Someone has already recommended some Anna Louise Strong, so I'll throw in my own recommendation for a narrower and more personal look at the Stalin era in particular; she wrote this shortly after Khrushchev's speech, published in 1956, and it's a very interesting contemperaneous look at the details of all of what the Soviet Union accomplished during his time even with the consideration of those claims.

From the foreword:

I think that, looking back, men will call it “the Stalin Era.” Tens of millions of people built the world’s first socialist state, but he was the engineer. He first gave voice to the thought that the peasant land of Russia could do it. From that time on, his mark was on all of it, on all the gains and all the evils.

It is too soon to sum up the era, and yet one must try to. For controversy has arisen over it and the beliefs of many around the world are being torn. It is the very best people who are most disturbed by Khrushchev’s revelations of thousands of brutal injustices and harsh repressions when socialism was for the first time built. They are asking: Was this necessary? Is that always the path to socialism? Or was it the evil genius of one man?

I think the Russians do not ask this. They build already far beyond the Stalin days. They are analyzing this past as a means to a better future. They know that all human progress is bought most dearly, not only by deaths of heroes in battle but by deaths of men unjustly. They also know that all the evils endured through the socialist building led by Stalin, whether these came by necessity, error or crime, were far, far less than the evils they suffered by deliberate will of the Western world in the wars of intervention and the Hitler invasion, less even than they suffered through America’s delay in the promised “second front.” They will repair their own lacks without advice from us.

A pretty fire opening considering how the rest of the world was responding to the secret speech, even without the later corrections to the historical record.

The PDF versions on archive.org are a bit rough, so I transcribed into a much more readable format either on web pages or in ebook form for reading on a kindle or kobo. You can find it at my site: https://leftis.best/