The House of Government

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.

Yuri Slezkine

Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
1 En Route
I Anticipation 3
1 The Swamp 5
2 The Preachers 23
3 The Faith 73
II Fulfillment 119
4 The Real Day 121
5 The Last Battle 158
6 The New City 180
7 The Great Disappointment 220
8 The Party Line 272
2 At Home
III The Second Coming 315
9 The Eternal House 317
10 The New Tenants 377
11 The Economic Foundations 408
12 The Virgin Lands 421
13 The Ideological Substance 454
IV The Reign of the Saints 479
14 The New Life 481
15 The Days Off 508
16 The Houses of Rest 535
17 The Next of Kin 552
18 The Center of the World 582
19 The Pettiness of Existence 610
20 The Thought of Death 623
21 The Happy Childhood 645
22 The New Men 665
3 On Trial
V The Last Judgment 697
23 The Telephone Call 699
24 The Admission of Guilt 715
25 The Valley of the Dead 753
26 The Knock on the Door 773
27 The Good People 813
28 The Supreme Penalty 840
VI The Afterlife 871
29 The End of Childhood 873
30 The Persistence of Happiness 887
31 The Coming of War 912
32 The Return 924
33 The End 946
Epilogue: The House on the Embankment 961
Appendix: Partial List of Leaseholders 983
Notes 995
Index 1083