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wwatts1734's review against another edition
4.0
"The First Socialist Society" is one of the best popular histories of the Soviet Union in English. In it, English Historian of Russian History Geoffrey Hosking explores not just the names, dates and events that comprised Soviet history, but told the story of the Soviet people in ways that are compelling and personal. The book begins in Czarist Russia, detailing the events that led up to the October Revolution. Then he goes through the whole drama of Soviet History, from the Revolution through the Civil War and the New Economic Policy through the era of Stalin and the post-Stalin age right up to the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev. The book was published in 1985, so it misses one of the great dramas of Soviet History, which was the Gorbachev era and the reign of Glasnost and Perestroika and ultimately the end of the Soviet Union. Despite this shortcoming, this is definitely a Soviet history that is worth reading.
The only drawback that I noticed in reading this book is that it focuses almost exclusively on domestic policy and life within the Soviet Union. There is very little mention made of foreign affairs or the Soviet foreign activities except when it was impossible to ignore them, such as the Second World War and the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe. This history completely ignores the Comintern, Soviet expansion in places like Southeast Asia and Cuba and foreign policy events like the Berlin blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I would recommend that the reader pick up another history that focuses more on Soviet foreign policy in order to get a feel for these events. But despite this, "The First Socialist Society" is a great read, very engaging and understandable even to the reader who is unfamiliar with Russia or Russian history, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the Soviet Union.
The only drawback that I noticed in reading this book is that it focuses almost exclusively on domestic policy and life within the Soviet Union. There is very little mention made of foreign affairs or the Soviet foreign activities except when it was impossible to ignore them, such as the Second World War and the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe. This history completely ignores the Comintern, Soviet expansion in places like Southeast Asia and Cuba and foreign policy events like the Berlin blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I would recommend that the reader pick up another history that focuses more on Soviet foreign policy in order to get a feel for these events. But despite this, "The First Socialist Society" is a great read, very engaging and understandable even to the reader who is unfamiliar with Russia or Russian history, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the Soviet Union.
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