People From Another World: A Reappraisal of the Soviet Union (First Edition)

While the conservative historians typically simply ignore or deny these facts in their entirety, the liberal historians, who at least pretend to some degree of fidelity to the facts, and are more than capable of good historical work, will often typically skirt around, excuse or justify facts inconvenient to their framework of the Soviet Union as aberrations or things which happened in spite, rather than because of, the Soviet Union. 

Unlike either of these schools, however, this book seeks to offer a radical reappraisal of the common understandings of the Soviet Union both in the academy and among the broader public, reckoning with the real, hard facts of the former regime as we have them today (with all its warts and wrinkles). With the release of the Soviet archives, evidence has uncovered countless ways in which the Soviet Union stood starkly in contrast to both the idea of the authoritarian dystopia pushed by the right and center and the idea of the regressive imperialist empire pushed by some elements of the left; however, the findings from these archives, while well-discussed in academia, remain in many ways unknown among the public, who still possess perceptions typically colored by the most comically evil depictions of the USSR. 

As such, through a truly materialist analysis of the available evidence about the Soviet Union (purified of the aforementioned cold warrior framings) this work marshalls the abundance of evidence that points to a far more complex legacy that the Soviet Union has left behind then is often implied, arguing and building on Albert Szymanski's thesis that, for all the Soviet Union’s many flaws and errors, it was not just better than its great enemy in the United States, but an overall net-positive historical force.