The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

by Yuri Slezkine

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, Politics, Russian History, Russian Revolution, Soviet Union

1096 pages, Hardcover

First published August 7, 2017

About the author

Yuri Lvovich Slezkine (Russian: Ю́рий Льво́вич Слёзкин Yúriy L'vóvich Slyózkin; born February 7, 1956) is a Russian-born American historian, writer, and translator.
He is a professor of Russian history, sovietologist and Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is best known as the author of the book The Jewish Century (2004) and The House of Government: A Saga of The Russian Revolution (2017).

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Omphalos on the Moscva

Like Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem, The House of Government uses a limited geography as a focus to narrate an enormously important cultural history. This is the history of what can be called eschatological faith, the belief that the race of Homo Sapiens is destined toward a definite and definable end point. The two works narrate different strands of the same history, each with a distinctive virtuosity.

It is a common trope among Christian apologists that the modern Western world is primarily a product of Christian principles and institutions. What they would like to evoke through this assertion is a respect for Christian ideals of justice, individual responsibility, and virtuous character as the basis for the modern state. Such arguments have been made at least since Chateubriand’s Romanticist attack on the free-thinking philosophes and the French Revolution in the early 19th century.

However what these apologists are hesitant in pointing out is that Christianity also inspired other social movements, fascism and communism in particular, which Christianity has found even less benign than the liberal democracy emerging from the French and American revolutions. It is this strand that Slezkine follows into the House of Government, the Vatican-like dormitory of the Soviet Union in the 1930’s and 40’s. (Called The Swamp because of its location, it curiously shares an affinity with that other hotbed of political intrigue, the similarly named Foggy Bottom in Washington D.C, home of the Watergate Hotel and the American State Department. Perhaps it also inspired Trump’s campaign pledge about ‘draining the swamp’).

Moscow, of course, was considered the New (or Third) Rome by its 15th and 16th century rulers. Whether the Roman model of church government was an inspiration for the Eastern church and the subsequent soviet system or simply an inevitable consequence of similar totalitarian ambitions, religious or secular, is moot. However, Slezkine does a brilliant job of showing how Orthodox apocalyptic sentiment was closely bound up with fin de siecle Marxist fatalism. “Millenarianism,” Slezkine points out, “... is the vengeful fantasy of the dispossessed.” What might be said of both the House of Government and the Vatican in any case is that each indeed is “... a place where revolutionaries came home, and the revolution came to die.”

Both the Christian Church and the former Soviet Union see things from the same ideological perspective - an ideal future of justice, responsibility and virtue. Agreement about this ideal state is a necessary condition for participation in both. But since the ideal is defined and maintained by authority, agreement is not a matter of either intellectual understanding or intuitive acceptance but of credal obedience. If there is conflict among these impulses, even obedience itself may not be considered sufficient to prove orthodoxy. Despite even the most vigorous personal confessions of faith, one may be found anathema if there is any doubt about ‘the law written in the heart.’ Slezkine‘s aphorism is perfect: “... to be truly intelligent meant being religious about being intelligent.”

Qui custodiet custodies, Who should watch the watchers? A perennial issue in any strictly hierarchical state. Pope Francis has the same problem today that Stalin had in the 1930’s: How to ensure obedience to his authority within a dictatorial bureaucracy. Francis’s predecessor, Pius X, faced this problem in 1907 and issued a papal fatwa against those who claimed loyalty but were nevertheless suspected of heterodox tendencies. He also established a network of secret informers and a process for secret trials that would be the envy of future totalitarian regimes. The preferred punishment was excommunication, a spiritual death sentence.

As Francis has found with his Vatican Curia today, neither directives nor cajoling, nor even a change in the cast of characters is very effective in eliminating non-compliance. The Curia, like Stalin’s nomenklatura, has a life of its own, one that it would like to keep solely as its own. Lately Francis seems to be trying a bit of spiritual terror himself by accusing his senior people of careerism and other un-virtuous activities. The effects seem limited to date. Popes come and go but the Curia is always with us.

Stalin of course didn’t operate under the constraints that are placed on today’s popes and he went well beyond spiritual terror in his attempt to control soviet government. I’m sure the popes as well as Stalin appreciate the proximity of their minions. So convenient for exercising power directly. Terror works best at close quarters. But not too close. Just as the popes since the 14th century kept a bolt-hole across the Tiber in the Castel Sant’Angelo, so Stalin remained in the Kremlin across the Moscva from the House.

The most important difference between the House and the Vatican of course is that the former was the residence of families while the latter is populated by single clerics. While many government officials keep diaries and journals, without families to treasure them, hide them, and pass them on, they end up, particularly if juicy enough, in a closed official archive or are destroyed. This is why the House is so well documented, and why it takes a thousand pages or so to recount its history over such a relatively short period.

The complex narrative works largely because Slezkine is such a master of the overall cultural story. He is able to establish the significance of the details by continuous reference to the movement of Russian and European history. For example, Russia, like the United States, is a land of educated cults. Converting from the religious to the political variety or from one radical group to another is de riguer for the activist. Slezkine’s guided tour through the cast of characters preceding the Revolution fills an enormous gap in my understanding of the historical scene.

