The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.53 (647 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B071XN75S1 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 553 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-01-25 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The extraordinarily detailed information on the households and the complexity of their domestic relations is one of the remarkable and unique aspects of this book."--Sheila Fitzpatrick, London Review of Books"Mammoth and profusely researched. "A master stylist as well as a first-class historian. Slezkine’s scholarship and his powerful historical imagination take us into the heart of the confrontation between the everyday reality of Bolshevism and its extreme millenarian metaphysics. A work begging to be debated; Slezkine aggregates mountains of detail for an enthralling account of the rise and fall of the revolutionary generation."--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)"To roam the corridors of the House of Government, following the endlessly intersecting stories of Bolshevik families at home, is to come as close as a distant reader can to the horror, strangeness and disorientating pathos
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destructionThe House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. 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. 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. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet
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.