The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within

by Geoffrey Hosking

The First Socialist Society is the compelling and often tragic history of what Soviet citizens have lived through from 1917 to the present, told with great sympathy and perception. It ranges over the changing lives of peasants, urban workers, and professionals; the interaction of Soviet autocrats with the people; the character and role of religion, law, education, and literature within Soviet society; and the significance and fate of various national groups. As the story unfolds, we come to understand how the ideas of Marxism have been changed, taking on almost unrecognizable forms by unique political and economic circumstances.

Hosking's analysis of this vast and complex country begins by asking how it was that the first socialist revolution took place in backward, autocratic Russia. Why were the Bolsheviks able to seize power and hold on to it? The core of the book lies in the years of Stalin's rule: how did he exercise such unlimited power, and how did the various strata of society survive and come to terms with his tyranny?

The later chapters recount Khrushchev's efforts to reform the worst features of Stalinism, and the unpredictable effects of his attempts within the East European satellite countries, bringing out elements of socialism that had been obscured or overlaid in the Soviet Union itself. And in the aftermath of the long Brezhnev years of stagnation and corruption, the question is posed: can Soviet society find a way to modify the rigidities inherited from the Stalinist past?

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, Russian History, Soviet Union, Philosophy, Theory

570 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1985

About the author

Geoffrey Alan Hosking is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union and formerly Leverhulme Research Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College, London.

Reviews

[Nadienne Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rather condensed tome of nearly 90 years of history which, whilst it occasionally touches on the lives of the people of the Soviet Union, primarily focuses on the actions of its various leaders and how they related to other leaders within the Soviet Union. It glances over World War Two (The Great Patriotic War) and reserves any sort of judgement, mostly, for the actions of said various leaders (there’s no real condemnation of the actions of Stalin, per se). It also seems to completely ignore the famine in Ukraine, well, it briefly mentions it, but doesn’t go into much detail.

If anything, the Soviet Union of say, 1917 to 1920 or so, was a grand experiment designed to completely alter the way the world worked up until that point, and unfortunately, due to the actions of those in charge, **cough** Stalin **cough**, the entire experiment was derailed to service the ego of one man. And those who followed him never really tried to return to the pre-Stalin era. And then Gorbachev brought the whole thing crashing down by essentially embracing Social Democracy.

[Armand · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great source of information about the rise, development and collapse of the USSR (1921-1991).

I learned so much from reading this work and found Hosking's writing to be generally accessible, and it helps too that he doesn't write like a robot but rather like a human being. He does not shy from expressing sympathy for the victims of the USSR's million atrocities, violations, affronts, and indignities.

Hosking does a nice job of smoothly moving us from the macro level to the macro in a few sentences. For example, he might start a paragraph by discussing the general state of Jewish life in Khrushchev's Russia, then discuss the Jews of "the Pale" (far Western Russia) specifically, and then write about the Russian prosecution of synagogues, and follow all that up with one specific bit of evidence maybe- for example- by citing a letter ordering the closing of a single synagogue in Kiev.

I believe the book was written with college students in mind, but it's also very accessible- I would argue- to anyone who is interested in history.

*** more soon!

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty great for what it is. Broad easy overview / history of Soviet experiment. a bit too sympathetic I would say, but still well told and well paced.

[Cody]

(unfinished, stopped about a 100 pages in)

this work just has no in-text citations, it's very difficult to cross-reference claims made by Hoskings, there is a bibliography at the end, but without in-text citations I can't rightly even check his claim of red guards killing unarmed workers, I also don't know if this work had had the advantage of having the Soviet archives opened post '90s as it was written in the '80s.

[Lark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up because I know next to nothing about Soviet history and it got decent reviews. I really recommend this book if you're starting from zero. The only problem is that it is (obviously) dated. If you want to know what happened AFTER 1985, you might need to find the sequel...

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic history of Russia. Great.

[Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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.