Research Catalog

The House of Government : a saga of the Russian Revolution

Title
The House of Government : a saga of the Russian Revolution / Yuri Slezkine.
Author
Slezkine, Yuri, 1956-
Publication
Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017]

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Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person.

TextUse in library JFE 17-9740Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Description
xv, 1,104 pages : illustrations, maps; 24 cm
Summary
"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 550 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, 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, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared"--Provided by publisher.
Subjects
Genre/Form
  • Biography.
  • History.
  • Biographies.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (pages [995]-1081) and index.
Contents
Book one. En route -- Part I. Anticipation -- The swamp -- The preachers -- The faith -- Part II. Fulfillment -- The real day -- The last battle -- The new city -- The great disappointment -- The party line -- Book two. At home -- Part III. The second coming -- The eternal house -- The new tenants -- The economic foundations -- The virgin lands -- The ideological substance -- Part IV. The reign of the saints -- The new life -- The days off -- The houses of rest -- The next of kin -- The center of the world -- The pettiness of existence -- The thought of death -- The happy childhood -- The new men -- Book three. On trial -- Part V. The last judgment -- The telephone call -- The admission of guilt -- The valley of the dead -- The knock on the door -- The good people -- The supreme penalty -- Part VI. The afterlife -- The end of childhood -- The persistence of happiness -- The coming of war -- The return -- The end -- Epilogue: The House on the Embankment -- Appendix: Partial list of leaseholders.
Call Number
JFE 17-9740
ISBN
  • 9780691176949
  • 0691176949
LCCN
2016049071
OCLC
987591300
Author
Slezkine, Yuri, 1956- author.
Title
The House of Government : a saga of the Russian Revolution / Yuri Slezkine.
Publisher
Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017]
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [995]-1081) and index.
Chronological Term
1900-1999
Research Call Number
JFE 17-9740
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