>'Spider Eaters' by Rae Yang
Yang is a professor of Chinese literature and the book is a memoir of her experience in the cultural revolution
>'Mao's Great Famine' by Frank Dikotter
Dikotter is a historian who specializes in Chinese history and teaches at the University of Hong Kong, and this book is based on 4 years of research he did by combing through fairly recently uncovered archives and documents from local to state level. Heres a decent article on the book
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/05/maos-great-famine-dikotter-review
>'The Gulag Archiplago' by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
pretty self explanatory, but I think people who havent read it have this misconception that the book is simply his memoir+stories of other people he knew who were in the gulags, but its a history based on his own archival research into the legal history of the early soviet union between 1918-1956, with his own personal stories or the stories of others peppered in to give a human face the event he is describing.
>'Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928' and 'Stalin: Volume II: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941' by Stephen Kotkin
long as fuck and I havent read them yet, but they are the first two parts in this epic long biography of Stalin that Kotkin is planning.