The House of Government
Subtitle: a saga of the Russian Revolution
By: Yuri Slezkine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 1104
ISBN-13: 9780691176949
Subjects: Communists; Apartment dwellers; State-sponsored terrorism; Buildings, structures; Victims of state-sponsored terrorism; Politics and government; Dom na Naberezhnoĭ (Moscow, Russia); Apartment houses; History; Biography; Political purges
Description: "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."--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 995-1081) and index.
Table of contents: title: Book one. En route; title: Part I. Anticipation; title: The swamp; title: The preachers; title: The faith; title: Part II. Fulfillment; title: The real day; title: The last battle; title: The new city; title: The great disappointment; title: The party line; title: Book two. At home; title: Part III. The second coming; title: The eternal house; title: The new tenants; title: The economic foundations; title: The virgin lands; title: The ideological substance; title: Part IV. The reign of the saints; title: The new life; title: The days off; title: The houses of rest; title: The next of kin; title: The center of the world; title: The pettiness of existence; title: The thought of death; title: The happy childhood; title: The new men; title: Book three. On trial; title: Part V. The last judgment; title: The telephone call; title: The admission of guilt; title: The valley of the dead; title: The knock on the door; title: The good people; title: The supreme penalty; title: Part VI. The afterlife; title: The end of childhood; title: The persistence of happiness; title: The coming of war; title: The return; title: The end; title: Epilogue: The House on the Embankment; title: Appendix: Partial list of leaseholders.