Khrushchev was reviewed on the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Toronto Globe and Mail book reviews. It was selected by those newspapers, as well as by The Economist, as one of "the best books of 2003." Khrushchev was also awarded the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, and the 2004 Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize for distinguished scholarship in the field of American foreign relations.

Taubman is also the author of The View from Lenin Hills: Soviet Youth in Ferment (1967), Governing Soviet Cities: Bureaucratic Politics and Urban Development in the USSR (1973), and Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Detente to Cold War (1982); co-author (with his wife, Jane Taubman, Amherst Russian professor) of Moscow Spring (1989); editor-translator of Khrushchev on Khrushchev by Sergei N. Khrushchev (1990); and co-editor (with Sergei Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason) of Nikita Khrushchev (2000). In addition to scholarly articles and reviews, he has written op-ed pieces and book reviews for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Washington Post. During the 1988 Moscow summit between Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, Taubman served as a television analyst for CNN. He has also appeared on the Today show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, C-SPAN’s Booknotes and Washington Journal, and NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Fresh Air. Since the 1960's he has made more than twenty five trips to the Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Taubman, who was born in New York City and went to Bronx High School of Science, received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1962, a Certificate of the Russian Institute from Columbia in 1965, and a Ph.D. in Public Law and Government from Columbia in 1969. He is an Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, where he also serves on the Steering Committee of the Harvard Cold War Studies Project. He currently chairs the Advisory Committee of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, and was a member the International Advisory Group for the Russian Foreign Ministry Archives. Taubman served on the Policy Planning Staff of the U. S. Department of State as an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1970-1971. In 2003 he was named "Alumnus of the Year" by the Harriman Institute of Columbia University. At Amherst College, he teaches courses on "Russian Politics," "Rethinking the Cold War," "National Identity" (co-taught with an historian and an anthropologist), and "Personality and Political Leadership" (co-taught with a psychologist).