Moscow's House of Government, 1928-1938

FAIN: FA-54424-09

Yuri Slezkine
University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)

Across the Moscow River from the Kremlin stands a huge gray building known as the House of Government, the House on the Embankment, or the House of the Dead. Built during the First Five-Year Plan as a model of the "Communist organization of daily life" and a shelter for top government officials, poets laureate, and Red Army commanders, it became the most coveted and most dreaded "living space" in Stalin's Russia. I would like to write a history of the first ten years of its existence--as an examination of the physical structure itself; as a collective biography (historical ethnography) of the people inside; and as a metaphor for the life and death of the first generation of Soviet rulers (and the Russian Revolution).

Associated Products

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Book)
Title: The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
Author: Yuri Slezkine
Abstract: 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 eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, 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.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Princeton: Princeton University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

The George L. Mosse Prize
Date: 1/3/2019
Organization: American Historical Association
Abstract: The George L. Mosse Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding major work of extraordinary scholarly distinction, creativity, and originality in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since 1500.

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