Slezkine cuts through many points of sociological confusion. For example his controversial treatment of Russian religion as politics and vice versa is justified simply by the fact that “... most people who talk about religion do not know what it is.” This includes not only ‘believers,’ but also the law. He nicely comments on the U.S. Constitutional problem in defining religious belief to make the point: there is little functional difference between faith in Jesus or faith in Marx. A culture of faith can move fluidly between the two, as demonstrated by the re-establishment of the Orthodox Church under Putin.

Certainly one’s view of any literary work is dependent upon the expectations one brings to it. Based on the title and first chapter, one would be entitled to expect a fairly quick focus on the turbulent years of the Great Terror and the consequent tumult caused in the lives of the residents. Forget it. Slezkine is far to well-read and far too imaginative to sleight any part of his subject, which is really, I suppose world history as it appears to coalesce in Russia, in Moscow, and ultimately on the particular building of The House of Government as a sort of navel of the planet.

So for example in his review of the millenarianism which was so influential in contemporary Marxism, it is not sufficient for Slezkine to describe Russian variants, nor even those of Europe and European derivation in the Americas. He treats the reader to a rather enjoyable tour through Chinese eschatology as well. True, this kind of thing can get tedious if one is planning a timed intellectual journey between fixed points. Best therefore to adjust whatever expectations one has and simply enjoy the ride. That ride took me about a month, but I may just do it again.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is truly a rare time when I will admit defeat and label a book as DNF (did not finish). However, after completing 22% of this piece, I have decided that I cannot continue, lacking the ability to affix sufficient attention to the narration or glean much of the author’s message. Some of this surely lays at my own feet, but as many have said on Goodreads, life is too short to be burdened with a book that leaves you feeling miserable as you trudge along.

Being a lover of history and revolutionary events steeped in politics, I was intrigued when I came upon Yuri Slezkine’s book. It was said to depict the intricacies of the Russian Revolution and told a strong story about it. While I know some publishers choose to spice things up with an eye-catching blurb on the dust jacket summary, I was led into something I was not expecting, much like the Tsar and his family. Slezkine spent a great deal of time in the portion of the book I read depicting the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover of the Soviet State as something akin to a new religion. Surely those familiar with the ideological underpinnings of the Bolsheviks and communist foundations will find some humour in this, but Slezkine does a decent job with the argument. While some may find it hard to find a comparison between Jesus, Moses, Joseph Smith, or Mohammed with the likes of Marx and Engels, the reader may see some interesting parallels found within the book. The struggle and clash of communism (youthful ideals) with well-established state ideologies (the old guard) shows how the Russian State was ready for a change and how easily it caught on with the masses. That said, much like the other major religious reformations over time, blood and violence preceded any change and it took a long time for the acceptance of this change. Slezkine reiterates his argument and pushes the reader to accept it through a form of inculcated repetition, much as the leaders of the Bolsheviks would have been able to instil this new means of thinking to the population. By this point of the book, I had tossed in the towel, as I was lost, both with the constant explosion of muddied facts, literary comparisons, and general circular arguments. While some who love Russian literature and writing style may love this piece, I cannot count myself as one of them.

I will be the first to admit that Russian literature is usually beyond my abilities. Be it the mindset or the dense style as thick as pea soup, I cannot be entirely sure, but I am sure that it is not simply something lost in translation. Slezkine does a masterful job at tying together history, politics, and literature, finding parallels between them all to sell his argument in favour of the revolutionary movement. I must applaud him there and can only hope that much of the remaining pages of this massive book continue to sell the details of the rise of the Bolsheviks. I could not find a thread to grasp as the narrative kept sinking deeper and deeper into a repetitive argument. The early religious parallels were truly interesting for me, but they lost their lustre quickly and I expected something more all-encompassing. For some reason, I entered this book thinking that it would be a piece of detailed fiction, whereby Slezkine would sell the idea of the Russian Revolution through his characters. Or perhaps a piece of non-fiction that would tie together some of the key happenings that led up to the fall of the Empire and arrival of Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks to take control of the House of Government, the heart of the Russian State. I do hope some find solace in his massive tome, educating themselves with the details and the literary references. I’ll stick to my biographical pieces and educate myself with pieces more in line with my personal likes.

Thanks for the chance to try this, Mr. Slezkine, but I will steer clear of your work for the time being.

Wholeheartedly attempting to read this book fulfils Topic #3 (Book Set During a Revolution) of the A Book for All Seasons (Equinox #2) Book Challenge.

Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/

A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This is a work of history. Any resemblance to fictional characters, dead or alive, is entirely coincidental"

This is a monumental, long and detailed book that is both a history of the Russian revolution, a personal reflection on the literature it produced and a collection of family stories centred on a large apartment building known as the House of Government, which was built in the early 1930s to house the elite class of the Bolshevik regime. Slezkine's other central theme is that the Bolsheviks shared all of the key attributes of a millenarian (apocalyptic) religious sect. He succeeds brilliantly in showing the all too human weaknesses that led to some of the most brutal acts of the 20th century.

I am not remotely qualified to review this with any academic rigour or to judge the soundness of Slezkine's wilder theories, so this is purely a personal reaction, and I apologise for being unable to do it justice. I must admit that this is not a book I would have chosen to read for myself - it was a Christmas present, and was then chosen for a group discussion in the Reading the Chunksters group.

