On the occasion of the 100-year anniversary of the October Revolution, Manfred Hildermeier has updated his classic history of the Soviet Union to reflect the most current research. This definitive work now includes a chapter on the Putin era, which brings the content up to the immediate present. The history of the Soviet Union stretches like a huge monolith through almost the entire 20th century. The first socialist state didn’t just influence the course of world history during the “Great Patriotic War” against Hitler’s armies and the Cold War era. It was also a departure point and a result of the revolutionary experiment, a way of making a social utopia into reality. Manfred Hildermeier is able to craft an informative as well as interpretive and easily understandable overview based on an incredible wealth of materials. His guiding point of view is to investigate the shared “socialist” principles of political, social, economic, and culture development. Manfred Hildermeier is a professor of Eastern European history at the University of Göttingen.