Looking for book on Russia / Bolshevik era.

Cafe Society
1

I was looking for a nice fat book like Berlin: City of Scars or maybe Battle Cry of Freedom, or Fox Butterfield’s China. My target: Russia, particularly during the era of Soviet dominance and Stalin’s reign.

I’m mostly focused on what daily life was like for people - what they read or ate, and where and how they lived. But I also want to know the “dirty” version of events - the nasty truths behind the Soviet mask of a perfect conformist society with no “deviants.” I wanmt to know about both crime and coping, gulags and games. How did people enjoy themselves in the harsh Soviet regime, and what dangers did they face?

2

Stalin’s biographies by Simon Sebag Montefiore are great, as is the quicker read “Koba the Dread” by Martin Amis

3

I’m currently reading “The Gulag Archipelago” by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. It sounds like it is just what you’re looking for - all the dirty secrets that Russia didn’t want the rest of the world to know, written by people who survived them. I believe Solzhenitsyn won a Nobel Prize for this book. It’s a non-fiction work, and not fantastically entertaining, but it would be a fantastic companion for any fiction set in that era.