There is a large amount of literature on the subject in many languages. Numerous people, Soviet citizens and foreigners alike, inside and outside the Soviet Union, suffered terror. Millions of people perished, but millions did survive and some of them have left their accounts. The best-known work is written by one of them, Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. His famous trilogy The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1974–78) draws on his own and countless others’ reminiscences and accounts. Kuromiya, Hiroaki’s The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) seeks to retrieve the lost voices of the executed. The most comprehensive and judicious scholarly treatment of terror under Soviet communism is Werth, Nicolas, “A State Against its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” in Courtois, Stéphane, Werth, Nicolas, Panné, Jean-Louis, Paczkowski, Andrzej, Bartošek, Karel and Margolin, Jean-Lois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Murphy, Jonathan and Kramer, Mark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Some important documents related to the Great Terror are translated in Getty, J. A. and Naumov, O. V., The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). A concise account of Stalin’s terror as genocide is Naimark, Norman M., Stalin’s Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). The most extensive oral testimonies of the Holodomor of 1932–33 are assembled in Mace, James E. and Heretz, Leonid (eds.), Oral History Project of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1990).

Statistical data are always incomplete and can be misleading. The most useful analysis of statistical data on Soviet terror are Wheatcroft, Stephen G., “Great Terror in Historical Perspective: The Records of the Statistical Department of the Investigative Organs of OGPU/NKVD,” in Harris, James (ed.), The Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence Under Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 287–305, and Ellman, Michael, “Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments,” Europe-Asia Studies 54, 7 (2002), 1151–72.

The most detailed, albeit not comprehensive, account of the Great Terror is Binner, Rolf, Bonwetsch, Bernd and Junge, Marc, Massenmord und Lagerhaft. Die andere Geschichte des Großen Terrors (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), which attributes the Great Terror to internal and social factors. By contrast, Khlevniuk, Oleg, “The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938,” in Cooper, Julian, Perrie, Maureen and Rees, E. A. (eds.), Soviet History, 1917–53: Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 158–76, sees the Great Terror as a response to the threat of war. For the export of the Great Terror to Asia (Mongolia and Xinjiang), see Kuromiya, Hiroaki, “Stalin’s Great Terror and the Asian Nexus,” Europe-Asia Studies, 66, 5 (2014), 775–93.

There is also a voluminous literature on the Gulag. Apart from Solzhenitsyn, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, , The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Staklo, Vadim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), and Viola, Lynne, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), are the most updated accounts based on declassified archival documents.

One of the most revealing accounts left by Soviet leaders directly involved in the terror under Stalin, is Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics – Conversations with Felix Chuev, edited with an introduction and notes by Resis, Albert (Chicago: Dee, 1993).

The main study of the Soviet government under Lenin is Rigby, T. H.’s Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The main study of these institutions under Molotov is Watson, Derek’s Molotov and Soviet Government: Sovnarkom, 1930–1941 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). There is no comparable study of Soviet government under Rykov. On the STO see Watson, Derek, “STO (The Council of Labour and Defence) in the 1930s,” Europe-Asia Studies 50, 7 (1998), 1203–27. On the management and regulation of the government apparatus see Rees, E. A., State Control in Soviet Russia: The Rise and the Fall of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, 1920–34 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), and Shearer, D. R. Industry, State and Society in Stalin’s Russia, 1926–1934 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996). On interdepartmental conflicts within the Soviet government, see Gregory, P. R. (ed.), Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy: Evidence from the Soviet State and Party Archives (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2001); Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Ordzhonikidze’s Takeover of Vesenkha: A Case Study in Soviet Bureaucratic Politics,” Soviet Studies 37, 2 (1985), 153–72; and Rees, E. A. (ed.), Decision-Making in the Stalinist Command Economy, 1932–1937 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).

Soviet studies and migration did not dwell in the same scholarly space until quite recently. Both scholarly communities are probably to blame. With the exception of the Great Migration of African-Americans from the southern states to northern cities in the 1910s through the 1960s, internal migration long tended to play second fiddle to immigration in migration studies. Among Russianists, seasonal migrants and migrants to the cities figured in labor and urban histories, and the more recent literature on the Gulag and other carceral regimes has included useful information on the logistics of deportation. But attempts to encompass various forms of migration and their interdependence have been few and far between. For a European-wide perspective, see Kulischer, Eugene, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–47 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948); for a recent analysis of internal migration in “Russian political space” throughout the twentieth century, see Siegelbaum, Lewis H. and Page Moch, Leslie, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).

The contribution of World War I to the downfall of tsarism is an old topic, but it has been infused with new life in recent years by attention to soldiers as “violent migrants” and to refugees as both socially destabilizing and significant to claims for national independence. See especially Sanborn, Joshua A., “Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia During World War I,” Journal of Modern History 77 (2005), 290–324; Gatrell, Peter, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Baron, Nick and Gatrell, Peter (eds.), Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924 (London: Anthem, 2004); and Gatrell, Peter, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For the chronological extension of the war-induced “continuum of crisis,” see Holquist, Peter, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Deracinating people became an important part of the Stalin revolution, with enormous implications for social transformation. The dimensions of this policy and its execution have been analyzed most thoroughly in Polian, Pavel, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), and most brilliantly in the following works: Brown, Kate, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Viola, Lynne, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Shearer, David R., Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). An older historiography analyzed the unprecedented migration of peasants to the cities. It includes Hoffmann, David, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), and Kotkin, Stephen, “Peopling Magnitostroi: The Politics of Demography,” in Rosenberg, William and Siegelbaum, Lewis H. (eds.), Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 63–104.