The book is divided into six parts, an epilogue and various appendices. The first part is in three chapters, first an introduction to the book's Moscow location, then a review of the careers of the main players before the revolution and finally an introduction to Slezkine's millenarian sect theory consisting of a fascinating history of religious sects going back to Biblical times, whose relevance only gradually becomes apparent. In the second the story moves from the October revolution, through the civil war, the retreat from pure communism under the New Economic Policy, the death of Lenin and the gradual establishment of a strict party line, deviation from which proved fatal.

The House of Government finally appears over 300 pages in, in the third part, which describes its creation and the lives of some of its early tenants. There is a wealth of detail here, which makes it clear just how privileged the elite class was, as the contents of some of these apartments are itemised. The fourth part continues this exploration, focusing more on the people.

Slezkine builds a compelling picture through many personal family stories, and in the fifth part of the book brings home the full horror of the Great Terror by going through the cast itemising those who were killed or interned, when and what happened to their families, bringing out the relentless and inherently contradictory nature of the regime's deadly logic. The final section covers a much longer period from the end of the Terror until the fall of communism, largely explaining what happened to those who survived the purges and giving Slezkine's opinions on why Soviet Communism failed to endure once its founding generation were all dead.

Slezkine has clearly immersed himself in Soviet and later Russian literature, and summarises many of the key novels (Leonid Leonov's late novel The Pyramid sounds very interesting, but does not seem to available in English). The epilogue covers the works of Yuri Trifonov, who spent his childhood in the House and wrote many books about the house, its inhabitants and their attempts to come to terms with the past.

I won't apologise for describing this as an extraordinary book - its sheer size and scope may be daunting and some of the subject matter is harrowing, but it is clearly written and full of fascinating detail.

[Beata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning piece of non-fiction that is hard to find nowadays. Found it by pure chance and now I believe it to be one of the best books on the revolution. A real jewel! The book is truly terrifying; it describes the lives the revolutionaries, those famous and less known, led well before the revolution, during it, and until their ultimate downfall. A reminder of how any revolution eventually devours its creators.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

So how to rate this?

As a piece of archival and documentary research, this is monumental and undoubtedly worthy of 5-stars.

But it’s less convincing to me as an academic thesis which seeks to offer millennial religious cults as an analytical model to make sense of the Russian Revolution – 3-stars.

And for me as a general reader with an informed (Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag, Nadezhda Mandestam's Hope Against Hope: A Memoir and Hope Abandoned) though not academic, interest in the Revolution – 3-stars.

At over 1000 pages this is consistently digressionary and Slezkine could certainly have made his arguments more succinctly – this is particularly the case where he makes his religious cult comparisons with Bolshevism, with extensive chapters on world religious histories. Despite the length, not all of his points are completely clear: for example, I was confused where he equates the Christian crucifixion with myths of dragon-slaying. These parts sometimes felt like the author was either musing aloud rather than offering a digested and processed thesis, and sometimes unsure of his own ground so that he had to keep hitting us over and over with the point he wants to make.

The historical documentation directly related to the Revolution, though, is fascinating, if overwhelming. Starting before the Revolution, the eponymous House doesn't appear till around p.300 - and when it does, we're treated to long sections on who precisely dug its foundations and laid its pipes... this level of detail is both the book's strength if one is an academic and also its weakness: it is exhaustive and, for me, exhausting. However, the value lies in the documentation, transcription and translation of so many Russian sources, not least diaries and personal letters. This part makes an outstanding contribution to scholarship and I can imagine students using this as a reference book for some time to come.

I am, though, quite at a loss to understand how this has been compared to the fiction of Tolstoy, Grossman etc. - it's history, and not popular history - it makes little concession ( and why should it?) to the general interested reader.

To return to the thesis that Bolshevism was a millenial/apocalyptic cult - I'm not convinced... There are always well-recognised similarities between the systematic organisation of religion and politics (think of classical Athens where the theatre festivals were offerings to the god Dionysus, or the Roman state where the cardinal civic virtue is to be pius, a more complicated quality than ‘faithful’, akin to moral worth and manliness) but also important dissimilarities. By the end of the book, Slezkine also defines Bolshevism as 'Russia's Reformation' akin to the Protestant Reformation(s) of the Western European Renaissance.

There is, too, a cynicism that filters through the narrative: this is history written with teleological hindsight so that even the early passions of the 'preachers' for a fairer and more equitable system, for the overthrow of oppression and exploitation are viewed, I felt, with distrust and even a touch of superiority - it's easy to look back on the Russian Revolution (or any other?) and colour it by the overwhelming tragedy of what happened later but that doesn't necessarily mean that the instigators weren't genuinely driven by an idealising vision of something better than life under the Tsars.

Despite some misgivings, when Slezkine gets to the heart of what I expected from the book – the lives of the families in the House – the book comes to life. The intimacy and insight into real lives is what hooked me. Fascinating, too, is the complex, contradictory nature of the family in Bolshevik ideology: on one hand, loyalty to the family first rather than the state is dangerous; on the other, the family is the basic building block of politics, the place where ideology is to be embedded and passed down – hence the existence of the House.

