The Gulag Archipelago

Even Solzhenitsyn’s wife has come out to say that this is more a work of fantasy and folklore than meaningful historical record.

Bloodlands

Haven’t read this but I don’t have high hopes seeing as it appears to be a “double genocide” theory advocacy work.

Mao’s Great Famin

This book is garbage. It is an extended tabloid piece not a meaningful piece of academic work.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141009093707/http://chinastudygroup.net/2011/03/o-grada-review-of-dikotter/

The Great Terror

I’d recommend looking into Robert Conquest and his bias (putting it lightly).

The Gulag Archipelago is a work of fiction from a Nazi sympathizer, so that makes sense.

Even Wikipedia can’t hide that Timothy Snyder is a hack:

Omer Bartov wrote that “the book presents no new evidence and makes no new arguments”,[28] and in a highly critical review Richard Evans wrote that, because of its lack of causal argument, “Snyder’s book is of no use”, and that Snyder “hasn’t really mastered the voluminous literature on Hitler’s Germany”, which “leads him into error in a number of places” regarding the politics of Nazi Germany

Mao did not cause the famine, China was a slave-feudal society where famine was a recurring feature due to underdeveloped agriculture and poor technology to cope with weather disasters. Famine was abolished under socialism during Mao’s time, just not overnight.

As for Robert Conquest, he’s a hack who includes Nazis killed as “victims of communism,” as well as non-births as deaths.

Wild Swans is a personal biography and anecdote, not an actual work of historical analysis.

Cambodia wasn’t socialist and the overwhelming majority of socialists condemn Pol Pot, so I don’t care to offer anything here.

All in all, you essentially have some of the worst of liberal academia combined with essentially historical fiction. That’s not a good basis for any historical analysis.

For the Soviet Union, I recommend the following works:

• This Soviet World (1936)

• Human Rights in the Soviet Union (1984)

• Blackshirts and Reds (1997)

• Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend (Published in English in 2023)

And for China, the following:

• China’s Millions (1965)

• The East is Still Red (2023)

• People’s Republic of China

Bloodlands

To add to Cowbee’s list of recommendations, this book in particular is so bad that this exists:

Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False

Timothy Snyder, who holds a prestigious academic post, is famous for writing “Bloodlands”. And as it turns out, “Bloodlands” is full of lies. Not just “lies” in an ideological sense - it’s not an opinion that these are lies. Furr’s book catches Snyder lying about what his sources say. It catches Snyder inventing sources. Snyder omits details from his sources that would contradict his point, he gets page numbers, figures and statistics wrong, and he even uses Nazis and Nazi collaborators as sources without identifying them as such.

Going meticulously through every citation, tracing each claim through Polish, Ukrainian and Russian sources to its faked origin, Furr has proven that one of America’s most famous historians is a fraud. Snyder, who is considered an expert on the Stalin era, wrote a book about the crimes of Stalin, intent on equating Stalin with Hitler. But nearly every citation in his book is bogus. Each citation, noticed on its own in a History 101 term paper by a sharp TA, would get a freshman undergrad flunked, with an accompanying sobering lecture about whether they should be attending university at all. But Snyder sits happily in his tenured post at Yale. If you email him about “Blood Lies” he pretends not to have heard of it.