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 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

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.

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.

Remarkably well researched

The detail of this book evidences the remarkable research carried out by its author.

At times the risk is to be overwhelmed by this detail.

However, this is a story which simultaneously is reaching for Solzhenitsyn like horror while furthering that story by the authors research.

The author adds the angel of religious fervor driving the dogma of Russian Communism, while asking how come Communism in Russia lasted only a lifetime while Christianity in its various derivatives has lasted several millennia.

Incredible detail and vivid

I highly recommend this audiobook and do not be discouraged by the length of the book!

Congratulations to the performer of the text as the pronunciation of many proper names and foreign words was excellent! Often I find many history audiobooks on Eastern Europe and Russia do not verify pronunciation. It makes the listening much easier.

In terms of content, what an incredibly detailed book! Highly recommended for anyone who wants a better understanding of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union from 1917 through the post-Stalin era. You get to understand people as people and not just names, dates, and political titles. You will follow families across generations and be genuinely touched to learn of their sufferings and endurance.

I appreciate the sociological and religious schema employed to better situation ideology of the Soviet Union alongside other movements in the world, from Russian Old Believers to Reformation Central Europe to the Satanic Panic in the US and Canada in the 1980s. It is a very interesting lens to view the show trials of the 1930s. I am not sure if I am entirely convinced by the arguments but I think it helps to shed light on the mentalities of people who lived through that point in time before the Great Terror and the Secret Speech.

The book is very detailed and you will learn a lot. Some background is required but I don’t think too much. The only area where I am still confused is understanding the left and right deviations from just before Lenin’s death right to the Bukharin trial. I think I will need to go back and make some timelines and understand more how figures like Zinovyev and Bukharin end up targeted for show trials.

As the book is quite long, there are some repetitious elements, usually in explaining points of commonality and divergence between Christianity, Judaism, and Bolshevik ideology. Also some excerpts from novels or diary entries are repeated in different chapters. As an audiobook it is harder to skip as you might when reading a printed book, but it does mean that if you want to consult a chapter or two in isolation, you will not be at much disadvantage versus reading or listening to the whole book.

So once again: incredibly happy I purchased and listened to this audiobook. Quality of performance is best in class. Content is detailed and relevant and the arguments advanced provide insights and connections to other episodes in history not often provided in standard histories of the subject. As such, this is a great resource for developing deeper understanding of this historical time period. 100% recommend it to anyone who likes history.

I'd Listen to Stefan Rudnicki Read the Phone Book

I'm a huge fan of this narrator, having listened to several of his other readings. I think his interpretations and voice are marvelous. That being said, I'm finding the book itself hard to get through. Am I missing something? Parts of it are interesting, but I'm into the 10th hour and most of it is so tedious I want to give up and turn on Netflix. I'm hanging in there because reviewers say it gets better and well, I love me my Stefan.