Books like Little Golden America — 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.  

In 1929, George Counts, a professor at Columbia Teachers College who was sympathetic to Soviet experiments in education, bought a new Ford, shipped it to Moscow, and braved 10,000 kilometers of mostly unpaved roads to see the Soviet Union, then undertaking a massive industrialization drive.

I was aware that the Soviet highway system was underdeveloped but was nonetheless shocked to learn details like the fact that the Soviet Union had no gas pumps; Counts poured pails of gas into his car through a funnel. His road trip helped me better understand Americans’ optimism about the Soviet project and Soviet visitors’ love of American technology.

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.    

The follow-up to his acclaimed book What Belongs to You, Cleanness is a relatively short but gorgeously executed novel about an American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria. It gives snapshots of his relationship, as well as dating app hooks ups – for better or worse. Greenwell is one of the greatest writers of our time, and he turns each sentence beautifully. 

The Schneirs did not write the first book on the famous case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, New Yorkers who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 and put to death by the U.S. government in 1953. But for 20 years after its publication in 1965, their book became the definitive version of how the Rosenbergs had been victims of a grave miscarriage of justice, convicted of a crime “that never occurred”.

When the Schneirs published a revised version in 1983, its claims directly conflicted with those of another 1983 book, The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, which argued that during World War II, Julius Rosenberg had absolutely been a spy who shared atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. These divergent views led to a very public debate over the Rosenbergs’ guilt.

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.

The strength and resilience—or not—of the Russian economy is one of the most important questions in international affairs since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022: policymakers and observers alike are asking what effects the wide-ranging sanctions are having, and whether the Russian economy will implode, thwarting Moscow’s aggression. I’m not an economist so I need help understanding this, and I found this book to be the best introduction to this complex and difficult subject. Connolly also wrote a fine book on the impact of sanctions on Russia since 2014, but I think this one gives a concise and accessible assessment of the Russian economy as a whole, the role of the state, and Moscow’s attempted diversification of economic partners and integration into the global economy.

Soviet rule completely changed the relationship between Russia as the imperial metropole and Ukraine as a peripheral territory in the empire.

It was through Terry Martin’s classic that I first understood the enormous political implications of the Soviets’ intricate nationality policy that invested the state’s various ethnic groups with their own national educational and administrative institutions, all the while depriving them of the right to political self-determination.

Martin’s analysis is as sharp as his prose is crisp and his detailed understanding of the Bolsheviks’ political reasoning remains impressive over twenty years after the study’s publication.

Ilf and Petrov were Soviet-era funny men, comedians, and satirists who dared to tell a few truths about the horrors of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. They also wrote a delightful travel book (One Storied America) about the United States in the 1930s.

Lisa Kirschenbaum takes us behind Ilf and Petrov’s 10,000-mile American road trip. Kirschenbaum introduces us to the many people that Ilf and Petrov met in Depression-era America: immigrant workers, famous filmmakers, poets, and revolutionaries, and analyzes their experiences in the country of their dreams.

Kirschenbaum’s insightful observations about the Soviet Union and the United States during this seminal decade are worth considering today.