Shortest History of the Soviet Union

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the war-torn Russian Empire in a way that defied all predictions, including their own. Scarcely a lifespan later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed as accidentally as it arose. The decades between witnessed drama on an epic scale—the chaos and hope of revolution, famines and purges, hard-won victory in history’s most destructive war, and worldwide geopolitical conflict, all entwined around the dream of building a better society.This book is a lively and authoritative distillation of this complex history, told with vivid details, a grand sweep, and wry wit. The acclaimed historian Sheila Fitzpatrick chronicles the Soviet Age—its rise, reign, and unexpected fall, as well as its afterlife in today’s Russia. She underscores the many ironies of the Soviet experience: An ideology that claimed to offer humanity the reins of history wrangled with contingency. An avowedly internationalist and anti-imperialist state birthed an array of nationalisms. And a vision of transcending economic and social inequality and injustice gave rise to a country that was, in its way, surprisingly normal.Moving seamlessly from Lenin to Stalin to Gorbachev to Putin, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union provides an indispensable guide to one of the twentieth century’s great powers and the enduring fascination it still exerts.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Shortest History of the Soviet Union comes as close to a miracle as an academic book can. It is written for the general public that wants a clear overview of the topic but at the same time offers a concise and well-balanced synthesis of decades of Soviet studies. It is an immensely readable overview of the entire history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991, full of anecdotes and lively detail but also meeting the highest academic standards. It avoids all extreme political passions, but its pages are nonetheless permeated by a gut moral sense. When things get really horrible, only black comedy can adequately render the situation—every pathetic sense of tragedy is already a fake. In this vein, I would add that if I were a Stalinist, I would have said that those who ignore this book deserve . . . if not a Gulag sentence, then at least a year or two of harsh re-education!, Sheila Fitzpatrick does the seemingly impossible by telling the entire history of the Soviet Union (and even some post-Soviet history) in a single sitting. A clear and engaging account of Soviet history, this book is extremely readable, mind-bogglingly brief, and relentlessly insightful., Fitzpatrick is the foremost historian of the Soviet Union in the world. With admirable writing and strong organization, she compresses tons of excellent information into a very accessible text., Hugely authoritative.

Sheila Fitzpatrick is Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Russian History at the University of Chicago, honorary professor at the University of Sydney, and a professor in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University. Her many books include Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (1999), The Russian Revolution (third edition, 2007), and On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (2015), and she is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.