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The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution Audiobook
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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, 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.
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“This panoramic history plotted as an epic family tragedy describes the lives of Bolshevik revolutionaries who were swallowed up by the cause they believed in. The story is as intricate as any Russian novel, and the chapters on the Stalinist Terror are the most vivid.”
— New York Times
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“An utterly gripping masterwork…A mixture of historical narrative, novel, and family saga with echoes of Grossman, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and even Tolstoy.”
— Simon Sebag Montefiore, New York Times bestselling author -
“A Soviet War and Peace."
— London Review of Books -
“Magisterial…[An] epic that recounts the multigenerational story of the famed building and its inhabitants—and, at least as interesting, the rise and fall of Bolshevist faith.”
— New Yorker -
“A humane masterpiece, rendering the colossal scale of Stalin’s brutality not in numbers but in individual lives and a single Moscow apartment building. There are pages I don’t think any reader will ever forget.”
— Guardian (London) -
“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.”
— Library Journal -
“A tour de force.”
— Robert Service, author of Lenin: A Biography
Awards
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A London Guardian Best Book of the Year for 2017
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A New York Times Editor’s Choice
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A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
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A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2017
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A Literary Hub Pick of Best Books of the Decade
The House of Government Listener Reviews
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Michael Barrett, 10/27/2021
About Yuri Slezkine
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.
About Stefan Rudnicki
Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.