The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

Amazon.com Price: $27.43 (as of 05/12/2019 13:32 PST- Details)

Description

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

The House of Government is unlike some 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 real story of the residents of a huge 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 referred to as the House at the Embankment, used to be situated across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included the whole thing 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, separately, to prison or their deaths.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, 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, eternally disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Russia » Moscow » The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

Recent Products