This is a select bibliography of English language books (including translations) and journal articles about the post-Stalinist era of Soviet history. A brief selection of English translations of primary sources is included. The sections "General surveys" and "Biographies" contain books; other sections contain both books and journal articles.

Works listed here are cited in the notes or bibliographies of scholarly sources. Each is published by an academic or major press, written by a recognized expert, or substantially reviewed in scholarly journals; borderline cases are omitted. A selection of primary sources are included. Many of the books below carry their own bibliographies; see the Further reading section for other bibliographies, and the External links section for historical sites, academic sites, and museums.

Citations follow APA style. Book have citations to academic journal or mainstream published reviews when available. For books only partly about the subject, relevant chapter or section titles are provided when useful and available. Translators of the original-language edition are included when possible. In cases where a title or name has appeared with more than one English spelling, the most recent published form is used and a footnote documents any earlier title under which the work appeared.

Overviews of Russian history

General surveys of Soviet history

These works contain significant overviews of the Post-Stalinist era. Cohen, S. F. (2011). Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917. New York: Oxford University Press. Figes, O. (2015). Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991. New York: Metropolitan Books. Heller, M., Nekrich, A. M., & Carlos, P. B. (1986). Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the present. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hosking, G. (1987). The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within (Second Edition). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kort, M. G. (2019). The Soviet Colossus (8th Edition). London, UK: Routledge. Kenez, P. (2017). A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to its Legacy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lewin, M. (2016). The Soviet Century. (G. Elliot, Ed.). New York: Verso. Malia, M. (1995). Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia 1917–1991. New York: Free Press. Mccauley, M. (2007). The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union. London, UK: Routledge. Nove, A. (1993). An Economic History of the USSR 1917-1991 (3rd Edition). London, UK: Arkana Publishing. Suny, R. G. (Ed.). (2006). The Cambridge History of Russia: Volume 3, The Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ——. (2013). The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Period studies Beschloss, M. R. (1991). The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963. New York: E. Burlingame Books. Cousins, N. (1972). The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev. New York: W.W. Norton. Dornberg, J. (1974). Brezhnev: The Masks of Power. New York: Basic Books. Hornsby, R. (2023). The Soviet Sixties. Yale University Press. McCauley, M. (Ed.). (1987). Khrushchev and Khrushchevism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McGlinchey, E. (2014). Fast Forwarding the Brezhnev Years: Osh in Flames. Russian History, 41(3), 373–391. Rutland, P., & Smolkin-Rothrock, V. (2014). Looking Back at Brezhnev. Russian History, 41(3), 299–306. Strong, J. W. (1971). The Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Kosygin: The Transition Years. New York: NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Tatu, M. (1974). Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin (2nd Edition). New York: Viking Press. Tompson, W. J. (2014). The Soviet Union under Brezhnev. London, UK: Routledge. Willerton, J. (1987). Patronage Networks and Coalition Building in the Brezhnev Era. Soviet Studies, 39(2), 175–204. Zubok, V. M. (2007). A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Social history

Cook, L. J. (1993). The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed: Welfare Policy and Workers' Politics from Brezhnev to Yeltsin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dimitrov, M. (2014). Tracking Public Opinion Under Authoritarianism: The Case of the Soviet Union During the Brezhnev Era. Russian History, 41(3), 329–353. Galmarini, M. (2016). The Right to Be Helped: Deviance, Entitlement, and the Soviet Moral Order (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Hopkins, M. W. (1985). Russia's Underground Press: The Chronicle of Current Events. New York: Praeger. Hosking, G. A. (1991). The Awakening of the Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kerblay, B., & Swyer, R. (1983). Modern Soviet Society. New York: Pantheon. Kozlov, D., & Gilburd, E. (Eds.). (2013). The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. LaPierre, B. (2012). Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Lorimer, F. (1979). The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects. New York: AMS Press. Mawdsley, E., & White, S. (2004). The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917–1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matthews, M. (1989). Patterns of Deprivation in the Soviet Union Under Brezhnev and Gorbachev. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. ———. (2011). Education in the Soviet Union: Policies and Institutions Since Stalin. London: Routledge. Millar, J. R. (1988). Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raleigh, D. (2011). Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation. New York: Oxford University Press. Roucek, J. (1961). The Soviet Treatment of Minorities. Phylon, 22(1), 15–23. Shtromas, A., Wenturis, N., & Hornung, K. (1990). Political Change and Social Development: The Case of the Soviet Union. Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publishing. Weinberg, E. (1992). Perestroika and Soviet Sociology. The British Journal of Sociology, 43(1), 1–10.

