The House of Government
A Saga of the Russian Revolution
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Narrated by:
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Stefan Rudnicki
About this listen
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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If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century.
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What? Nazism = communism?
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East West Street
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When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg Trials.
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Outstanding!
- By lori on 05-07-18
By: Philippe Sands
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They Were Christians
- The Inspiring Faith of Men and Women Who Changed the World
- By: Cristobal Krusen
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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What do Abraham Lincoln, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Louis Pasteur, Frederick Douglass, Florence Nightingale, and John D. Rockefeller, Sr., all have in common? They all changed the world - and they were all Christians. Now the little-known stories of faith behind 12 influential people of history are available in one inspiring volume. They Were Christians reveals the faith-filled motivations behind some of the most outstanding political, scientific, and humanitarian contributions of history.
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Great book
- By Amazon Customer on 12-10-18
By: Cristobal Krusen
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Where the Jews Aren't
- The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
- By: Masha Gessen
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan. The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there.
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The Jewish World of Our Ancestors
- By Roberta L. Ruben on 06-16-18
By: Masha Gessen
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Stalin's Daughter
- The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
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- Narrated by: Karen Cass
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The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
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Insightful and thoroughly researched
- By Jean on 06-16-15
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The Rasputin File
- By: Edvard Radzinsky, Judson Rosengrant - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 22 hrs and 26 mins
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For almost a century, historians could only speculate about the role Grigory Rasputin played in the downfall of tsarist Russia. But in 1995 a lost file from the state archives turned up, a file that contained the complete interrogations of Rasputin's inner circle. With this extensive and explicit amplification of the historical record, Edvard Radzinsky has written a definitive biography, reconstructing in full the fascinating life of an improbable holy man who changed the course of Russian history.
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Good old Radzinsky
- By Babs on 03-13-18
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An American Bride in Kabul
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Few westerners will ever be able to understand Muslim or Afghan society unless they are part of a Muslim family. Twenty years old and in love, Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish-American girl from Brooklyn, embarked on an adventure that has lasted for more than a half-century. Drawing upon her personal diaries, Chesler recounts her ordeal, the nature of gender apartheid - and her longing to explore this beautiful, ancient, and exotic country and culture.
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An Exceptional Book
- By Elaine Fresco on 04-16-19
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Out of the Depths
- The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last
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- Narrated by: Steve Blane
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Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel--and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous, and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis' deadliest concentration camps, and how he managed to survive against all possible odds.
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Amazing Book, Amazing Man
- By Shari on 01-14-13
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Seven Women
- And the Secret of Their Greatness
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- Narrated by: Tom Parks
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In his eagerly anticipated follow-up to the enormously successful Seven Men, New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas gives us seven captivating portraits of some of history's greatest women, all of whom changed the course of history by following God's call upon their lives - as women.
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A Different Kind of Inspiring
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The Last Days of the Romanovs
- Tragedy at Ekaterinburg
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- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
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Helen Rappaport, an expert in the field of Russian history, brings you the riveting day-by-day account of the last 14 days of the Russian Imperial family, in this first of two books about the Romanovs. The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July 16 to 17, 1918, has long been a defining moment in world history. The Last Days of the Romanovs reveals in exceptional detail how the conspiracy to kill them unfolded.
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GREAT
- By courtney on 08-31-17
By: Helen Rappaport
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Rasputin
- Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs
- By: Douglas Smith
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Rasputin separates fact from fiction to reveal the real life of one of history's most alluring figures. Drawing on a wealth of forgotten documents from archives in seven countries, Smith presents Rasputin in all his complexity - man of God, voice of peace, loyal subject, adulterer, drunkard. Rasputin is not just a definitive biography of an extraordinary and legendary man, but a fascinating portrait of the twilight of imperial Russia as it lurched toward catastrophe.
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A story that deserves a better narrator.
- By James on 01-27-18
By: Douglas Smith
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What listeners say about The House of Government
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Edward V. Blanchard
- 11-05-17
Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
What a generous & magisterial book! Basically the story of a wide group of leaders, intellectuals & senior bureaucrats and their families, most of whom lived at one time or other in the House of Govt. From the pre-revolutionary backgrounds thru the Oct Revolution, building the new Communist state, collectivization, the 5 year plans, the Great Terror & then the Great Patriotic War. This is s deep social, cultural & intellectual history of how a Bolshevik sect became the state religion of a great country, but it reads more like Tolstoy of “War & Peace”! Lots of Russian names & families to keep track of. Long, but fascinating, subtle, generous & sympathetic, but never “rose tinted”. Most highly recommended! Reader was easy to listen to, with the right balance of seriousness (& occasionally, irony).
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16 people found this helpful
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- Rock
- 05-06-23
Masterpiece
I replay this book once or twice a year at least. The author pens a compelling history jam packed with intimate details and first person accounts. The subjects jump out of the page, sometimes eerily so. The narration is animated and smooth, though very deep. I have to play it pretty loud sometimes to hear properly
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- Rabeep Grewal
- 07-09-23
For scholars of the revolution
Must read for those intrigued by the Russian revolution and Bolshevism. A needle in a haystack
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- Marcus Caris
- 11-11-18
A Powerful Argument, mired in minutiae
This is a deeply researched book about the moral and artistic underpinnings of the Russian Revolution. There are however so many long examples and so many people mentioned that it is daunting for the reader to keep it all in their head. However the arguments are so compelling that I’d still recommend the book but with the caution that there will be moments that the explanation of the plots of dozens of soviet era novels may be a slog.
#tagsgiving #sweepstakes
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- Zeljko Z.
- 08-05-24
clarity and depth of presentation.this is one of the best books I listened so far
the best book I've slidtened in last few years. intelligently presented with historical perspective.It is a must listen
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- T. Anderson
- 09-15-17
A people's history of the Soviet Union.
I've been reading historical and biographical books on the Soviet Union since I became aware that there was such a thing as history, more than 45 years ago. Nothing I have ever read comes close to painting the day to day struggle of the Soviet people to not only survive but to avoid being exterminated or sent to dissappear in the Gulag.
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.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 08-03-24
Amazing depth and informative
The author made some excellent points connecting Bolshevism to other religious sects. Also, did a great job showing the world that Stalin et al created and how people did or did not survive it.
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- Scott Free
- 07-05-18
The fallibility of too much close up.
I wanted to like this book and in many ways I did like this book getting to know the story of the government house and the Bolsheviks involved and the tragedy of the Red Terror both right after the Revolution in the 1920s and then later the Stalin Red Terror which karmically bit the Bolsheviks right in the butt. Many of The Executioner's were themselves executed.
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.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Elocutus55
- 06-23-19
For the history fan...
Those who are interested in The history of the roots of Soviet Bolshevism, this is an expansive and fascinating look at the dynamics of the Soviet Union’s origins and development. Using the ambitious building of “The House of Government” building in Moscow as a lens, the author weaves social and biographical details into a terrific story.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Peter W. Kalnin
- 09-21-21
Phenomenal history, perfect narration
An amazing collection of stories of the Russian Revolution as told through the lives (and deaths) of the true believers who lived in a huge apartment complex that works as an icon for the regime and its ideology: The House of Government is a deconstructed vision of the cockeyed bolsheviks who inhabited both a building and a government which was guided by atheistical millenarianism that relied equally on revolutionary inspiration and violent terror. This book excites, saddens, elevates and exhausts the reader because we know the disasters that awaits most of the people in these stories in an evermore repressive and cruel Stalinist environment. Orwell's 1984 echoes the stories of these lost humans.
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.
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1 person found this helpful