The House of Government

Starred review from May 22, 2017
In this mammoth and profusely researched work, Slezkine (The Jewish Century), professor of history at UC Berkeley, recounts the Russian revolution through the activities and inhabitants of the House of Government, Europe’s largest residential building. Built in 1931 in a central Moscow swamp, the house was home to hundreds of Communist Party officials, their dependents, and maintenance workers. The community lasted just over a decade; Stalin purged many residents in the 1930s and the rest were evacuated in 1941 as the Nazis advanced. Slezkine finds the story of the House of Government worth telling because it was “where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die.” This is a family saga of the “Old Bolsheviks,” the men and women who midwifed the revolution and guided its early steps before falling victim to Stalin’s paranoid excesses. Slezkine illuminates myriad aspects of these lives, including fashion choices and intellectual schisms. He also analyzes Bolshevism’s failure so soon after its apparent triumph, inviting controversy by describing the Bolsheviks as “millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse.” Slezkine asserts that the cosmopolitanism and humanism of postrevolutionary culture undermined the single-mindedness necessary to maintain their ideology. It’s a work begging to be debated; Slezkine aggregates mountains of detail for an enthralling account of the rise and fall of the revolutionary generation. Illus. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

July 1, 2017

The House of Government, a large Soviet living complex built in Moscow in the 1920s, was populated by government and party officials not quite significant enough to live in the Kremlin. Slezkine (history, Univ. of California Berkeley; The Jewish Century) relates Bolshevik and Soviet life and history as experienced by its residents. The residence is placed in geographic, architectural, and historical contexts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Bolshevik revolution is compared to other religious and nonreligious millenarian sects. During the 1920s, revolutionaries moved into the house and became domesticated, attaining a surprising level of material comfort and leading traditional family lives. Stalin's Great Terror tore domesticity apart, and many residents of the house, labeled wreckers and enemies of the people, were exiled or killed. Throughout the book, first-person entries taken from diaries, letters and memoirs illuminate daily life and private thoughts, as in Orlando Figues's The Whisperers. VERDICT This comprehensive work of scholarship and storytelling will appeal to readers with an interest in the Russian Revolution, the early Soviet Union, and the pitfalls of utopian community building.--Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL

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