Culture

Bittner, S.V. (2001). Remembering the Avant-Garde: Moscow Architects and the "Rehabilitation" of Constructivism, 1961–64. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 2(3), 553–576. Congdon, L. (2017). Solzhenitsyn: The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Epstein, M. (2019). The Phoenix of Philosophy. Russian thought of the late Soviet period (1953-1991). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Johnson, P. (1965). Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kirk, T.C. (2020). Memory of Vorkuta: A Gulag Returnee's Attempts at Autobiography and Art. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 21(1), 97–126 Majsova, N. (2020). Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age: Memorable Futures. Lanham: Lexington Books. Morson, G. S. (1979). Socialist Realism and Literary Theory. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 38(2), 121–133. Nove, A. (1983). The Class Nature of the Soviet Union Revisited. Soviet Studies, 35(3), 298–312. Plamper, J. (2005). Cultural Production, Cultural Consumption: Post-Stalin Hybrids. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 6(4), 755–762. Pyzhikov, A. V. (2011). The Cult of Personality During the Khrushchev Thaw. Russian Studies in History, 50(3), 11–27. Reid, S. E. (2016). (Socialist) Realism Unbound: The Effects of International Encounters on Soviet Art Practice and Discourse in the Khrushchev Thaw. In J. Bazin, P. D. Glatigny, & P. Piotrowski (Eds.), Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989) (pp. 267–295). Budapest: Central European University Press. Senelick, L., & Ostrovsky, S. (Eds.). (2014). The Soviet Theater: A Documentary History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shkandrij, M. (2001). Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's Press. Stites, R. (1992). Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Zubok, V. M. (2011). Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ethnic groups Armstrong, J. L. (1990). Policy Toward the Polish Minority in the Soviet Union, 1923–1989. The Polish Review, 35(1), 51–65.

Religion

Adams, A. S., & Shevzov, V. (Eds.). (2018). Framing Mary: The Mother of God in Modern, Revolutionary, and Post-Soviet Russian Culture. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Budnitskii, O., Engel, D., Estraikh, G., & Shternshis, A. (2022). Jews in the Soviet Union: A History. New York: NYU Press. Dobson, M. (2014). Child Sacrifice in the Soviet Press: Sensationalism and the "Sectarian" in the Post-Stalin Era. The Russian Review, 73(2), 237–259. Givens, J. (2018). The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. King, R. (1975). Religion and Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Brigham Young University Studies, 15(3), 323–347. Kowalewski, D. (1980). Protest for Religious Rights in the USSR: Characteristics and Consequences. The Russian Review, 39(4), 426–441. Larson, N. D. (2014). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Modern Russo-Jewish Question. New York: Columbia University Press. Pinkus, B. (2009). The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pospielovsky, D. (1984). The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. Ramet, S. P. (1993). Religious Policy in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ro'i, Y. (2009). The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948-1967 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenthal, B. G. (Ed.). (1997). The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. New York: Cornell University Press. Rywkin, M. (2015). Moscow's Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia. New York: Routledge. Smolkin-Rothrock, V. (2014). The Ticket to the Soviet Soul: Science, Religion, and the Spiritual Crisis of Late Soviet Atheism. The Russian Review, 73(2), 171–197. Steeves, P. (1986). The June 1983 Plenum and the Post-Brezhnev Antireligious Campaign. Journal of Church and State, 28(3), 439–457. Warhola, J. (1991). The Religious Dimension of Ethnic Conflict in the Soviet Union. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 5(2), 249–270.

Gender and sexuality

Alexander, R. (2021). Regulating Homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956–91: A Different History. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cohn, E. (2009). Sex and the Married Communist: Family Troubles, Marital Infidelity, and Party Discipline in the Postwar Ussr, 1945-64. The Russian Review, 68(3), 429–450. Dumanèiã, M. (2021). Men Out of Focus: The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Engel, B. (1987). Women in Russia and the Soviet Union. Signs, 12(4), 781–796. Engel, B. A. (2021). Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (The Bloomsbury History of Modern Russia Series). London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Ewing, E. T. (2010). Separate Schools: Gender, Policy, and Practice in Postwar Soviet Education (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.