Review
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Winner of the 2018 PROSE Award in World History, Association of American Publishers
Selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice, Aug 24, 2017
One of The Spectator 2017 Books of the Year
One of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2017
One of The Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2017
One of The Guardian's Best Books of 2017
One of Open Letters Monthly's "Our Year in Reading 2017
One of the Economist.com "Wise Words 2017 Books of the Year" in History
One of the Millions.com "A Year in Reading 2017: Stephen Dodson"
One of World's 2017 Books of the Year in "History"
From the Back Cover
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"An utterly gripping masterwork. As residents of the House of Government enjoy privileged childhoods, fall in love and
marry, rise to power, betray each other, and are arrested and , we learn about the peculiar nature of Bolshevism and
get a new history of Russia. But the book's compelling brilliance is its living nature--a mixture of historical
narrative, novel, and family saga with echoes of Grossman, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and even Tolstoy."--Simon Sebag
Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
"Few books are truly visionary, but The House of Government earns this description. The cumulative effect of this
massive chronicle of the Soviet era is devastating and, more important, utterly satisfying. It's a work of art in
itself, a beautifully written exploration of a central phase of modern history, and one that has never seemed as
terrifyingly relevant. Tolstoy himself would have recognized Yuri Slezkine as an artist, as the author of a narrative
with transmogrifying power, an epic that functions on countless levels at the same time."--Jay Parini, author of The
Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year
"The House of Government traces the public and personal lives of residents of a unique, elite Moscow housing complex as
they evolve from fanatic Bolshevik revolutionaries--dreaming of a Marxist utopia and determined to shed blood to create
it--to victims of Stalin's terror. Based on diaries, letters, memoirs, and interviews, featuring hundreds of rare
photos, and combining history, biography, and social theory, this cornucopia of a book is a tour de force."--William
Taubman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era and Gorbachev: His Life and Times
"Using the House of Government as a microcosm of the rise and fall of the first generation of Soviet leaders and their
utopian ideas, Yuri Slezkine's remarkable book illuminates the entire experience of Stalinism. Drawing on memoirs,
letters, and literature, he lays bare the emotions of the Russian Revolution and its Bolshevik beneficiaries, from love
and friendship to a commitment to the end that justified the most vicious means. Perpetrators became victims as hundreds
of once-powerful residents of the House were imprisoned, exiled, tortured, and . The House of Government is
extraordinarily ambitious, exciting, and disturbing."--Ronald Grigor Suny, author of The Soviet Experiment
"In this monumental study, Yuri Slezkine tells the story of the first Soviet ruling generation by looking through the
windows of the remarkable building where many of them lived. Fittingly built in an area called the Swamp, the House of
Government saw more than a third of its elite tenants evicted and arrested in the terror of the 1930s. Drawing on an
amazing array of archives, memoirs, and interviews, Slezkine's unique narrative becomes a history of the Soviet Union
itself. Nobody interested in Soviet history can afford to miss it."--J. Arch Getty, University of California, Los
Angeles
"An incomparable masterpiece, Slezkine's account of the lives of elite Bolshevik families is as fascinating as a
nineteenth-century Russian novel. He builds real drama and pathos into the stories of these people, and we find
ourselves hoping against hope that they will survive. Yet this is history of the highest rigor. It would take several
lifetimes for mere mortals to locate, read, and figure out what to do with the diaries, letters, s, and drawings
Slezkine found in the archives. This family saga heightens the tragedy of the Russian Revolution and gives the reader a
quality of understanding rarely achieved by any work of history."--Lewis H. Siegelbaum, coeditor of Stalinism as a Way
of Life and author of Cars for Comrades
"Yuri Slezkine's brilliant account of the Soviet past shifts the story away from coal and iron statistics and into
Bolshevik millenarianism, Communist love lives, and the terror that enveloped a generation of leaders. A tour de
force."--Robert Service, author of Lenin: A Biography
"Boldly conceived and brilliantly executed, The House of Government is at once a major scholarly and literary
achievement."--Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy