What's the best book or set of authors that deal with the history of the Soviet Union that you know of?
>>25353381Zubok is interesting.>The Soviet Union was one of the strangest empires that ever existed. It relied on a revolutionary ideology that claimed to banish oppression and exploitation, yet was imposed by force of arms and cunning wherever possible. As Vladislav Zubok's book shows, this ideology was not secondary to the Soviet's oppressive empire, but central even to its own architects and shaped their vision of its work. They looked towards Marxism-Leninism to predict supposed economic disasters in the West, and to guarantee the universality of working class revolutionary. Zubok shows that this modernizing ideology did underpin an empire in the classic sense, one that radiated out from Moscow and by 1970s embraced a good portion of the globe. His work also shows, though, that its rulers were always at war among themselves about what Marxism meant for empire-building.>Zubok's new history, relying on newly open Soviet archives, should bury any lingering notions that the "Cold War" was forced on the Soviet Union by an expansionist and recalcitrant America. From 1945, Stalin moved to claim parts of Turkey (for Soviet Armenia), Northern Iran, and the Sakhalin Islands, not to mention Germany and all of Eastern Europe. He did know tactical retreats however. He withdrew from Manchuria only because he falsely assumed the Chinese communists to whom he gifted it would be under his thumb. He gave up fighting for Greece because he thought it provided little strategic value. Despite future premiers' attempts to convince the West of their good intentions, they all held to a fundamental "revolutionary-imperial paradigm" as Zubok calls it, that demanded expansion. Only Gorbachev, who believed that socialism could win abroad purely by the power of its ideas, dissented from this consensus. Thus, as Zubok said, the empire under Gorbachev committed suicide by failing to use force to sustain itself. Ideas brought the empire about, and also brought about its downfall.OS:https://youtu.be/pO1HC8pHZw0
>>25353381Thats a massive topic. What are you looking for in particular?
>>25353381This and Bogdanov
>>25355139Yeah, that Russian surrealist stuff. There's a movie called Zerograd from the 80s that is so this:https://youtu.be/trD6eAbB7m8I follow a Russian guy that finds Soviet-era propaganda imagery to be really funny and he re-renders it in MS Paint. A lot of weirdness about the USSR. Snail on the Slope is peak weird:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_on_the_Slope