The sheer weight of material marshalled here will make this a go-to for researchers for years - as a general reader I found this fascinating in places (the domestic lives of the inhabitants of the House), but ponderous in others. Ultimately, it didn't change my view of the Revolution but it does offer up a wealth of substantive information on the Bolshevik families who dreamt, engineered and were ultimately destroyed by the Revolution.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning. I thought this book was about an apartment building constructed for high Soviet officials (The House of Government), the people who lived there, and their fates during the purges of the 1930's and 40's. But it is so much more than that. This book is not for the faint hearted, or someone looking for a quick read. It is an 1100 page tome, a detailed account of the Russian Revolution led by the Bolsheviks - how it began, the lives and beliefs of the people who ran the revolution, how they lived afterwards, their fates after Stalin came to power, how the Revolution betrayed the common people, and so much more. I admit to struggling through the first sections, with all the background and philosophy and comparisons of communism to various religions, words whirling about my head, when suddenly the intent of those sections would became crystal clear and I would think "aha! that is why this section is here, it led exactly to THIS." So don't give up! Every word is important! This book also shows how Russia itself became a complete metaphysical House of Government in the sense that the Government was everything, the Party was everything, Communism was everything, and they controlled every action and thought of the citizens with an iron hand. I thought the last few chapters were particularly riveting, as they related actual trial testimonies, and the fates of the Old Bolsheviks and their families during the purges and afterwards. Stories of some of the children were particularly heart wrenching. Anyone interested in history in general, or Russian history in particular should read this, along with anyone who really thinks Communism is a good idea. (Although those people tend to always believe they could make it work if they only had the chance.) This is an important book, one of the most enlightening and informative books I have ever read. Many thanks to NetGalley and Princeton University Press for the opportunity to read this exceptional work. I may very well go buy the hardback of this book for future reference.

[Michael Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, at least in Part I, is quite literary. The Russians, steeped in literature, can really write poetic prose. The author quotes the historical actors throughout to capture the "you are there" feel for the reader.

Here's just one example where an activist named Mikhail Fridliand describes going to the State Duma Headquarters in the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, where the Provisional Government was housed just after the fall of the Tsarist state.

"I made my way to the palace through the menacing darkness, accompanied by the sound of random gunfire— now close at hand, then far away, then suddenly right next to my ear. The moon shone down in place of the streetlamps, which had long since been extinguished; the soft, warm snow fluttered down and tinted the streets a light blue. Trucks full of people kept rushing by every few minutes and then disappearing around the corner like screaming, rattling apparitions. The area in front of the palace, on Shpalernaia, was almost unbearably bright and noisy. Tauride had always been a quiet, old, cozy place, with silent doors and waxed floors, deputies strolling about arm in arm, and Duma marshals bobbing and gliding by. Now it was completely unrecognizable, with feverishly moving bright spots and a thousand sparkling lamps lighting up the darkness, exciting the city’s mutinous blood and sucking it in with its pale tentacles. Directly in front of the main entrance, in the middle of the white, fluffy garden, a large, magnificent automobile lay on its side, like a wounded animal, its bruised nose and headlights buried in the snow. One of the doors was open, and large snowy footprints were visible on the stylish rug and tender leather of the seats. The entire courtyard around it was filled with motorcycles, carts, sacks, and people— a whole sea of people and movement breaking against the entrance in waves."

He continues....

"The sudden chaos of new creation had lifted up the ancient house, widened it, enlarged it, and made it enormous, capable of encompassing the revolution and all of Russia. Catherine Hall had become a barracks, parade ground, lecture hall, hospital, bedroom, theater, a cradle for the new country. Flooding in, all around me, were countless streams of soldiers, officers, students, schoolgirls, and janitors, but the hall never seemed to grow too full; it was enchanted; it could accommodate all the people who kept coming and coming. Chunks of alabaster from the walls crunched underfoot, amidst machine-gun belts, scraps of paper, and soiled rags. Thousands of feet trampled over this trash as they moved about in a state of confused, joyous, incomprehensible bustle.'

===

For all the romance expressed above, however, this generation of Marxist rebels were quite religious in their own way, captive of a form of Millenarianism, a vengeful fantasy of the dispossessed. As with religion, people were divided into two camps: "us" and "them."

Lenin would accentuate that, and it would become quite ruthless, with nine groups to be subjected to “concentrated violence”:

1) the parasitic strata (former landowners, rentiers of all kinds, bourgeois entrepreneurs not directly involved in production; trade capitalists, traders, brokers, bankers)

2) the unproductive administrative aristocracy recruited from the same strata (the top bureaucrats of the capitalist state, generals, archbishops, etc.)

3) the bourgeois entrepreneurs as the organizers and directors (managers of trusts and syndicates, the “operators” of the industrial world, the top engineers, the inventors directly connected to the capitalist world)

4) the skilled bureaucrats—civilian, military, and clerical

5) the technical intelligentsia and intelligentsia in general (engineers, technicians, agronomists, veterinarians, doctors, professors, lawyers, journalists, most teachers, etc.)

6) the officers

7) the well-off peasantry

8) the middle and, in part, petty urban bourgeoisie

9) the clergy, even the unskilled kind.

The punishments included censorship, forced labor, suppression of strikes, takeover of property, confiscation of produce, and confinement in concentration camps. (The Gulag was already open for business).

Then there was the death of Lenin and the ascension of Stalin. In the early 1930's there was the Great Famine that cost the lives of millions of people, and in the late 1930's the Show Trials of the Old Bolsheviks, such as Nikolai Bukharin, that ended in execution. What was supposed to be heaven on earth had become Hell.

In the author's epilogue, he traces the life of a survivor, author Yuri Trifonov. His father was a Red Army officer who was arrested and shot in 1938 (and "rehabilitated" in 1955). Trifonov's mother spent years in a labor camp for not denouncing her husband. (She was also rehabilitated in 1955). Author Yuri Trifonov died in 1981.

