The Shortest History of the Soviet Union

The First World War became the killer of the empires that so imprudently started this war. In 1917, a tiny sect of Bolshevik revolutionaries unexpectedly came to power in the Russian Empire. The biggest social experiment in recent history began: the Bolsheviks began to build a new state and a new man on the foundation of Marxism. The Soviet Union existed for 70 years.

Holodomor, terror, complicity in the beginning of the Second World War and "victory" in it, flight into space, biographies of general secretaries - the classic of American historiography Sheila Fitzpatrick tells the shortest history of the evil empire, as Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union at the time. Seventy years of tragedies and greatness of spirit are concentrated on these two hundred pages. This book will be interesting both for those who lived in the Soviet Union and for those who, fortunately, did not encounter it.

The socio-economic experiment called "USSR" could be called fascinating if it were not staged in front of people. At the same time, this book is an inoculation against nostalgia, on which the Chekists, the official heirs of the Land of the Soviets, are parasitizing.