The House of Government

A Saga of the Russian Revolution

By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's 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 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 800 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.

©2017 Yuri Slezkine (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

A people's history of the Soviet Union.

I've been reading historical and biographical books on the Soviet Union since I became aware that there was such a thing as history, more than 45 years ago. Nothing I have ever read comes close to painting the day to day struggle of the Soviet people to not only survive but to avoid being exterminated or sent to dissappear in the Gulag.

Disturbingly, the author points out unmistakable simalarities in Western countries that while not as extreme as in the Soviet world, nevertheless destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of "free" and completely innocent people. A tale that should never cease to be told and most importantly, remembered.

A Powerful Argument, mired in minutiae

This is a deeply researched book about the moral and artistic underpinnings of the Russian Revolution. There are however so many long examples and so many people mentioned that it is daunting for the reader to keep it all in their head. However the arguments are so compelling that I’d still recommend the book but with the caution that there will be moments that the explanation of the plots of dozens of soviet era novels may be a slog.

#tagsgiving #sweepstakes

Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR

What a generous & magisterial book! Basically the story of a wide group of leaders, intellectuals & senior bureaucrats and their families, most of whom lived at one time or other in the House of Govt. From the pre-revolutionary backgrounds thru the Oct Revolution, building the new Communist state, collectivization, the 5 year plans, the Great Terror & then the Great Patriotic War. This is s deep social, cultural & intellectual history of how a Bolshevik sect became the state religion of a great country, but it reads more like Tolstoy of “War & Peace”! Lots of Russian names & families to keep track of. Long, but fascinating, subtle, generous & sympathetic, but never “rose tinted”. Most highly recommended! Reader was easy to listen to, with the right balance of seriousness (& occasionally, irony).

Masterpiece

I replay this book once or twice a year at least. The author pens a compelling history jam packed with intimate details and first person accounts. The subjects jump out of the page, sometimes eerily so. The narration is animated and smooth, though very deep. I have to play it pretty loud sometimes to hear properly

For scholars of the revolution

Must read for those intrigued by the Russian revolution and Bolshevism. A needle in a haystack

The fallibility of too much close up.

I wanted to like this book and in many ways I did like this book getting to know the story of the government house and the Bolsheviks involved and the tragedy of the Red Terror both right after the Revolution in the 1920s and then later the Stalin Red Terror which karmically bit the Bolsheviks right in the butt. Many of The Executioner's were themselves executed.
Where the author falls down is in his failure to pull back from the close-ups on the individual Bolsheviks in the government house; the book is filled with diary entries letters a lot of that and that's great except that he never shows the larger forces acting on the Soviet Union and other prominent dissidents and Scholars that have laid out much of this story.
This failure to address the other scholarship around the Soviet Union leads to doubt about some of the central Theses of the book that the Bolshevik Revolution was a millenarian movement In some ways it was a millenarian movement but in other ways maybe not and some of these other authors like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Antony Sutton who wrote The Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and others too numerous to mention suggest that the Soviet Union was part of a much larger picture and that the Bolsheviks themselves were not in as complete control as one might of thought and it was obvious when Stalin was liquidating the old Bolsheviks that it was a blatant power-play the fact that they all thought it was something else just means that they were extremely deluded.

For the history fan...

Those who are interested in The history of the roots of Soviet Bolshevism, this is an expansive and fascinating look at the dynamics of the Soviet Union’s origins and development. Using the ambitious building of “The House of Government” building in Moscow as a lens, the author weaves social and biographical details into a terrific story.

Phenomenal history, perfect narration

An amazing collection of stories of the Russian Revolution as told through the lives (and deaths) of the true believers who lived in a huge apartment complex that works as an icon for the regime and its ideology: The House of Government is a deconstructed vision of the cockeyed bolsheviks who inhabited both a building and a government which was guided by atheistical millenarianism that relied equally on revolutionary inspiration and violent terror. This book excites, saddens, elevates and exhausts the reader because we know the disasters that awaits most of the people in these stories in an evermore repressive and cruel Stalinist environment. Orwell's 1984 echoes the stories of these lost humans.

It is helpful to be familiar with Russian history and literature, as well as English literature to get the full effect of Slezkine's expertise. This book is not for the feint of heart, nor the non-reader. Nevertheless, it is a rich experience which I consider a masterpiece, despite its unavoidable disjointed effect in covering such an encyclopedic topic, and from so many different angles.

Stefan Rudnicki is the ideal narrator for this masterpiece. As always, Mr. Rudnicki delivers magnificently.

can't get enough

this is my second time reading the book. informative about soviet history and haunting.

Very good very important

Get ready for a tome! If you can finish it, you will have a very good picture of the Bolshevik Revolution. The basic analogy of the Bolsheviks being a non “religious” millenarian movement was something I had never entertained. I heartily recommend but maybe also be reading something light so you can occasionally take a break from the reading.