Good Books About the Fall of the Soviet Empire:
I read and enjoyed David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, but I was wondering if there were other good ones, especially ones that covered slightly different territory (such as what happened in Eastern Europe). If you have some recommendations, please post them in the comments. Thanks!
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World
The Fall of the House of Usher.
While the book is out of print, you can easily get it used.
This stuff may be old hat to many of you but it was an eye opener to me!
John
RUSSIA'S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION: POLITICAL CHANGE FROM GORBACHEV TO PUTIN, by Mike McFaul
POWER AND PURPOSE: AMERICAN POLICY TOWARD RUSSIA AFTER THE COLD WAR, also by Mike McFaul and James Goldgeier, for an overview of U.S. policy towards Russia in the 1990s.
Prof. McFaul has also written very good analyses of the Russian elections in 1996 and 1999/2000. I am a big fan of his. ;)
GORBACHEV AND YELTSIN AS LEADERS, by George Breslauer
AFTER THE SOVIET UNION, an anthology edited by Tim Colton. (This one is probably a bit dated, but it was a good summary of how people were thinking about the fall of the Soviet Union as it happened.)
THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION, by Geoffrey Hosking (same comment).
There was an excellent article by Janos Kornai, a Hungarian economist at Harvard, in an anthology published around 1989. Unfortunately, I can't remember the title, but it's probably google-able. The article presented a game-theoretic model of how revolutions can occur unexpectedly. In light of the color revolution phenomenon, it is worth a re-read.
THE MAGIC LANTERN, by Timothy Garten Ash, which focuses more on Eastern Europe
DEMOCRACY DERAILED IN RUSSIA, by Steven Fish. (This one focuses less on the fall of the Soviet Union and more on the rise of Putin, but it is the best recent book on Russia that I've read.)
INSIDE PUTIN'S RUSSIA, by Andrew Jack, while it is more journalistic and lacks cutting-edge analysis, offers a good summary of the ascendency of Putin and the "twilight of the oligarchs," as he colorfully puts it.
There are a bunch of interesting books about Central Asia, too, which I personally find more interesting given that it, along with the Caucasus, is where the post-Soviet space clashes with political Islam. If people are interested, I'd be happy to post a separate list of books on Central Asia.
(I realize Judt is a bugbear to some at the VC, but there is always something to be said for ideological diversity.)
Since merely putting the books on my "to read" list won't actually teach me anything, how is it that the Soviet Union so relatively neatly fell apart into the component republics? Why those borders and not others? Why, during the building of the empire, did so much, especially the east, become part of Russia, and remains so today, while other parts were added as separate bits? And why is Kaliningrad part of Russia?
The short answer is that the then-presidents of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian SSRs got together at Belovezhskaya Puscha in December 1991 and declared the Soviet Union dead. The Central Asian countries did not want this, because their leaders were highly Sovietized (and still are; their tactics in avoiding "color revolutions" involve cozying up to Moscow), but it was presented to them as a fait accompli.
Why did people respect these borders? I basically think that at the time, people were defining their national identies in cultural terms. Thus, the Slavic republics did not particularly care that the Central Asians went their own way, and in fact they wanted them to.
There were three instances of significant violent conflict in the post-Soviet space, and fortunately, all three were essentially on the periphery. These were the Azerbaijan-Armenia war; Tajikistan; and the Transdniestr region of Moldova. Two of these easily fit the model of people wanting to define their identities in cultural terms. The Armenian-Azeri clash was a pure cultural clash; the pro-Russia Transdniestr Republic was about nervousness over a possible unification between Moldova and Rumania. Tajikistan was essentially a failed state with a lot of local clan-based politics that erupted into civil war and became a protectorate of Russia.
What is more interesting are the dogs that didn't bark -- why didn't northern Kazakhstan try to split away and join the Russian Federation, or Tajik-speaking Uzbekistanis try to join Tajikistan?
As a reader who has done graduate work in Russian and Polish history at Columbia and Harvard, I have to tell you that much of what has been recommended, excluding the Hosking and Kenez books, are questionable, somewhat amateurish histories often focused on the international relations or espionage aspects. If you want a real history written by a serious historian, you'd do better by looking at Martin Malia's "The Soviet Tragedy."
Be aware that there are strong agendas still in Soviet-Russian studies. Malia, a late professor at UC Berkeley was from a centrist school and played a role himself in the collapse of the Soviet Union under the pseudonym Z.
From the right-wing camp, Richard Pipes' work is the gold standard, although I can't think of a book of his that deals specifically with the collapse of the Soviet Union other than his astounding 1954 doctral disseratation, The Formation of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Harvard UP), which was the first work to look at the National question in the Soviet Union (at a time when Soviet studies often involved analyzing who was standing where on the podium in Red Square on May Day). Simply put, Pipes called the break up of the Soviet Union on national lines almost four decades in advance, when the ideological differences between Beria and Molotov were thought to matter.
I won't bother listing any of the leftist, Stalin-apologist works by J. Arch Getty, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Moshe Lewin and the like.