The House of Government : a saga of the Russian Revolution / Yuri Slezkine.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 995-1081) and index.

Book one. En route -- Part I. Anticipation -- The swamp -- The preachers -- The faith -- Part II. Fulfillment -- The real day -- The last battle -- The new city -- The great disappointment -- The party line -- Book two. At home -- Part III. The second coming -- The eternal house -- The new tenants -- The economic foundations -- The virgin lands -- The ideological substance -- Part IV. The reign of the saints -- The new life -- The days off -- The houses of rest -- The next of kin -- The center of the world -- The pettiness of existence -- The thought of death -- The happy childhood -- The new men -- Book three. On trial -- Part V. The last judgment -- The telephone call -- The admission of guilt -- The valley of the dead -- The knock on the door -- The good people -- The supreme penalty -- Part VI. The afterlife -- The end of childhood -- The persistence of happiness -- The coming of war -- The return -- The end -- Epilogue: The House on the Embankment -- Appendix: Partial list of leaseholders.

"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 550 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"--Provided by publisher.