Download The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution AudioBook Free
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers resided before their destruction. The House of Federal government is unlike some other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Tranquility, Grossman's Life and Destiny, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative says 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 vibrant account of the non-public and general public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and nov the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, The House of Federal government, later known as The House on the Embankment, was located over the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The greatest home building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments rentals with public areas that included from a cinema and a collection to a playing golf courtroom and a filming range. Slezkine says the chilling story of how the building's residents resided in their apartments rentals and ruled the Soviet express until some 800 of these were evicted from the home and led, one by one, to prison or their fatalities. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, The House of Federal government weaves alongside one another biography, literary criticism, architectural background, and fascinating new ideas of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an memorable human saga of any building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, permanently disturbed by the ghosts of the vanished.