Finally, publication of valuable collections of documents, some with extensive commentary, on the deportations of kulaks and borderland peoples include Danilov, V., Manning, R. and Viola, L. (eds.), Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie: Dokumenty i materialy v 5 tomakh, 1927–1939 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999–2006), and Pobol’, N. L. and Polian, P. M. (eds.), Stalinskie deportatsii, 1928–1953 (Moscow: Materik, 2005).

One of the most remarkable projects in the history of any country is the History of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1929 in nine volumes (London: Macmillan, 1950–69) begun by Carr, E. H. in the 1940s and continued by Davies, R. W. in his Industrialization of Soviet Russia from 1929 to 1936 in fourteen volumes (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980–2014); a fifteenth volume up to 1940 is in preparation. Even without access to Soviet archives, Carr’s work was so diligent and precise that it remains an essential work of reference. Carr took on Davies as a collaborator for the last volumes completed before his death. In his own work Davies benefited eventually from access to Soviet archives and also from collaboration with Stephen Wheatcroft and Oleg Khlevniuk.

The collapse of the Soviet state in 1991 opened up many former Soviet archives for independent historical investigation. Surveys of the resulting progress in our understanding of the Soviet economic system include Gregory, Paul R. and Harrison, Mark, “Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin’s Archives,” Journal of Economic Literature 43, 3 (2005), 721–61; Ellman, Michael, “The Political Economy of Stalinism in the Light of the Archival Revolution,” Journal of Institutional Economics 4, 1 (2008), 99–125; and Markevich, Andrei, “Economics and the Establishment of Stalinism,” Kritika 15, 1 (2014), 125–32.

Economists have tended to describe the Soviet economy as a developmental state that provided civilian public goods and pursued civilian economic growth, although inefficiently. This tradition is exemplified by Dobb, M. H., Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948); Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1962); and, more recently, Allen, Robert C., Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

In contrast to this approach, research in former Soviet archives has given greater salience to power and security as factors in Soviet economic institutions and policies. Gregory, Paul R., The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), has analyzed Stalin’s economic decisions in light of his quest for internal security. The needs of external security are emphasized by Samuelson, Lennart, Plans for Stalin’s War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Stone, David R., Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926–1933 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Barber, John and Harrison, Mark (eds.), The Soviet Defence-Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); and Harrison, Mark (ed.), Guns and Rubles: The Defense Industry in the Stalinist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

The archival revolution is still recent, but Kontorovich, Vladimir and Wein, Alexander, “What Did the Soviet Rulers Maximise?,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, 9 (2009), 1579–601, maintain that Western economists should have reached the same conclusions long before, based on the published goals of Soviet leaders and the outcomes of their policies.

Three works commend themselves to entry-level readers. The final edition of Nove, Alec’s Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) remains a vivid and compelling narrative of the Soviet economy from beginning to end. A thematic textbook on the Soviet economy up to 1945 is Davies, R. W., Harrison, Mark and Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (eds.), The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Although not limited to the Soviet economy or to our period, the third edition of Ellman, Michael’s textbook on Socialist Planning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) is fully revised in the light of the Soviet archives and pays more attention to military affairs.

Anyone wanting a fuller grasp of the position of workers during the 1920s and 1930s should start with Schwarz, Solomon’s Labor in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1952). Schwarz was an ex-Menshevik and has a teleological interpretation of what he sees as a linear path from free to coerced labor, but the story he tells is empirically rich and offers an excellent introduction to the topic. Three outstanding memoirs of the 1930s are equally rewarding and full of accurate and insightful detail: Smith, Andrew, I Was a Soviet Worker (London: Robert Hale, 1937); Scott, John, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, enlarged edn. prepared by Kotkin, Stephen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and Kravchenko, Victor, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (London: Robert Hale, 1947).

The 1980s and 1990s produced a number of well-researched monographs on Soviet workers during industrialization. Their interpretations differ, often considerably, but all are solid studies. Kuromiya, Hiroaki, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), focuses mainly on the shock work movement. Siegelbaum, Lewis H., Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1942 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), examines Stakhanovism not just from the point of view of its impact on production, but also its social and cultural role in the context of the mid 1930s. A study of Stakhanovism from a radically different perspective is Maier, Robert, Die Stachanov-Bewegung 1935–1938: Der Stachanovismus als tragendes und verschärfendes Moment der Stalinisierung der Sowjetischen Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990). Filtzer, Donald, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (London: Pluto, 1986), is a structural analysis of worker–state relations during the entire span of the first three Five-Year Plans from a Marxist perspective. Andrle, Vladimir, Workers in Stalin’s Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), advances arguments similar to those of Filtzer, but analyzes them within the framework of sociological theory.

All of the above books, with the partial exception of Maier, were written before historians had access to the former Soviet archives. Since then some important specialist studies have appeared. Goldman, Wendy Z., Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), is a comprehensive study of women workers and the politics of female labor during the first two Five-Year Plans (1928–37); it also offers a detailed account of the general situation within industry in these years. Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), is a monumental study of the building and operation of Magnitogorsk and how workers constructed their lives there. Rossman, Jeffrey J., Worker Resistance Under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), is one of the few archive-based studies of worker protests during the first years of industrialization. Davies, Sarah, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), is one of the only archive-based studies on workers’ attitudes, although its representativeness is limited by its focus solely on Leningrad. These and other archive studies greatly enhance our grasp of the nuances and details of the period they cover. They also show that the memoirs and the earlier studies based only on published sources hold up rather well.

Since the end of the 1990s, several important volumes of archival documents on the policy of the Soviet state toward peasants in the period of the civil war, the NEP and the 1930s have been published in Russia by eminent specialists of Soviet peasantry. The two most outstanding series are: Danilov, V. P., Manning, R. and Viola, L. (eds.), Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, 1927–1939, 6 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999–2006), and Danilov, V. P. and Berelovich, A. (eds.), Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK, OGPU, NKVD, 1918–1939, 6 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998–2012).