Though I had not heard of Yuri Trifonov, the year of his death stands out to me. I took several courses
on Russian history and Soviet Politics in college. Part I of this book was mostly new to me, but the rest of it was very familiar. I recall that one day, when it would be around the time of a Trifonov's death, a guest speaker came to the Soviet politics class I was in. He was an expert on the Soviet economy. He explained to us that the Soviet Union could no longer feed its people and it was only a matter of time before it collapsed. And, indeed, it did. A tragic, but fitting coda to the disastrous Bolshevik experiment that went terribly wrong.

[Biblio Curious · Rating 4 out of 5]

My relationship to this book is complicated. Like a 1st date, it shows up charming as can be. After a few weeks, skeletons begin to tumble out of the closet revealing a few structural flaws.

Those first few pages were exquisite, the details are profound and resonating. The writing style reminds me of someone trying to recall strong memories of days long past in an attempt they will be preserved. These early chapters describe street scenes and scents in such detail, I'm sure folks who've actually been here can relate. The chapters are organized chronologically and give an overview of the Bolsheviks house.

Once the setting for the house is outlined for us, Slezkine crams in every ideology that travelled through Russia's streets in the early 1900s. The books he drops into the conversation at the beginning of The House of Government will continue to show up for all 980 pages. It does become grinding after about 700 pages of the same books mentioned. There were a few moments when it's interesting to see how society changed when considering these books. Books that were highly celebrated in 1910, had different connotations by the 1930s. After that, it became a little repetitive and only new people are saying the same things about the old books.

Granted, I did read this tome cover to cover & it may not be Slezkine's intention. Perhaps it was written for another interesting purpose. One that's steeped in heritage & people trying to find their roots or answer some of those unanswerable questions. Near the end of the book, he includes a chapter on the children of the Bolsheviks and orphanages they were sent to.

Most of this book contains snippets of old letters, journal entries and some newspaper clippings wedged into Slezkine's historical context, summaries and commentary. It makes me wonder how the descendants of this house would view this book? Or people who knew some of the families who lived here? What does this book offer them in terms of closure?

A few of the structural troubles are minor such as the books mentioned in a repetitive way. Why were only these books mentioned? Censorship was a huge issue for Soviet Russia, surely the residents talked about books being repressed? Or wished for older books? When residents went to their rest homes, surely they were able to obtain some censured books? Or when people returned from exile? Again, this could be a topic for another book & the scope would be far to big.

Another issue that emerged by about page 800 is why was Stalin's life & early impact on these residents glossed over? Why don't we learn how he took over power & his early days of power? Surely the residents had opinions of him at the beginning? His death and body preservation were mentioned in a few paragraphs. Perhaps the intended audience for this book is already well versed on Stalin, he's already received more than his share of the limelight for study and this book focuses on the residents.

When Stalin's influence is mentioned, he suddenly appears in the 2nd 1/2 of the book, during the height of his power. The narrative focuses on the mindset of the residents waiting for sentencing & we're given the high numbers of deaths he caused all across the countryside. Some passages are truly grotesque & difficult to stomach because of how many people lost their lives. Caution when reading Chapter 25: The Valley of the Dead, it's a disturbing one.

This book does give plenty of information about the women of this time. And it humanizes the Bolsheviks rather than treat them as an abstract ideology. During the course of this book, we see the inner workings of their daily lives, realistic & human thoughts they had while living in Soviet Russia and the heartbreak of the women who married men that decided to commit to Bolshevism.

After reading it, I'd only recommend it to people with a firm interest in Russian history & the issues related to the Revolution & its ideologies. Perhaps students of history or historical fiction could benefit from this style of presenting historical events. The majority of readers could be just bored to tears by the vast number of people who drift in and out of the narrative.

After reading it, I can say I have a greater appreciation for the importance of personal correspondence in a historical context. But it did need a few more rounds of editing so Slezkine's point can be more clear. I hope there's a 2nd edition that's more polished because the scope of this book is vast & tells stories that have value.

If you're still unsure whether to read it or not, just read the first & last chapter. See if the language & writing style speaks to you. The first chapter shows his writing at it's best and the final chapter summarizes some of his opinions.

Original review, before reading it:
Originally, I sampled this one from Netgalley, then gave in and pre-ordered it. The beautiful book now rests on my Russian Lit bookshelf.

I still haven't officially reviewed it simply because it's a tome that deserves a slow reading. The beginning pages were simply exquisite, the details are profound and resonating. The writing style reminds me of someone trying to recall strong memories of days long past in an attempt they will be preserved. These early chapters describe street scenes and scents in such detail, I'm sure folks who've actually been here can relate. The chapters are organized chronologically and give an overview of the Bolsheviks house.

What I find most intriguing about this is a uni press has published a work of fiction, essentially a novel. What makes it stand out above other novels is it's also trying to be a biography with some historical facts blended in. From what I've gathered, it looks quite successful in this endeavour.

I think any fans; casual or academic of Russian History, Biography, Memoir, Literary Fiction could enjoy this work. From a writer's point of view, the writing style is unique blend of fiction, biography or historical fact. Keep in mind, it's 1100 pages, so isn't a light read!

