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 cinema and library to a tennis court and 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 and led, one by one, to prison or to their deaths. Unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment, and written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the 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. Drawing on letters, diaries and interviews and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, the book weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies and reigns of terror. The residents had enjoyed privileged childhoods, fell in love and married, rose to power, then betrayed each other and were arrested and shot and we learn about the peculiar nature of Bolshevism and get a new history of Russia in this massive chronicle of the soviet era. 1104pp, photos and maps, this is an even more important history given the state-sponsored terrorism of Putin and current politics and government in Russia.
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