A short, but thought-provoking, essay on the relationship between the Soviet state and peasants during the first two decades of Soviet power is Graziosi, Andrea, The Great Soviet Peasant War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996).

On peasants and the Bolshevik state during war communism and the civil war, see Kondrashin, V. P., Krestianstvo Rossii v grazhdanskoi voine: k voprosu ob istokakh stalinizma (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009); Figes, Orlando, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Danilov, V. P. and Shanin, T. (eds.), Antonovschina. Dokumenty i materialy (Tambov: Izd. TIO, 1994); Osipova, T., Rossiiskoe krest’ianstvo v revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voine (Moscow: Streletz, 2001); and, for the specific case of Ukraine, Graziosi, Andrea, Bolsheviki i krestiane na Ukraine, 1918–1919 (Moscow: Airo-XX, 1997).

On peasants and the Soviet state during the NEP, see Lewin, Moshe, La paysannerie et le pouvoir soviétique (Paris: Mouton, 1966); Grosskopf, Sigrid, L’alliance ouvrière et paysanne en URSS (1921–1928): le problème du blé (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1976); Danilov, Viktor P., Rural Russia under the New Regime (London: Hutchinson, 1988); and Werth, Nicolas, La vie quotidienne des paysans soviétiques de la Révolution à la collectivisation (Paris: Hachette, 1984).

On peasants and the Soviet state during the 1930s, see Davies, Robert W., The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980); Viola, Lynne, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

On the 1931–33 famine, see Conquest, Robert, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Davies, Robert W. and Wheatcroft, Stephen G., The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Kondrashin, V., Golod 1932–1933 godov: tragediia rossiiskoi derevni (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008); Pyrih, R. (ed), Golodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraini. Dokumenti i materiali (Kiev: Kyievo-Mohylians’ka akademiia, 2007); Graziosi, Andrea, Lettres de Kharkov (Lausanne: Noir et Blanc, 2015); Martin, Terry, “The National Interpretation of the 1933 Famine,” in The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), ch. 7; and Graziosi, Andrea, Hajda, Lubomir A. and Hryn, Halyna (eds.), After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine on Ukraine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). There is an interesting debate between Russian historians (V. Kondrashin, V. P. Danilov, N. Ivnitskii, I. Zelenin) who consider the famines of 1931–33 in Kazakhstan, the Volga region, the north Caucasus and Ukraine as a “tragedy of the Soviet countryside”) and Ukrainian historians (S. Kul’chyts’kyi, V. Vasylyev, Y. Shapoval, R. Serbyn, H. Boriak et al.) who single out the famine in Ukraine (“Holodomor”) as a genocide perpetrated by the Stalinist regime against the Ukrainian peasants in particular. On this debate, see Graziosi, Andrea, “Les famines soviétiques de 1931–1933 et le Holodomor ukrainien,” Cahiers du monde russe 46, 3 (2005), 453–73.

For defining contributions to the fields of women’s and gender history and the study of Bolshevik agendas of women’s liberation, see Lapidus, Gail Warshofsky, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), and Goldman, Wendy Z., Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For studies encompassing the longue durée of the women’s movement and women’s lives in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, see Stites, Richard, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism (1860–1930) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) and Engel, Barbara Alpern, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

The works devoted to prominent figures of the Bolshevik working women’s movement include Clements, Barbara Evans, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Farnsworth, Beatrice, Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980); and Elwood, R. C., Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Wood, Elizabeth A.’s The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) focuses on the conflict-ridden history of the Women’s Department of the Secretariat of the Party Central Committee, its leaders and grassroots organizational work. On the Bolshevik-Soviet gender project of women’s emancipation in Muslim Central Asia, see Northrop, Douglas, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

On ramifications of Bolshevik visions in their compromised, defaulted variations in public policy, popular culture, and the workplace of the 1920s and 1930s, see Gorsuch, Anne E., “‘A Woman is Not a Man’: The Culture of Gender and Generation in Soviet Russia, 1921–1928,” Slavic Review 55, 3 (Fall 1996), 636–60; Naiman, Eric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Bonnell, Victoria, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Hoffmann, David L., “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34, 1 (Fall 2000), 35–54; Goldman, Wendy Z., Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Borenstein, Eliot, Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Bernstein, Frances L., The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007).

On the recent scholarship questioning the prevalent historical account about marked de-radicalization of Soviet gender agendas by the mid 1930s, see Krylova, Anna, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); also her “Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method,”Gender and History 28, 2 (2016), 307–23. On variegated representations of gender roles in Stalinist official culture, see Chatterjee, Choi, Soviet Heroines and Public Identities, 1930–1939 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), and Neary, Rebecca Balmas, “Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists’ Movement and the Soviet Culture of Daily Life, 1934–41,” Russian Review 58, 3 (1999), 396–412.

Surveys of the relationships between communism and nationalism include those devoted to Marxism such as Herod, Charles C., The Nation in the History of Marxian Thought: The Concept of Nations with History and Nations without History (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), and Connor, Walker, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), as well as to the history of communism, like Pons, Silvio, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). These relationships have also been analyzed by intellectuals like von Mises, Ludwig, Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of our Time [1919] (New York: New York University Press, 1983), Kohn, Hans, Living in a World Revolution: My Encounters with History (New York: Trident Press, 1964), or Seton-Watson, Hugh, Nationalism and Communism: Essays, 1946–1963 (New York: Praeger, 1964). In 1934 Rosdolsky, Roman, Engels and the “Nonhistoric” Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848 (Glasgow: Critique, 1986), reconsidered Marx’s and Engels’s view of the national question, on which also see Cummins, Ian, Marx, Engels and the National Movements (London: Croom Helm, 1980). Gallissot, René, “Nazione e nazionalità nei dibattiti del movimento operaio,” in Storia del marxismo, vol. II, Il marxismo nell’età della Seconda Internazionale (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 787–864, remains the best study of the Second International’s attitude toward the national question.