Link to my video review showing some features of the book from before I read it:
https://youtu.be/9hyvfRfn800

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

A massively researched exploration of the Russian revolution from pre-1917 through Stalins’s terror, searching for the source of the true believer commitment of the early Bolshevists and the reasons it didn’t survive their generation. Slezkine doesn’t believe you’ll be convinced by one example, so he turns a fire hose of evidence on you at every turn. And a fire hose of convoluted prose. I listened, and at times just let the text wash past, figuring I was getting the gist of it. But in the end, I came away with a sense of the pervasiveness of the attitudes he was explaining, at least among the intelligentsia and Old Bolshevists who inhabited or were close to the House of Government.

There is a very religious aspect to his understanding of Bolshevism and it’s follow-on. He spends a good chunk of the early section discussing cults in general, to support the argument that Bolshevism was the equivalent of a religious cult for its participants. For example, he compares the behavior of religions and cults that foretell the of the world, and how they handle the fact that the end doesn’t come, with how the Bolshevists had to handle the failure of the revolution to spread around the world or to lead to immediate socialism within Russia. Later, he injects another long discussion of the history of witch hunts before exploring the terror that followed the assassination of Sergey Kirov in 1934. Personally, it seems to me that the Inquisition would be a better comparison to the Terror than witch hunts, but I’m not a Russia scholar. Religious toleration of persecution and suffering is also the backdrop for the Terror, both for the people who were disappeared and their friends and families who were left wondering what was true, and did it matter.

In the conclusion, Slezkine argues that Bolshevist Communism was Russia’s Reformation, in that it introduced a self-directed sense of guilt and self-discipline that resembled Western Puritanism. He then goes on to posit that the revolution eventually failed because Communism failed to police and replace family intimacy with an ideological replacement. Instead, Bolshevists in the House of Government, the Communist elite, raised their children in an old-fashioned environment of classic literature, bourgeois furniture, dacha summers, music lessons, and family warmth that couldn’t elicit the parents' 1917 fervor in their children.

I expected the book to take place only in and around the actual apartment building, but in fact the first third or more was filled with the history of the revolution and an introduction to many of the people who later lived in the apartment House. It follows their ideas, relationships, and reading during their pre- and immediate post- Revolution lives: protesting, living in exile in rural Russia, rushing around in the early days of the new country. Then Slezkine examines family life in detail, with a long section on family relationships and the musical chairs aspect of early Bolshevist marriages. He discusses the history of the site where the House of Government would be built, how that occurred, and how it operated, once built. The last third I listed to faster than I usually do, as the unending sequence of midnight knocks on doors of the House to arrest the residents one by one, and the surreal conduct of their trials, was difficult to experience.

Slezkine has apparently read every document in every archive, and every work of literature, from the period 1900 to 1940. He has a bottomless depth of research to draw on. Slezkine spends much of the book quoting from diaries and letters and summarizing the plots of Soviet novels. He argues that the Bolshevists paid particular attention to literature as the key tool to bring the peasants and unconverted Proletarians around. This was because literature was the way the true believers had studied and become passionate about the cause. Thus the proper role for literature, and whether individual authors were conforming to it, became of primary importance. The problem was, interpreting the quick-moving Party line, and whether authors were lauding it or criticizing it, was in the eyes of the reader/censor. Literary works and their fate are examined in detail.

This makes an excellent pre-curser to Svetlana Alexievich’s Second Hand Time. Among the 1990s Russian voices that Alexievich records for us are those of the older, true believers in Communism. They still have the same faith in the principles of Communism that enabled 1930s residents of the House of Government to accept persecution for imaginary crimes because such mistakes were acceptable in the fight for the larger goal of achieving a true and strong Communist state.

Dense and overwhelming at times, but excellent.

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917 they believe that the arrival of Communism - envisioned as a Utopian society on earth - was a rapture that they would experience within their own lifetimes. Having apparently discovered the Laws of History and successfully marginalized the competing ideological streams of the revolution, Bolshevik leaders and their cadres believed they stood on the brink of an imminent world-changing event that would bring heaven down to earth in the form of a global Communist society.

But although the Bolsheviks succeeded in taking charge of the revolution and inheriting control of the old Russian Empire, their prophecy did not come to pass. Communism, in the rapturous form that they envisioned it at least, did not arrive. The day of judgement came and went. Meanwhile the leaders who prophesied it slowly passed away. Over the next seven decades the problem became what to do with the country that they inherited during their initial fervor, after the anticipated end of history came and went without a climax.

This book is an analysis of the Bolsheviks as a millenarian sect, comparable to the early Christians, Muslims and a range of other religious movements. Slezkine's argument echoes the writings of John Gray and others who have correctly noted how religious enthusiasms were transmuted into "secular" politics over the past century in the West. Within this overarching argument (which you don't actually have to accept to appreciate the actual research in the book) most of this huge text deals with the intimate details of the lives of Bolshevik revolutionaries who lived in the Soviet's House of Government, as well as their children who were the inheritors of the revolution. This is in reality a family history on a grand scale. The book deals with the diaries of these revolutionaries (many of which are incredibly moving and beautiful), their literary tastes, romantic lives, political activities, and, often, their untimely deaths at the hands of the later Stalinists.

