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The epic story of an enormous Soviet 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 chilling true story of an enormous Moscow apartment building where Soviet leaders and their families lived until hundreds of these Bolshevik true believers were led, one by one, to prison or to their deaths in Stalin's purges. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews with survivors, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, this epic story weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Margaret Atwood is an author and activist.
Wish to know more about #dictatorship? A shortlist of 5: 1. On Tyranny, Tim Snyder; 2. The House of Government, Yuri Slezkine; 3.The World Turned Upside Down, Yang Jisheng; 4. Mao’s Great Famine,Frank Dikotter; 5.The Face of the Third Reich: Joachim C. Fest. Have fun!
"I just can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s 1,000 pages, but I consider it one of the most brilliant books I’ve ever read. And I would almost go so far as to say, you can’t really understand the Soviet Union until you’ve read this book."
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Don't miss this conversation with two of our most distinguished Russian historian authors: Yuri Slezkine (The House of Government) and Karl Schlögel (The Soviet Century)! Listen in: https://t.co/KWFNGA4i8W @MIIS_MIR #Soviet #Twitterstorians #USSR #History https://t.co/o9XlNuJJVB