The Soviet pre-1939 experience has been the subject of important studies. Kappeler, Andreas, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (New York: Longman, 2001), is the key book on the Russian Empire, and Pipes, Richard, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954) still is the fundamental work on the civil war. I reviewed the evolution of the national question in Soviet history in “La ‘question nationale,’” in Histoire de l’URSS (Paris: PUF, 2010), while the best specific study on the topic remains Martin, Terry, An Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Also noteworthy are Smith, Jeremy, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Suny, Ronald G. and Martin, Terry (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Cadiot, Juliette, Le laboratoire imperial. Russie-URSS, 1860–1940 (Paris: CNRS, 2007).

Valuable studies of specific questions are Bennigsen, Alexandre and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Chantal, Les mouvements nationaux chez les musulmans de Russie. Le “sultangalievisme” au Tatarstan (Paris: Mouton, 1960); Gitelman, Zvi, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Section of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Mace, James, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Pianciola, Niccolò, Stalinismo di frontiera. Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia centrale, 1905–1936 (Rome: Viella, 2009), while Gross, Jan T., Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), analyzes the use of the national question after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. As for Stalin, the articles quoted in the text must be read together with van Ree, Erik, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2002).

Borkenau, Franz, The Communist International [1938] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962); Narinsky, Mikhail and Rojahn, Jürgen (eds.), Centre and Periphery: The History of the Comintern in the Light of New Documents (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1996); Broué, Pierre, Histoire de l’Internationale communiste, 1919–1943 (Paris: Fayard, 1997); and Chubarian, A. O. (ed.), Istoriia kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala, 1919–1943. Dokumental’nye ocherki (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), introduce the history of the Third International, about which see also The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). On the Cominform, see Adibekov, G. M., Kominform i poslevoennaia Evropa, 1947–1956 (Moscow: Rossiia molodaia, 1994), and Procacci, G. et al. (eds.), The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences, 1947/1948/1949 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994).

Naimark, Norman M. and Gibianskii, Leonid (eds.), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Boulder: Westview, 1997), Ther, Philipp and Siljak, Ana (eds.), Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), and Service, Hugo, Germans to Poles: Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing After the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), detail the emergence of the socialist bloc in Europe, while Gibianskii, L. Ia., Sovetskii soiuz i novaia Yugoslaviia, 1941–1947 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), and Pirjevec, Joze, Tito in Tovariši (Ljubljana: Skupina Mladinska knjiga, 2011), are devoted to Yugoslavia, Tito’s, and Fejtö, François, A History of the People’s Democracies: Eastern Europe since Stalin (New York: Praeger, 1971), provides an overview of the evolution of socialist regimes, with Zwick, Peter, National Communism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983), looking especially at their relations with nationalism.

Bianco, Lucien, La Récidive. Révolution russe, révolution chinoise (Paris: Gallimard, 2014) throws light on the Chinese leadership’s relations with nationalism, while Luthi, Lorenz, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), analyzes the Sino-Soviet split. Engerman, David, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) looks at the value of the Soviet model for the leaders of the states emerging from decolonization. Laqueur, Walter Z., Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East (London: Routledge, 1961), pioneered the exploration of the topic in the Middle East, while Modak, Debnarayan, Dynamics of National Question in India: The Communist Approach (1942–64) (Kolkata: Progressive Publishers, 2006), and Keller, Edmond J., Revolutionary Ethiopia: From Empire to People’s Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), study communist attitudes toward the national question in two large multinational settings. Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), analyzes Moscow’s relationships with socialist regimes in the Third World in the 1970s.

Agursky, Mikhail, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder: Westview, 1987), Brandenberger, David, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), Brudny, Yitzhak, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Mitrokhin, Nikolai, Russkaia partiia. Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953–1985 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003), reconstruct the emergence of strong nationalist trends within the Soviet Russian elite, while Zaslavsky, Victor and Brym, Robert, Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), and Slezkine, Yuri, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, 2 (1994), 414–52, provide an account of the late Soviet approach to the national question. Beissinger, Mark R., Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), is still the best study of the national factor in the collapse of the USSR, on which see also Suny, Ronald G., The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Szporluk, Roman, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000), and Plokhii, Serhii, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2014), focus upon Russian–Ukrainian relationships, while Pirjevec, Joze, Le guerre jugoslave, 1991–1999 (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), is a solid study of the Yugoslavian catastrophe. Laruelle, Marlène, Le rouge et le noir. Extrême droite et nationalisme en Russie (Paris: CNRS, 2007), follows the evolution of the interconnection between communism and nationalism in Russia after 1991.

Recently the study of the history of youth has experienced a real boom. Historians have begun to approach youth as a social and cultural construct as well as an object and engine of change. For a general introduction to the historical study of youth as a social and cultural construct see Levi, Giovanni and Schmitt, Jean-Claude (eds.), A History of Young People in the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), vol. I, “Introduction,” 1–11.