What was most striking to me from the book was the intensely zealous belief of these early revolutionaries, as well as the full implications of their genuinely revolutionary sentiment. The word "revolution" has been cheapened greatly over the past decades, used for every change of government, reformist movement and marketing campaign. The Bolsheviks however exemplified the full extent of what revolution means. Their goal was not simply to depose the old regime but to completely deracinate and transform Russian society, as well as the world. They sought to transform not just politics, but also moral values, artistic expression, the physical composition of cities and the intimate lives and thoughts of human beings. Nothing was free from questioning and often violent renovation in a new image ordained by Communism. Reading these accounts, including Bolshevik ideas of what marriage should be, how people's homes should be built, and even details of how they literally bulldozed ancient religious institutions was a sobering reminder of what true revolution means. Although some will recoil at the Bolshevik's most extremist ideas, you can't help but admire their sheer ability and willingness to utterly remake the world in a way that was perhaps unprecedented in human history.

The ultimate failure of the Bolsheviks came not just because they failed to fulfill their immediate promise of earthly salvation, Slezkine argues, but because they failed to indoctrinate their children with the same revolutionary zeal that had fired their original revolution. The children of those who lived in the House of Government grew up reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky rather than Marx and Engels. Over time they ceased to believe in the millenarian ideas of the revolution, though they continued to inhabit and administer the grand structure that it had built. The original Bolsheviks succeeded in winning power the way that other millenarian movements like Christianity and Islam had, but they failed to make their deepest beliefs normative for people. As such, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed it was clear that no one there really believed in the original dreams that had driven Lenin, Bukharin and many others.

This is a book that is very, very heavy on details and minutiae. At nearly 1000 pages it can at times be overwhelming, given the amount of attention is paid to the intimate lives of dozens of characters who are impossible to all keep track of. It would probably have benefited from some concise editing to make it more of a popularly appealing story, though it was clearly a labor of love and the author likely wanted to include the fullest account possible. Having said that, students of 20th century intellectual history will get a lot out of this, as will, undoubtedly, people who are inspired or motivated by revolutionary ideas in the present day. Politics is the search for religion by other means, and revolutionary politics is the vehicle of the most zealous religion of all. I picked up this book in part out of fascination with modern Muslim revolutionary movements, many of which seemed to have been inspired by the militant iconoclasm of the Bolsheviks, Jacobins and others of their type. In many ways the story of the Russian Revolution is a universal story of modernity, and this book is a worthy contribution to understanding it.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book that will I am sure come to be seen as a classic. Words like "epic" are thrown around too easily sometimes but are appropriate here. We are rapidly approaching the 100 year anniversary of the October Revolution and this is a fine book to read about it. Yuri Slezkine has written a history of the Russian Revolution focused on the time up until 1941 but also embracing its ultimate failure in the 1990s. The book is on the surface a history of a building - known as the "House of Government" -- that was built to house the key members of the Soviet bureaucracy - or nomenklatura. Slezkine has obtained access to a vast set of biographies, autobiographies, diaries, letters, and the like from many of the residents of the building during its heyday in the 1930s. So in a sense, this is a collective history/ biography of the Soviet bureaucracy from its inception in the 1920s until most of the old Bolsheviks who had not already passed away were purged by Stalin and the NKVD or destroyed in WW2.

The above description only provides a hint of the richness of the book. Slezkine really provides several distinct yet interconnected stories about the Russian Revolution, each of which can be taken on its own terms. These stories also combine to provide the overall story of the failure of the grand Soviet experiment.

Slezkine treats the Russian Revolution as an example of the success of a millenarian cult that succeeds in taking political power but then fails at the task of institutionalizing the cult and getting it to persist indefinitely into the future. Seen this way, the comparison with the Russian Revolution is the development of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam into established and persisting institutions. The first part of the book establishes this perspective - a perspective that is maintained throughout the rest of this long story.

A second line of narrative in the book concerns the nuts and bolts of moving from a small revolutionary core of true believers to the establishment of some bureaucratic order for getting anything done. Related to this are extensive discussions of the Soviet building program in the 1920s and 1930s. It is in this context that the "House of Government" is conceived of and built - representing both the practical needs of housing critical officials and a statement of what these spaces for living and working were supposed to look like under the coming Communist future. This section is fascinating on its own terms and reminded me of Merridale's recent history of the Kremlin.

A third aspect of the book, which is spread throughout the text, concerns Soviet literature and culture. How did Soviet artists and writers come to think about their work. What else did they read and what influenced their thinking? Goethe and Cervantes are mentioned a lot. Related to this is how these officials brought up their children and what they read. There is a broad discussion of the demographics of the building - who got apartments there, what were their positions, what were their families like, what was the broader space like in term of parks, theaters, playgrounds, etc. There is some incredible material here and it figures prominently into the rest of the book. For example, one of the paradoxes is that while those who received leases to rooms were strictly controlled and reviewed, the additional people who lived in the apartments was not and could include wives, children, mistresses and their children, as well as more extended family members.

The story eventually leads to the period of the purges, the Great Terror, the "knock on the door" in the middle of the night by NKVD agents, the camps in the Gulag, and the executions. This part of the book is especially gripping. The readers gets a range of first person accounts of these encounters. There are also accounts of how those not arrested (yet) and their children coped with this time. There are also extended discussions of how those arrested dealt with their fates as Communist true believers. This is precisely the problem faced by the protagonist in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, but it is presented here in the words of how the actual victims and their families came to grips with it.

