Reddit reviews Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941

I'll just say don't overthink petit-bourgeois delusions and resentments if you're interesting in drawing real lessons from Soviet history. Half of the argument is literally presuming the NKVD hid a substantial amount (itself undeclared in an already weak assertion) of additional executions (with no clear reason to presume why a 'totalitarian bureaucracy' would obscure its own estimates to itself, making its structural violence less effective ['effective' as in socially and ideologically targeting 'the right people,' who were a class minority by nature] as a whole, when that information was [apparently] concealed to the public at large) and then playing numbers games (which is there to draw us away from learning the actual sociological relevance of mass violence and its nature, purpose, and difference between and within reactionary and revolutionary societies). I too could easily misrepresent life expectancy 'discrepancies' (say, of the work done by Amartya Sen) to 'prove' the British Empire starved 200 million people to death in India, but I don't enjoy wasting my time when I know I can't convince people out of their material and social interests. Unlike anarchists, we're not basing our 'arguments' around our petit-bourgeois resentment against political projects that don't require us and were (and are) superior to our baseless (and classless) ideological fantasies. Our arguments are based in a methodology where dialectical and historical materialism have to be internalized, where we have to ask the right questions to even have a chance at giving the right answers. Us arguing about the 'honesty' of the NKVD or the 'possibility' of thousands of unknown shallow graves in Siberia just means that we have already surrendered to the nonsense of our enemies.

For the USSR I would recommend Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941, Red Bread, and Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel to start. All of those are accessible and written by westerners or emigres. None of them are uncritical of the USSR, and they all at some point exhibit what I feel are some unfair prejudices, but they are definitely worth reading. Red Bread in particular is sort of anti-communist. Also, read Lenin!