World War I and the revolutionary upheaval that followed it became an important formative experience for many young people in Europe. They brought the politics of generation to the forefront in the interwar period. The seminal intellectual history of the “generation of 1914,” the European youth born around 1900, is Robert Wohl’s The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), in which the author demonstrates the commonality in their experience and thinking. More specifically focused on socialist youth is Jørgensen, Thomas E.’s article “The Purest Flame of the Revolution: Working Class Youth and Left Wing Radicalism in Germany and Italy during the Great War,” Labour History 50, 1 (2009), 19–38, which deals with the radicalizing force of World War I. In my article “‘Youth, It’s Your Turn!’: Generations and the Fate of the Russian Revolution (1917–1932),” Journal of Social History 46, 2 (2012), 279–87, I analyze the lasting legacy of the Russian Civil War on communist youth. I demonstrate how the Komsomol became an outlet in which generational tensions were nurtured and expressed throughout the 1920s, producing a constituency for the Stalinist turn.

The standard study on the development of the early Communist Youth International is Cornell, Richard, Revolutionary Vanguard: The Early Years of the Communist Youth International, 1914–1924 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). Following a similar approach, primarily based on an analysis of stenographic reports of Komsomol congresses is Fisher, Ralph T.’s Pattern of Soviet Youth: A Study of the Congresses of the Komsomol, 1918–1954 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). More recently a number of studies on the interwar Komsomol have appeared that make extensive use of archival material. They examine the complicated interchange between ideology, policy and reality in the league’s evolution and practices as well as explore the relationship between representation and the reality of Soviet youth: Gorsuch, Anne E., Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Neumann, Matthias, The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 2011); Neumann, Matthias, “Revolutionizing Mind and Soul? Soviet Youth and Cultural Campaigns during the New Economic Policy (1921–8),” Social History 33, 3 (2008), 243–67; Guillory, Sean, “Profiles in Exhaustion and Pomposity: The Everyday Life of Komsomol Cadres in the 1920s,”Carl Beck Papers 2303 (2013). Gorsuch’s monograph also includes an excellent chapter on gender and generation. On the issue of class identity, vanguardism and rural expansion see Neumann, Matthias, “Class Ascription and Class Identity: Komsomol’tsy and the Policy of Class During NEP,” Revolutionary Russia 19, 2 (2006), 175–96; and Tirado, Isabel, “The Komsomol and the Young Peasants: The Dilemma of Rural Expansion 1921–1925,” Slavic Review 52, 3 (1993), 460–76, and “The Komsomol’s Village Vanguard: Youth and Politics in the NEP Countryside,” Russian Review 72 (2013), 427–46. On the growing militarization of Soviet youth in the 1930s, see Bernstein, Seth, Raised Under Stalin: Young Communists and The Defense of Socialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

The literature on the communist youth movement in other European countries is less extensive. The two key works for Britain are Waite, Michael’s “Young People and Formal Political Activity. A Case Study: Young People and Communist Politics in Britain 1920–1991: Aspects of the Young Communist League” (M.Phil. dissertation, University of Lancaster, 1992), which uses archival material as well as oral history interviews, and Linehan, Thomas’s chapter on young communists in Communism in Britain 1920–1930: From the Cradle to the Grave (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Withney, Susan B.’s monograph Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) provides a fascinating analysis of the politics of generation in interwar France. The standard work on the communist youth movement in Weimar Germany is Köster, Barbara’s “‘Die Junge Garde des Proletariat’: Untersuchungen zum Kommunistischen Jugendverband Deutschlands in der Weimarer Republik” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bielefeld, 2005). A succinct overview can also be found in Mallmann, Klaus Michael, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik. Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionaeren Bewegung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), 182–93.

On the issue of revolutionary internationalism and practices of transnational solidarity the reader should consult the ground-breaking works by Albert, Gleb J., including Das Charisma der Weltrevolution: Revolutionärer Internationalismus in der frühen Sowjetgesellschaft, 1917–1927 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2017), “‘German October Is Approaching’: Internationalism, Activists, and the Soviet State in 1923,” Revolutionary Russia 24, 2 (2011), 111–42, and “‘To Help the Republicans Not Just by Donations and Rallies, but with the Rifle’: Militant Solidarity with the Spanish Republic in the Soviet Union, 1936–1937,” European Review of History – Revue européenne d’histoire 21, 4 (2014), 501–18.

There are many fascinating autobiographies of former communists which cover their formative years in the communist youth movement. For the Soviet Union the most intriguing account has been provided by Kopelev, Lev in his autobiography The Education of a True Believer (London: Wildwood House, 1981). Similarly, the British Marxist and historian Eric Hobsbawm, vividly recollects his experience of youth in interwar Europe in Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Abacus, 2003). Buber-Neumann, Margarete recalls her path through the KJVD, to the Comintern and into the whirlwind of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union in Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1957). For an interesting autobiography of a young French communist, see Figuères, Léo, Jeunesse militante: chronique d’un jeune communiste des anneés 30–50 (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1971).

Before the opening of the Russian archives, scholars interested in the communist experience and the internal life of communist parties had to rely chiefly on oral history and the memoirs of former communists. Some further light was cast on the Soviet Communist Party by the party archives of the Smolensk Oblast, captured by the invading Germans and deposited after the war at Harvard University. These provided the material for Fainsod, Merle’s classic study, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule [1958] (Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989), and Werth, Nicolas’s Être communiste en URSS sous Staline (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1981). In France, Kriegel, Annie, a former member, blazed a trail with her ethnological and sociological study of the French communists, who in her view formed a “party-society,” a party that was a society in itself: Les communistes français (Paris: Seuil, 1968) – translated as French Communists: Profile of a People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) – was several times reworked and expanded before achieving its final form in 1985. Pudal, Bernard, in his Prendre parti. Pour une sociologie historique du PCF (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1989), made use of Bourdieu’s praxeological sociology to analyze the role of Thorez as a model in activists’ identification with the party.

