I'm sure other nations falsify data, but I've never studied it so I don't know. I have spent weeks picking through claims and counterclaims of death toll for the Ukrainian famine, and trying to track one Kazakh nomadic tribe that self identified as Kipchaks (which is questionable, but that's another issue) and can state with absolute certainty that soviet data (particularly census data) is very problematic
It was an MA so there was no reading list as such- I'd bounce in to see my supervisor all fired up by something I'd read, and he'd suggest another 20 books that were related, or challenged my thinking. It's a full time job following all the trails of breadcrumbs. And the critical thing is to read everything, but read it critically. So I have read the black book of soviet communism, and Anne Applebaum, and Konrad Kellen, and Dolot, and Burdzhalov, and the Webbs....You know lot of it's got an agenda, but there is useful stuff in there, if you can find it. (Sometimes it's good just to read the extremes and have a giggle.) That's the good thing about formal study, you aren't allowed to get away with just reading stuff that confirms your own prejudices.
Anyway, reading wise, this looks an interesting list:
http://www.indiana.edu/~reeiweb/graduate/readingList.shtml I haven't read some of the more recent stuff, or the stuff about sex, but there is a pretty good cross section IMO