
The House of Government
A Saga of the Russian Revolution
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Narrated by:
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Stefan Rudnicki
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 800 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.
©2017 Yuri Slezkine (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
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Masterpiece
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For scholars of the revolution
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Disturbingly, the author points out unmistakable simalarities in Western countries that while not as extreme as in the Soviet world, nevertheless destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of "free" and completely innocent people. A tale that should never cease to be told and most importantly, remembered.
A people's history of the Soviet Union.
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Amazing depth and informative
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#tagsgiving #sweepstakes
A Powerful Argument, mired in minutiae
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zz
clarity and depth of presentation.this is one of the best books I listened so far
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Where the author falls down is in his failure to pull back from the close-ups on the individual Bolsheviks in the government house; the book is filled with diary entries letters a lot of that and that's great except that he never shows the larger forces acting on the Soviet Union and other prominent dissidents and Scholars that have laid out much of this story.
This failure to address the other scholarship around the Soviet Union leads to doubt about some of the central Theses of the book that the Bolshevik Revolution was a millenarian movement In some ways it was a millenarian movement but in other ways maybe not and some of these other authors like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Antony Sutton who wrote The Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and others too numerous to mention suggest that the Soviet Union was part of a much larger picture and that the Bolsheviks themselves were not in as complete control as one might of thought and it was obvious when Stalin was liquidating the old Bolsheviks that it was a blatant power-play the fact that they all thought it was something else just means that they were extremely deluded.
The fallibility of too much close up.
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For the history fan...
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It is helpful to be familiar with Russian history and literature, as well as English literature to get the full effect of Slezkine's expertise. This book is not for the feint of heart, nor the non-reader. Nevertheless, it is a rich experience which I consider a masterpiece, despite its unavoidable disjointed effect in covering such an encyclopedic topic, and from so many different angles.
Stefan Rudnicki is the ideal narrator for this masterpiece. As always, Mr. Rudnicki delivers magnificently.
Phenomenal history, perfect narration
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