The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

Slezkine, Yuri

ISBN 10: 0691176949 / ISBN 13: 9780691176949

Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2017

About this Item

First edition, first printing hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, in very good condition. Jacket edges are creased and nicked. Board corners and spine ends are slightly bumped, with a notable bump to the front upper edge near the spine. Page block is tanned. Boards are clean, binding is sound and pages are clear. LW.

Seller Inventory # 610454

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691176949
• ISBN 13: 9780691176949
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition, First Printing.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Book Type: Used
• Seller catalogs:
  • Russian Interest

About this title

Synopsis

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, 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.

About the Author

Yuri Slezkine is the Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Jewish Century (Princeton), which won the National Jewish Book Award.