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Stalin by Oleg Khlevniuk

This historically situated and incredibly researched biography of Stalin will certainly teach you a lot but I fear it suffers from a miscalculation of depth of focus- it's too long to read as a useful summary of events, but far too short to give the reader a chance to understand and identify with the major players as characters

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Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott

This historical treatise has a lot of notoriety but I found it unnecessarily dense, and ultimately flawed, in that its focus on states and state power ignores a related discussion of capitalist power, such that altho there is a useful perspective to glean here about how a drive for social legibility can transform a society, I wouldn't recommend the book overall.