| FA-54424-09 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Yuri Slezkine | Moscow's House of Government, 1928-1938 | 9/1/2009 - 6/30/2010 | $42,000.00 | Yuri | | Slezkine | | | | University of California, Berkeley | Berkeley | CA | 94704-5940 | USA | 2008 | Russian History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 42000 | 0 | 42000 | 0 |
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). |