Flight through the Ages: A Complete, Illustrated Chronology from the Dreams of Early History... Book

This short book is a good survey of the upheavals that reprinted the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. If you need a primer on 20th century Russia, this is a good place to start. Author Brian Moynahan has a nice style and writes with a lot of verve too, as in this post-World War II passage:

"No relaxation came with triumph. The post-war years were a desperate time. Great cities had been smashed: over half the buildings in Kiev had been destroyed and three in four of its citizens had been killed or deported to Germany. The population was a fifth of the pre-war figure. Minsk was worse. Eighty percent of its buildings had been blasted away. Village Russia was devastated too. In the forests of Belorussia where the Germans had exterminated communities wholesale, tracts of land, so vast that the scale could be grasped only from an aircraft, were stripped of cabins, crops and people. One in five of all Belorussians had been killed or toiled at slave labor. Families across western Russia lived in caves, in drained water tanks and pits covered with tarpaulins. Millions of evacuees roomed in earth-floored barracks in the Urals or further east, forbidden to return to their old homes in the west."