The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, 1917–1921. Oxford University Press, 1970.
Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1932. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
The Russian Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1982/83.
The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Cornell University Press, 1992.
Stalin's Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s. Hg. mit Carolyn Rasmussen. Melbourne University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-522-85530-X
My Father's Daughter. Melbourne University Press, 2010.
A Spy in the Archives. Melbourne University Press, 2013.
On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton University Press, 2015. Deutschsprachige Ausgabe: Stalins Mannschaft. Teamarbeit und Tyrannei im Kreml. Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2017. ISBN 978-3-506784-32-2
“White Russians, Red Peril”: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia. Taylor & Francis, London 2021, ISBN 978-1-03-205749-1.
The Shortest History of the Soviet Union. Columbia University Press, New York 2022, ISBN 978-0-231-20716-4.