Books like A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia — picked by fans

The poet Langston Hughes’s autobiography engagingly recounts his travels to Cuba, Haiti, Japan, and Spain during the Civil War. The book's centerpiece is his 1931-1932 trip to the Soviet Union. He visited as part of a contingent of twenty-two African Americans hired to make a film on race relations in the United States.

The film project never panned out, but Hughes took advantage of the situation to visit Soviet Central Asia. He understood that his hosts tried too hard to convince American visitors of the progress made under the Soviet regime. But his autobiography also conveys the wonderful strangeness of being in a country officially committed to antiracism, where people of color had opportunities for education and advancement.  

The humorists Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s American travelogue remains a delight to read. Unlike other Soviet visitors, the coauthors, famous for their satirical novel The Twelve Chairs, leavened their criticism of American vulgarity, inequality, racism, and greed with a large helping of self-deprecating wit.

Their account of eating enchiladas, which they described as cut with gunpowder and topped with nitroglycerin, made me laugh out loud. This book offers a surprising view of Depression-era American and Soviet attitudes toward it.  

This book allows readers to see the United States through the eyes of six visitors from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. A big part of the collection's appeal is that the authors were not neutral observers but committed socialists. Armed with preconceptions about capitalism, they offer provocative perspectives on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

The book includes work by three authors little-known in English translation (Grigory Machet, Vladimir Korolenko, and Vladimir Bogoraz) and travelogues by three famous writers, the novelist Maxim Gorky, who visited in 1906, and the Soviet poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin, who visited in the 1920s. 

In 1980, the novelist Vassily Aksyonov, whose hipster characters loved rock’n’roll and all things American, fell afoul of the Soviet state; stripped of his Soviet citizenship while in the United States, he decided to stay.

His memoir chronicles his efforts to make sense of a country that often failed to match his idealized preconceptions. Like Ilf and Petrov, whose travelogue was one of his points of reference, Aksyonov undertook a road trip from New York to California and back.

He was sometimes overawed by American technology, critical of American cultural vacuity, and able to laugh at his own disorientation. His first thought when he saw rats in Washington, DC, was that they must be pets, maybe gerbils.    

I don’t enjoy reading theory and I love reading a good story. Somehow, Golubev managed to write a book in which he makes theory accessible and tells a series of unexpected, fascinating tales about how Soviet people from the 1950s on interacted with everything from model planes and boats to stairwells and televisions.

It is difficult to describe what a weird and fun book this is – most attempts to do so would make it sound esoteric and focused on theory, but this is no ordinary book. It features a cast of characters as diverse as bodybuilders, wayward youth, and Soviet psychics whose stories are told through stuff. 

The Brexit debate in Britain became bogged down in sentiment and myths.

All sorts of people brought up features of imagined history and former glories. Much of it was baloney, but it was not always possible to detect. This scholarly, evidence-based book guided me to a new understanding and appreciation of how my homeland developed over the 20th Century; it overturned some long-held assumptions.

I don’t believe anyone who wishes to understand those times can ignore this book.

This middle-grade memoir written and illustrated by Eugene Yelchin is hands down one of my favorite books in any category, period.

It is a short but rich story with layers of setting, from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the courtyard of the narrator’s communal apartment building, to his private world under the family table in their one-room apartment. I laughed out loud, except for when I was crying.

I like this book because Cohen writes about what happened and what could have happened―if Washington had chosen alternative foreign policies in its relations with the former Soviet Union and Russia. As I argued in Surviving the Millennium, this kind of approach is not “counter-factual” because it explores realistic policy alternatives made at the time that represent the paths not taken.

But sometimes, those alternative paths are actually implemented later in new circumstances, so they are part of the historical record and not “counter” the facts. I believe Cohen is right: The US lost a number of opportunities that could have brought Washington and Moscow into a more positive relationship that would have reduced tensions during the Cold War―and now in preventing the present “second” Cold War.

Alexei Yurchak was part of the last Soviet generation—the last citizens born in the USSR who also lived through its collapse as adults. As the title suggests, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More is a profound and poetic work about truth and what we come to accept as real. Yurchak wants to explain the paradox that, while Soviet people knew by the 1970s that their government was telling them almost nothing but untruths, they were still shocked to their core by their country’s demise. What I loved most about the book was Yurchak’s descriptions of ordinary life among his generation (their intriguing taste for the operatic qualities of metal, the elaborate public pranks they staged, the way they treated life like performance art). With pathos and humor in equal measure, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More paints a brilliant portrait of a world that millions of… show more.

This book is a treasury of significant but unknown historical information. Even if you are well-read on the Cold War, the global perspective which the book gives will change what you think you know.

Structuring his argument chronologically and thematically, O. Westad makes the most comprehensive case for the Cold War’s impact on the Global South. I learned more about the modern history of Africa and East Asia and their subsequent decolonization and state-building than in any other book.

I also appreciated how the author does not take an ideological stance for the USA or the USSR but allows the readers to explore the political argumentation that arose in decisive historical moments.