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The House of Government

A Saga of the Russian Revolution

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction

The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Yuri Slezkine's massive work concerns the Russian Revolution and the Soviet social and governmental experience. This history is organized around the context and framework of "The House on the Embankment"--a large apartment complex in which Party faithful lived, shuffling their units of occupancy based on their evolving standing within the Party. The steady and confident Stefan Rudnicki uses an arsenal of skillful techniques that enhance his affecting bass voice. His delivery of the narrative has a Russian tinge, and he adds occasional characterizations when delivering quotations or the direct opinions of characters. While the work is exhaustively researched, there's little question that tighter editing would have strengthened the listening experience. Only those with a focused interest in this slice of history will likely enjoy this--despite Rudnicki's heroic efforts to lure the listener's sustained interest. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 22, 2017
      In this mammoth and profusely researched work, Slezkine (The Jewish Century), professor of history at UC Berkeley, recounts the Russian revolution through the activities and inhabitants of the House of Government, Europe’s largest residential building. Built in 1931 in a central Moscow swamp, the house was home to hundreds of Communist Party officials, their dependents, and maintenance workers. The community lasted just over a decade; Stalin purged many residents in the 1930s and the rest were evacuated in 1941 as the Nazis advanced. Slezkine finds the story of the House of Government worth telling because it was “where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die.” This is a family saga of the “Old Bolsheviks,” the men and women who midwifed the revolution and guided its early steps before falling victim to Stalin’s paranoid excesses. Slezkine illuminates myriad aspects of these lives, including fashion choices and intellectual schisms. He also analyzes Bolshevism’s failure so soon after its apparent triumph, inviting controversy by describing the Bolsheviks as “millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse.” Slezkine asserts that the cosmopolitanism and humanism of postrevolutionary culture undermined the single-mindedness necessary to maintain their ideology. It’s a work begging to be debated; Slezkine aggregates mountains of detail for an enthralling account of the rise and fall of the revolutionary generation. Illus. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

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