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The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine
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Review
"Winner of the 2018 PROSE Award in World History, Association of American Publishers""Honorable Mention for the 2019 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, Nanovic Institute, University of Notre Dame""Winner of the 2018 George L. Mosse Prize, American Historical Association""Winner of the 2018 Norris and Carol Hundley Award, Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association""Shortlisted for the 2018 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize""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"
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From the Back Cover
"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 shot, we learn about the peculiar nature of Bolshevism and get a new history of Russia. But the book's compelling brilliance is its living organic 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 shot. 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, notebooks, 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
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Product details
Hardcover: 1128 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press; First Edition edition (August 22, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780691176949
ISBN-13: 978-0691176949
ASIN: 0691176949
Product Dimensions:
6.2 x 2 x 9.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.1 out of 5 stars
52 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#60,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This is a massive hybrid work that tells the personal human story of the Revolutionary Soviet elite. The book is centered around the story of the massive housing complex in Moscow built for the elite around the time of the first five-year plan (around 1930). But the book doesn't limit itself to that scope. It looks both forward and back at the lives of those who lived there. One of the very best parts of the book is the coverage of these people's lives *before* the 1917 revolution.The book is difficult to classify as a work. What makes it so interesting is that it able to be many things at the same time. Its a grand literary narrative of a large set of people in war and peace. Its a cultural and political history. It attempts to study and draw conclusions about a political system based on close study of those who led that system. It has grand diversions into literature, religion, russian intellectual history and all sorts of other matters. Its length and its tendency to cross so many traditional lines makes it exceptionally interesting but difficult to review. Its a book that could be reviewed in many different ways.The book humanizes and explains the old party members better than any other work I can think of. He presents the revolutionaries as a millenarian movement of true believers. The old world was going to end and they were going to build paradise. One of the great strengths of the book is that it is a showcase in the difficulties involved in building a utopia. The pre-revolutionary strengths of the movement immediately turned into weaknesses once the Civil War was over.They promised more than any revolution could deliver. Their stark dualist philosophy and discipline, which served them well as an underground movement, failed them once in power. The movement lacked any capacity to operate in a democratic fashion. It had no ability to accept dissent. Worst of all, the whole system was built on a lie. The lie that the revolution had brought utopia. Rather than being the product of one ruthless man, Stalinism seems within the context of the book to be the inevitable outcome of the system. If not Stalin, one of the others would inevitably have done something very similar.The impression I got from the book was that for all the evils of Stalinism, the country might have suffered even more if the revolutionary far left had come to power. Where they were different is that they really believed in abolishing the entire existing structure of life. They wanted to sweep away marriage, children and family life. The author's religious analogy actually works in this case in that if their ideas had been implemented, it would have been like throwing the entire country into a monastery. Everyone would have been put in Monk's cells with everything being communal. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came closest to actually making that model real with all the well-known consequences. I came away seeing more clearly what a dramatic change Lenin's NEP was for the true revolutionary faithful and how it created splits within the party that were eventually only resolved through the purge trials.There are parts of the book that tend toward excess. For example, he launches into an incredibly long intellectual diversion into the question of the Bolshevik party *as a religion*. Dealing with the question, he launches into a rambling history of nearly every religion in the world complete with lots of personal opinions an interpretations. An argument that should perhaps have been done in one or two pages consumes far, far more. The book is well over 1000 pages. Everything in the book is interesting, but not everything advances the core narrative of the book. There is a difference between telling a story and presenting an archive of material. His fault is tending on occasion toward the latter.I don't think the book is too long for the tale it tells, The problem is more that the "tree" needed to be pruned. The narrative needed to be tightened up. At certain points in the book, someone needed to ask how certain material was advancing the narrative. But the book is so good and the material on many occasions so interesting that I find it difficult to fault it much. Certain matters should have been included in perhaps extended appendix sections where they could stand alone as diversions into topics rather than interruptions of the narrative.This is not a "light" read. Its incredibly long. Its very dense. It expects a great degree of familiarity with Russian and Soviet history in all its aspects (political, historical, religious, cultural, literary, intellectual and more...) I personally found it very rewarding as a read. But reading it is a commitment and its not going to be for everyone. Its also not a comprehensive picture of Soviet society. Its narrowly focused on life at the very top of society and tending toward the stories of the true-believer party members.What the book ultimately was to me was the story of a political tragedy. It showed how the organization of a political movement and its ideology out of power impacts its ability to rule once in power. It shows very clearly the price of fanaticism and ruthlessness in politics. As well, it shows how important it is for a political elite to believe in the system they are running. The book shows quite well how the pre-revolutionary dedication to the political vision died out after the first generation.Again. This is a book that requires a large amount of knowledge going in and a commitment on the part of the reader. It will not be for everyone.
For Rulers: Priming Political Leaders for Saving Humanity from ItselfThis is a very unusual book exploring depth-dimensions of the Soviet Union which are neglected by most of the discourse on Communist Russia. It does so by discussing the fate of high-level Communist officials (see partial list pp. 983-994) who lived for some time in a special “Government House, together with analysis of main writings which reflected elite thinking..Insights stemming from the book include, among others, the following:1. Russian Communism was in many respects an apocalyptic millenarian sect. Much of the Nomenklatura was exhilarated by taking part in what they regarded as creating a new civilization and believed in its mission (though personally seeking and often achieving a high standard of living).2. The Communist regime failed to pass on its doctrine to the children of the ruling elite. These read Pushkin and Goethe, not Marx. As put by the author: “Revolutions do not devour their children; revolutions, like all millenarian experiments, are devoured by the children of the revolutionaries†(p. 955).3. The “masses†constituted material to be shaped and used by the ruling elite, without any traces of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.â€4. The hegemonic Marxist ideology was based on the basic fallacy that changing material conditions will produce a new kind of humans: “Focused on political economy and ‘base’-derived sociology, Marxism developed a remarkably flat conception of human nature. A revolution in property relations was the only necessary condition for a revolution in human hearts.†(p. 952).5. Therefore, unavoidably, “Bolshevism, unlike Christianity, Islam, and a few other millenarianisms, was a one-generation phenomenon†(p. 943).This book is essential reading for all interested in the history of the Soviet Union and of radical revolutions in general. But its importance is broader: Humankind is moving into a new epoch characterized, inter alia, by novel modes of production. But these by themselves will not change main propensities imprinted genetically on our species. This dissonance is likely to disrupt societies, creating “revolutionary†situations. My impression is that “putting books to the test of life and putting life to the test of books†(p. 129) will show that contemporary humanity is totally unprepared for this emerging challenge. This book can make a contribution to overcoming this serious lacuna.Professor Yehezkel DrorThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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