I also forgot the comical novel by Victor Pelevin,
Omon Ra. Set in the USSR, it's about a man raised by a fiercely nationalist father who joins the Soviet space program. It's a great read, quite short, and another insight into the hypocrisy and culture of lies of the Soviet Union.
And, perhaps most importantly, I forgot Bulgakov's
The Heart of a Dog and
The White Guard. The latter deals with the Ukraine during the Revolution which, as you may know, was actually fought over by three factions -- the Bolsheviks, the Royalists, and the Ukrainian "nationalists" (actually a bunch of brigands). Inexplicably, the dramatical version of this work was Stalin's favorite play and the reason why Bulgakov was never liquidated by the KGB. The former is a satire on the attempt to make intellectual Communists out of peasants and was made into a two-part TV movie around 1990 in Russia. I don't believe there's a version available with subtitles, unfortunately, and the version I saw was a bootlegged copy out of Russia. It's probably my favorite movie.
Anything you can read by Bulgakov is worth the time and effort, even in translation (though his prose in Russian is amazing). Many biased people like myself (
) consider him the best novelist of the 20th century. His
chef d'oeuvre was
The Master and Margerita which is a surreal work including excerpts from the book the character "The Master" wrote about Pontius Pilate. Long and involved, but unparalleled.