Not historical per se, but Vladimir Pozner's Parting with Illusions takes a good hard look at the Soviet Russia from the perspective of who amounts to a French-American; in fact, I was dissappointed by just how much he talks about the country and not himself in his own autobiography.

Pozner spent his earlier days in the Nazi-occupied Paris and fled, with his family, to the US afterwards when he was very young. His family then immigrated (is that the right word?) to the Soviet Russia, given that Pozner's father was a communist in heart (which the son inherited, until the illusion broke). If you're curious about what it was like in Russia right after the Second World War, it's the book for you.

It got me, a native Russian, by surprise due to the book telling about the - I believe the name is - the Putsch in Moscow in 1991 that led to the disbandment of the Soviet Union. Nowhere in the books or in school have we ever discussed this or even touched upon it; I think neither we did so in the uni history courses, which is a shame.