I am reading
Marooned In Moscow, by Marguerite Harrison, an adventurous woman who slipped uninvited into Russia across the Polish frontier in 1920 and set up shop as a correspondent for the Associated Press in Moscow. As it turned out, she was on the payroll of the U.S. military intelligence. She met Lenin, Krupsksya, Trotsky, and many other notable Bolsheviks, as well as workers, peasants, and members of the old regime. She was a very careful observer, and her book is full of insights and things that I had never read before about that period.
You can buy it from Amazon for your Kindle, or read the free version above.
Thank you; interesting.
Another view on the USSR is Solonevich’s Concentration Camp Russia, only in part available in an old English translation. I wish someone who can read Russian would undertake to translate it; I could help with the difficult parts, but I have no time translating it myself. It is a story of Solonevich’s arrest, trial and escape from a prison camp.