The Russian Question, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I learned a lot about Russian history reading this book. It's divided into two parts.

The first is an essay written in 1994, just a few years after the fall of the Soviet government, in which Solzhenitsyn poses an important question to the Russian people: To be or not to be? Meaning: Are the Russian people going to take this opportunity to fulfill their potential given the lessons of their history or not?  And he gives a quick summary of the successes and failures of the various Tsars from the start of the Romanov dynasty in the 1600's to Nicholas II and on through Soviet times.  He shows how the Tsars hampered Russia's progress by their ineptitude in foreign affairs, their propensity to get involved in European quarrels unnecessarily, coupled with a very centralized power structure and a lack of understanding of how to encourage development of their already huge territory and its people. Then the Soviets made things worse by sacrificing the country and its people to a deadly ideology that it was their goal to spread abroad.

The second part is a speech Solzhenitsyn delivered in 1993 to the International Philosophical Society in Liechtenstein about the need to reclaim moral clarity, the application of moral standards in politics, instead of utilitarian or legalistic ones, and, in personal life, the need for self restraint and the recognition that there is more to life than material well being.  Many of these themes he also covers in The 1978 Harvard Commencement Address.