). Chang, Jung and Halliday, Jon’s widely popular Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005) presents a wealth of sources, the interpretation of which has been severely criticized; see Benton, Gregor and Chun, Lin (eds.), Was Mao Really a Monster? The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Routledge, 2009).

The authoritative Chinese biography is Pang, Xianzhi and Jin, Chongji, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) [Biography of Mao Zedong (1949–1976)], 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2003); for the earlier years, see Jin, Chongji (ed.), Mao Zedong zhuan (1893–1949) [Biography of Mao Zedong (1893–1949)], 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996). Indispensable information on Mao Zedong’s day-to-day activities is provided by Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi (ed.), Mao Zedong nianpu 1949–1976 [Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong 1949–1976], 6 vols. (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2014). For the earlier period, see Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi (ed.), Mao Zedong nianpu 1893–1949 [Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong 1893–1949], 3 vols. (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2003).

In English translation, Mao Zedong’s writings are best documented for the pre-PRC period. A monumental translation project, which is expected to span ten volumes, is Schram, Stuart R. et al. (eds.), Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, 8 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992–). The official Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, 5 vols. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965–77), covers important texts and speeches between 1926 and 1957, partly in heavily redacted versions, and has been complemented by various unofficial reprints of Mao speeches by Red Guard organizations from the Cultural Revolution. A selection is presented by Schram, Stuart R. (ed.), Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed: Talks and Letters, 1956–1971 (New York: Penguin, 1974). A project on publishing Mao’s post-1949 writings includes the years 1949–57, but has remained unfinished: Kau, Michael Y. M. and Leung, John K. (eds.), The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976, 2 vols. (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1986–92). The most comprehensive collection in Chinese is Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi (ed.), Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao [Mao Zedong’s Manuscripts Since the PRC’s Formation], 13 vols. (Peking: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1987–98).

On Mao Zedong’s political thought, see especially Wakeman, Frederic Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), as well as Knight, Nick, Rethinking Mao: Explorations in Mao Zedong’s Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). Still informative is Schram, Stuart R., The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). On the political context of the “Sinification” of Marxism and the rise of the Mao cult, see especially Wylie, Raymond, The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch’en Po-ta, and the Search for Chinese Theory, 1935–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980). On post-1949 developments, see Leese, Daniel, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On Mao as storyteller, see the influential analysis by Apter, David E. and Saich, Tony, Mao’s Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Vukovich, Daniel F., China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (London: Routledge, 2012), critically revisits Western writings on Mao Zedong.

A preliminary assessment of Mao Zedong’s historical role is presented by Wilson, Dick (ed.), Mao Tse-tung in the Scales of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The politics of history in modern China is discussed in Unger, Jonathan (ed.), Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), and Huaiyin, Li, Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012). On Mao as a historian, see Zijin, Wang, Lishi xuezhe Mao Zedong [The Historian Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Xiyuan chubanshe, 2013); for a typical appraisal of his historical contributions by a party historian, see Jie, Li, Mao Zedong dui xin Zhongguo de lishi gongxian [Mao Zedong’s Historical Contributions to the New China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2015). The multifold afterlives of Mao are covered by Yushuo, Zheng (ed.), The Use of Mao and the Chongqing Model (Hong Kong: City of Hong Kong University Press, 2015), and Barmé, Geremie R., Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). Finally, the multivolume thread-bound edition of Mao Zedong’s comments on China’s traditional histories, Zhongyang dang’anguan (ed.), Mao Zedong pingdian ershisi shi [Mao Zedong’s Punctuations and Annotations to the Twenty-Four Histories] (Beijing: Zhongguo dang’an chubanshe, 1996), is highly recommended for bibliophiles.

The various strands that contribute to the history of postwar anti-communism are rarely joined together in a single study. Many of them can be explored in various essays in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, edited by Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and in Immerman, Richard H. and Goedde, Petra (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Selverstone, Marc J., Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

The literature on anti-communism in the global South is vast and diversified. For broad overviews, see Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and McMahon, Robert J. (ed.), The Cold War in the Third World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

On Western strategic analyses of the Soviet Union and communism, and the ensuing policy of containment, see Leffler, Melvyn P., For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007); Stephanson, Anders, “The Cold War Considered as a US Project,” in Pons, Silvio and Romero, Federico (eds.), Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 52–67; Gaddis, John Lewis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

The most comprehensive historical investigations of the meanings, permutations and usage of the concept of totalitarianism are Traverso, Enzo, Le totalitarisme. Le XXe siècle en débat (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), and Gleason, Abbott, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

The “cultural Cold War” waged for the consolidation of an anti-communist Western identity has been explored in many recent studies. Among the most illuminating are Berghahn, Volker R., America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone Between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Major, Patrick and Mitter, Rana (eds.), Across the Blocs: Exploring Comparative Cold War Cultural and Social History (London: Frank Cass, 2004); Mariano, Marco (ed.), Defining the Atlantic Community: Culture, Intellectuals, and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2010); Scott-Smith, Giles and Krabbendam, Hans (eds.), Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 (London: Frank Cass, 2004); Scott-Smith, Giles, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony (New York: Routledge, 2002).

On anti-communism in the United States, see Ceplair, Larry, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011); Schrecker, Ellen, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1998); Fried, Richard M., Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Friedman, Andrea, Citizenship in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014); Field, Douglas (ed.), American Cold War Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

On the politics and culture of postwar Europe, see Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); Stone, Dan, Goodbye to All That? A History of Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Müller, Jan-Werner, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Gilbert, Mark, Cold War Europe: The Politics of a Contested Continent (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Stone, Dan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Major, Patrick, The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945–1956 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Schissler, Hanna (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jarausch, Konrad Hugo, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Del Pero, Mario, L’alleato scomodo. Gli USA e la DC negli anni del Centrismo (1948–1955) (Rome: Carocci, 2001); Mariuzzo, Andrea, Divergenze parallele. Comunismo e anticomunismo alle origini del linguaggio politico dell’Italia repubblicana (1945–1955) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2010); Buton, Philippe, Buttner, Olivier and Hastings, Michel (eds.), La Guerre froide vue d’en bas (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014).