The opening of the Russian party archive (RGASPI) in 1990–91 brought into view the intense interaction and circulation of cadres between national parties and the Comintern in Moscow, and with it the transfer of Soviet practices to parties elsewhere. On these particular themes, see for example Studer, Brigitte, Un parti sous influence. Le Parti communiste, une section du Komintern, 1931 à 1939 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1994) and Hoppe, Bert, In Stalins Gefolgschaft. Moskau und die KPD 1928–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007). In exploiting the Russian and Western archives to explore the diversity of Communism, Dreyfus, Michel et al. (eds.), Le siècle des communismes (Paris: Seuil, 2004), proved to be a seminal work. It was followed by others that drew on the surprising wealth of personal files and autobiographical materials made available to reveal new aspects of communist life, from transnational exchanges to the biographical tabs kept on party members and the construction of communist subjectivities. Morgan, Kevin, Cohen, Gideon and Flinn, Andrew’s Communists and British Society 1920–1991 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2007) offers a collective biography of British communists; Studer, Brigitte, The Transnational World of the Cominternians (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), looks at the experience of European communists in Moscow, Stalin’s and Kirschenbaum, Lisa A., International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), at that of American communists, focusing on Spain; while Pennetier, Claude and Pudal, Bernard (eds.), Le sujet communiste. Identités militantes et laboratoires du “moi” (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014), offers a recent overview of the construction of communist identities and subjectivities.

On the rise of the category of “intelligentsia” in Russia, see the original interpretation in Knight, Nathaniel, “Was the Intelligentsia Part of the Nation? Visions of Society in Post-Emancipation Russia,” Kritika 7, 4 (2006), 733–58. On the strain of anti-intelligentsia sentiment within Russian social democracy, see Shatz, Marshall S., Jan Wacław Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989).

On intellectuals and the Bolshevik Revolution, see Burbank, Jane, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Finkel, Stuart, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Public Sphere (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

The historiography on Soviet intellectuals across the range of cultural and scientific fields and professions is truly vast. Fundamental works in English include Fitzpatrick, Sheila (ed.), The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Bailes, Kendall, Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Clark, Katerina, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Krementsov, Nikolai, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Dobrenko, Evgeny, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Zubok, Vladislav, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Soviet Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

The literature on fellow travelers and foreign intellectual visitors to the USSR is large, although heavily focused on Europe and the United States at the expense of other regions. The best-known “pre-archival” work is Hollander, Paul, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, 4th edn. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), which advanced a monocausal explanation centered on intellectuals’ alienation from their home society at odds with the present essay. A classic work particularly strong on biographical factors is Caute, David, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). More recent studies include Coeuré, Sophie, La grande lueur à l’Est: les Français et l’Union soviétique, 1917–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 1999); Engerman, David, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Economic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Stern, Liudmilla, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–40: From Red Square to the Left Bank (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); and Carew, Joy, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). For an interesting take on a non-European case, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila and Rasmussen, Carolyn (eds.), Political Tourists: Australian Visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008).

Clark, Katerina’s Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) reinterprets the international dimensions of Soviet culture and politics. Soviet cultural diplomacy, image-making and the reception of foreign intellectuals are treated in David-Fox, Michael, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Golubev, A. V., “… Vzgliad na zemliu obetovannuiu”: Iz istorii sovetskoi kul’turnoi diplomatii 1920–1930-x godov (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2004); and Fayet, Jean-François, VOKS: Le laboratoire helvétique. Histoire de la diplomatie culturelle soviétique dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Chêne-Bourg: Georg Editeur, 2014).

Works on party-state policies toward the domestic intelligentsia include an important collection of documents edited by Artizov, Andrei and Naumov, Oleg, Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia: Dokumenty TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul’turnoi politiki 1917–1953 gg. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 1999), translated in abridged form by Miriam Schwartz with commentaries by Clark, Katerina and Dobrenko, Evgeny (eds.), Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

The literature on Russian émigré intellectuals after 1917 is large. The seminal synthetic work on the emigration is Raeff, Marc, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Literature on the fascination of fascist intellectuals and German “National Bolsheviks” with communism is scattered, but see the references in David-Fox, Michael, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), ch. 7, and Laruelle, Marlène (ed.), Unknown Pages of Russian History: Russia and the Fascist Temptation (forthcoming).

Study of the non-Russian intelligentsias of the USSR and their international roles is also fragmented but developing in promising ways. The most suggestive works include (on the Ukrainian case) Yekelchyk, Serhy, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian–Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), and Amar, Tarik Cyril, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); and (on Turkestan and Central Asia), Khalid, Adeeb, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Khalid, Adeeb, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

There are a number of important studies of the founding Lenin cult focusing on its Soviet aspect and the immediate aftermath of Lenin’s death. Tumarkin, Nina, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), stresses the Russian roots of the phenomenon at the expense of its communist character. Ennker, Benno, Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion (Cologne: Bohlau Verlag, 1997), uses Soviet archives to demonstrate the cult’s conscious instrumentalization by Lenin’s successors. Velikanova, Olga, Making of an Idol: On Uses of Lenin (Göttingen: Muster-Schmidt Verlag, 1996), incorporates a longer perspective and has a valuable documentation but suffers from a poor-quality translation.

Writings on the Stalin cult also focus on its Soviet aspect, and surprisingly there seems to be no major study of Stalin as an international figure. Plamper, Jan, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemies of Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), is authoritative on Soviet visual culture. The essays in Davies, Sarah and Harris, James (eds.), Stalin: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) offer a broad perspective including David Brandenberger’s discussion of the all-important cult biography. Stalin is also discussed at length in Cohen, Yves’s monumental Le Siècle des chefs. Une histoire transnationale du commandement et de l’autorité (1890–1940) (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2013), a comparative and transnational study of the broader fixation on the figure of the leader in different societies and fields of activity. Cohen does also register the importance of the international aspect of Stalin’s cult, but this falls beyond the already monumental scope of his own treatment.

