I've been offline from the Internet for a few days, but in the meantime I was reading through the long excerpts from a Russian history textbook provided by Marcus.

First, thanks to Marcus for sharing them!

Second, I strongly recommend these readings to Hanna and other students as a translation exercise!! There's plenty of tricky grammar typical of written Russian (e.g., really looong participial constructions), but at the same time the formalism of the grammar can be a help for non-natives. And the vocabulary is a bit repetitive, so even if some words are unfamiliar and you have to use a dictionary, you'll keep seeing those same words again and again. So your reading will gradually get faster after several paragraphs. And you'll be refreshing your knowledge of Cold War events while also getting a fresh perspective from the Warsaw Pact side. It's like killing three or four birds with one stone. =)

Third, I was favorably impressed by the quality of the historical discussion and thought it was pretty fair and even-handed. True, it was clearly from a Soviet/Russian POV, but reading it as an American, I never thought, "Wait, that's completely one-sided -- what blatant propaganda!" Instead, while the descriptions of the США or Запад were sometimes bluntly critical, they were generally counterbalanced by self-criticism of Soviet policies.

Even so, there were some instances of what seemed to be subtle bias resulting from the "connotations and nuances" of words or phrasings. However, I don't think these cases were any worse than what you'd find in a US high-school textbook covering the same events -- except, of course, the American text would tend to be biased in the opposite direction!