A number of recent studies of non-Soviet cults touch at least in passing on the Comintern period. Apor, Balázs, The “Invisible Shining”: The Cult of Mátyás Rákosi in Stalinist Hungary, 1945–1956 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2017), is excellent on the later state cult though it deals only briefly with the earlier period. While focusing on the period of the Cultural Revolution, Leese, Daniel’s Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) offers important insight into the earlier development of Mao’s cult in an international as well as a national context. Adopting a political religions perspective, Lemmons, Russel’s Hitler’s Rival: Ernst Thälmann in Myth and Memory (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013) deals with both the Weimar phase as party leader and the Nazi-era phase as political prisoner, as well as the importance of the posthumous Thälmann cult in communist East Germany.

The best collections and overviews tend to reflect the closed-society perspective of the state personality cult. Apor, Balázs, Behrends, Jan C., Jones, Polly and Rees, E. A. (eds.), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), covers a variety of East European cases and includes outstanding contributions on the Stalin cult. Heller, Klaus and Plamper, Jan (eds.), Personality Cults in Stalinism – Personenkulte im Stalinismus (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2004), also extends to fascist comparators and has a helpful introduction outlining the notion of the “modern personality cult.” Ennker, Benno and Hein-Kircher, Heidi (eds.), Der Führer im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2010), also includes comparators of the authoritarian right. The same volume contains a useful exposition of the notion of the international cult community by Alexey Tikhomirov on Stalin and the GDR: “The Stalin Cult Between Center and Periphery: The Structures of the Cult Community in the Empire of Socialism, 1949–1956 – the Case of GDR” (297–324). Morgan, Kevin and Worley, Matthew (eds.), Twentieth Century Communism 1 (2009), is a special issue on “Communism and the Leader Cult” bringing together work on nonruling parties including those in Belgium, Finland, Vietnam, France and Brazil. Morgan, Kevin, International Communism and the Cult of the Individual: Leaders, Tribunes and Martyrs Under Lenin and Stalin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), builds upon this in attempting a transnational and comparative study of the type presented more summarily here. The same account also provides full references for some of the arguments that are here only briefly alluded to.

The first history of the KPD was written by Flechtheim, Ossip K., a former member who went on to a distinguished academic career in postwar West Germany. Die KPD in der Weimarer Republik [1949] (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969) is still worth reading. In the same year as Flechtheim’s book was reprinted, Weber, Hermann published Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus: Die Stalinisierung der KPD in der Weimarer Republik, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969), an indispensable work and one of his many books and articles on the KPD, its successor, the Socialist Unity Party, and the GDR. However, Weber’s emphasis on the Soviet Union as the ultimate source for every development in the history of the KPD is limiting.

In the 1990s a new generation of scholars began emphasizing the social and cultural history of German communism without neglecting its political history. They rooted the development of the KPD in its German as well as its Soviet context. Critical here are Mallmann, Klaus-Michael, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik: Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), and Weitz, Eric D., Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Pathbreaking in this regard is Rosenhaft, Eve, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Grossmann, Atina is illuminating on the KPD’s involvement in the Depression-era struggle for abortion reform in Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Swett, Pamela, Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), is also noteworthy, as is, from a different perspective, Fischer, Conan J., German Communists and the Rise of Nazism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

Much of the literature since the late 1990s has focused on the history of the German Democratic Republic, often with little attention to the party’s roots in the Weimar period. Mario Kessler, in contrast, has authored a host of works that cover the long span of the twentieth century. Most concern dissident and exiled communists. Particularly relevant for the Weimar period, but also for the history of the Cold War and the beginnings of the West German New Left, is Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten (1895–1961) (Vienna: Böhlau, 2013). Nettl, J. P.’s biography Rosa Luxemburg, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) is a classic, even if he exaggerates her democratic proclivities. (A one-volume abridged version is available.) Bois, Marcel provides a history of the KPD left in Kommunisten gegen Hitler und Stalin: Die Linke Opposition der KPD in der Weimarer Republik. Eine Gesamtdarstellung (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2014).

The German Left and the Weimar Republic: A Selection of Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2014), translated and edited by Ben Fowkes, is an excellent collection of primary sources, as is, more extensively, Weber, Hermann, Der deutsche Kommunismus: Dokumente 1915–1945 (Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1963).

The revolutionary history of the Chinese Communist Party has been the object of numerous studies. The opening of the secret Comintern archives caused by the collapse of the communist system in the USSR facilitated the documentary study of CCP history. Many new documents became available. The Russian scholars compiled the most comprehensive collection that simultaneously came out in Russia, Germany, China and Taiwan: Titarenko, M. L. et al. (eds.), VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty, 5 vols. (Moscow: AO “Buklet”, 1994–2007). Saich, Tony (ed.), The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), is also valuable as an English-language translation of printed Chinese documents. Klein, Donald and Clark, Anne, Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism. 1921–1969, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) is still the best Western encyclopedia of CCP activists.

For the detailed documentary analysis of the foundation of CCP history, see the Maring’s archives published in Saich, Tony, The Origins of the First United Front in China: The Role of Sneevliet (Alias Maring), 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1991). Recent research that received worldwide recognition is Yoshihiro, Ishikawa, The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party, trans. Fogel, Joshua A. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Kuo-t’ao, Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party. Volumes One & Two of the Autobiography of Chang Kuo-t’ao (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1971), is the most detailed first-hand account of CCP history in the 1920s and the 1930s. The Bolshevik impact on the CCP is meticulously examined in Pantsov, Alexander, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). This book is almost entirely based on archives. An outstanding study of the training of CCP cadres in Moscow, based on archive sources, is Spichak, Daria A., Kitaiskii avangard Kremlia: Revoliutsionery Kitaia v moskovskikh shkolakh Kominterna (1921–1939) (Moscow: “Veche,” 2012).

For a detailed account of the 1920s communist movement in the countryside, see McDonald, Angus W. Jr., The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution: Elites and the Masses in Hunan Province, China, 1911–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), and for a comprehensive analysis on CCP activity in cities, see Smith, Stephen A., A Road Is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–1927 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000).

A history of the Soviet movement in China is examined in a monumental study: Tso-liang, Hsiao, Power Relations Within the Chinese Communist Movement, 1930–1934, 2 vols. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), and the role of the hakka in the Chinese communist revolution is discussed in full detail in the magisterial article by Erbaugh, Mary S., “The Secret History of the Hakkas: The Chinese Revolution as a Hakka Enterprise,” China Quarterly 132 (1992), 937–68. The fullest documentary account on the CC CCP clandestine work in Shanghai in the 1930s is Litten, Frederick S., “The Noulens Affair,” China Quarterly 138 (1994), 492–512. For the Comintern’s role in the Chinese communist movement in the 1930s and 1940s, see Banac, Ivo (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933–1949, trans. Hedges, Jane T., Sergay, Timothy D. and Faion, Irina (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

The role of the CCP in the Sino-Japanese War is thoroughly examined in the most recent study: Gatu, Dagfinn, Village China at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (Vancouver: UBS Press, 2007). The classic work Kataoka, Tetsuya, Resistance and Revolution in China: The Communists and the Second United Front (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) is still quite useful. For Mao’s concept of “Sinicized Marxism,” see Vladimirov, P. P., Osobyi raion Kitaia, 1942–1945 (Moscow: APN, 1975) and Wylie, Raymond F., The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch’en Po-ta, and the Search for Chinese Theory 1935–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).

Levine, Steven I., Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria, 1945–1948 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), is the pathbreaking work on the CCP’s last civil war against the Guomindang. The most recent studies based on the new archival documents are Odd Westad, Arne, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) and Heinzig, Dieter, The Soviet Union and Communist China 1945–1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004).

For Mao Zedong’s rise to power in the CCP see his most recent biography by Pantsov, Alexander V. with Levine, Steven I., Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012) based on previously unknown archives. Mao’s writings are also of great importance for the understanding of the history of the CCP. The most valuable collections are Tse-tung, Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, 4 vols. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967) and Schram, Stuart (ed.), Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, 7 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992–2005).

The literature on Central Asia and Mongolia was transformed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed historians to ask new questions and to answer them on the basis of unprecedented access to the archives. Nevertheless, the historiography remains thin and spotty, with large areas still awaiting monographic treatment. For developments in Central Asia in the late tsarist period, see Khalid, Adeeb, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Brower, Daniel, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). Also useful is Sabol, Steven, Russian Colonization and the Genesis of Kazak National Consciousness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Sahadeo, Jeff, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), provides an excellent account of settler society and covers the era of the revolution. The complex politics of the revolution in Turkestan are explored by Buttino, Marco, La rivoluzione capovolta. L’Asia centrale tra il crollo dell’impero zarista e la formazione dell’URSS (Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2003), and Agzamkhodzhaev, Saidakbar, Istoriia Turkestanskoi avtonomii: Turkiston muxtoryiati (Tashkent: Toshkent Islom universteti, 2006).

For the early Soviet period, Khalid, Adeeb, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), provides the most comprehensive account of events in Turkestan and Bukhara in 1917 and the decade and a half that followed it. Kamp, Marianne, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), and Northrop, Douglas, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), offer contrasting takes on the hujum. On Kazakhstan, Pianciola, Niccolò, Stalinismo di frontiera. Colonizzazione agricola, stermino dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia centrale (1905–1936) (Rome: Viella, 2009) provides a sweeping account that spans the revolution. The political history of the revolutionary era is recounted by Amanzholova, D., Na izlome: Alash v etnopoliticheskoi istorii Kazakhstana (Almaty: Taymas, 2009). There is still very little on the 1920s in Kazakhstan, but two excellent monographs offer detailed accounts of collectivization and sedentarization: Ohayon, Isabelle, Le sédentarisation des Kazakhs dans l’URSS de Staline. Collectivisation et changement social (1928–1945) (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2006), and Cameron, Sarah, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (forthcoming). Excellent studies exist on the other republics in the early Soviet period. See Edgar, Adrienne, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); İğmen, Ali, Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Loring, Benjamin, “Building Socialism in Kyrgyzstan: Nation-Making, Rural Development, and Social Change, 1921–1932” (unpublished thesis, Brandeis University, 2008).

The foundational texts for the study of Soviet nationalities policies are Slezkine, Yuri, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, 2 (1994), 414–52; Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). For the national-territorial delimitation of Central Asia, Haugen, Arne’s The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) is indispensable. There is no adequate treatment of Soviet attempts at “revolutionizing the East,” but the relevant sections of Roy, M. N.’s Memoirs (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1964) offer fascinating insights.

Mongolia has not shared in the post-Soviet archival bonanza and the output on the years of the establishment of communism is quite thin. See Kaplonski, Christopher, The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty, and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014). Also useful is Morozova, Irina Y., The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2002). The best source on the Baron Ungern episode is Sunderland, Willard’s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).