The grand story is one of a massive family tragedy. It all started out so well - what the heck happened? Slezkine also mines the memoirs and letters of the children of the Old Bolsheviks as they grew to maturity during and after WW2. In tying together this massive story, Slezkine focuses on the question of why the Russian "reformation" last little more than a generation, while Christianity and other great religions have persisted. He provides a convincing but very rich story focused on how the first generation of revolutionaries related to the second and subsequent generations. It turns out that economic class analysis was insufficient to structuring a brand new society. While that may or seem surprising, the details of the spectacular Soviet failure to persist are well worth reading.

This is a well written book that is engaging and easy to follow, except that it literally involves a cast of hundreds of characters, many of which pop up throughout the story and are sometimes hard to keep track of without going back and checking. That is OK, I am fairly certain that I will be rereading this book before long.

[Ilya Azar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Лучшая книга для чтения в спецприемнике, но попросите судью дать вам хотя бы 5 суток

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unreal and singularly compelling history of Soviet Russia. Yuri Slezkine unites the rare capabilities of a scholar and a storyteller in this appropriately epic-length history, which pivots around the House of Government, the massive housing complex for the socialist/communist faithful. It is a massive book, but incredibly readable from start to finish.

Slezkine is particularly adept at zooming in and out on his subjects. At one moment, he relates the intimate thoughts, letters, and diary entries of individual people; at the next, he pans out and assesses human history, religion, and culture in broad strokes. Along with direct quotations and painstaking research, he spends a great deal of time analyzing Soviet literature, showing us what it reveals about ascendant revolutionary beliefs.

Throughout this history, Slezkine argues that Soviet socialism and its attendant fantasies of true communism were the latest in a long line of millennarian sects (mimicking many features of Christian apocalyptic cults, among other religions). This was a revelatory lens for me through which to better understand Russian communism. The Russian insistence on the coming utopia and the abolishment of the family and private property as the path to social enlightenment can be found in every chapter of the revolution. Slezkine makes it easy to understand how such a charming-sounding fundamentalist vision could result in the brutality, inhumanity, and absolute disregard for human life that characterized the Russian revolution.

Recommended especially to young progressives who think Marx is a cool avatar and that socialism is super-rad, bleating it’ll be different this time…

[Alain Acevedo · Rating 4 out of 5]

siempre recordaré el verano de 2023 como aquel en el que prácticamente me encerré durante 10 días para leer un libro de mil y pico páginas sobre las élites políticas de las primeras tres décadas de existencia de la URSS

me ha gustado mucho esto. pero:
1) los testimonios que contiene (y que provocan que el libro sea tan largo) tienen un interés desigual y habría estado muy bien que algunos de ellos fueran notas a pie de página y no parte del texto principal;
2) Slezkine a veces expresa algunas de las worst takes ever sobre la URSS y sobre el marxismo (cuando dice que los nazis y los bolcheviques "seguían a Marx" en su lucha contra los judíos y tenían "el mismo enemigo, sólo que los bolcheviques lo consideraban una clase social y los nazis lo tenían por una tribu" o sea qué tienes que tener en la cabeza para hacer ese juicio y quedarte tan pancho); (también esos takes sobre el marxismo como religión y ese rollo de "el núcleo del marxismo puede, por tanto, considerarse sobrenatural, no puede someterse a una verificación empírica" me pregunto yo qué ideología sí puede someterse a verificación empírica (supongo que Slezkine diría que el liberalismo pero jajajajajjaj)
3) algunos párrafos se repiten casi iguales en pocas páginas, ya te hemos entendido a la primera Yuri relax

en fin, vale mucho la pena acercarse a esta obra y se lee sorprendentemente fácil para tener 1.400 y pico páginas de puro texto (más 200 y algo de bibliografía)

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be a cruel thing to say about a 980-page book, but if you want to claim to understand how the Bolshevik ideology penetrated and drove the Soviet Union (and therefore understand the Soviet Union), you need to read this book.

It will not be easy. Slezkine tells you exactly what he is going to use his 980 pages for, and how his story will unfold. He spends the first third describing how Bolshevism is and is not like other Millennialist ideologies (that is, ways of thinking that focus on a Perfect Future Time). And he begins to introduce his characters --some famous, some not, all real. Slezkine tells us how they created and grew and reinforced the basic principles of Bolshevism (including intolerance toward any belief or person that would drag the proletariat utopia backwards).

Then, he starts populating this House of Government, a massive apartment complex in Moscow for the Party Elite and their families. These Best Bolshevists get four-room apartments, rugs, books, carpets, maids, a laundry, a theater, and sports facilities. In-laws galore move in as well. Children are indoctrinated in camps and groups and Party holidays are celebrated.

But you already know how this ends, and when characters you have been following for 700 pages begin to be shot or sent to the far reaches of Siberia, you plead for this to be over already. But you can't walk away, because here, in these 980 pages are some of the most incisive lessons about the Soviet Union.

Like this one: "One reason for the fragility of Russian Marxism was Marxism. The other was Russia."

I am not sure Slezkine's position on the Soviet Union in general. He is explaining, not evangelizing. And he lets many of his subjects do their own talking through letters, diaries, etc. They were true believers, even during the famines and the purges and the killings. And were bereaved by Stalin's death, and shocked to the core when they finally realized what they had done to themselves.

A character in a Russian post-war novel opines about the Soviet experience: "Was it not Russia's historic mission to crash to the ground from the height of a thousand year greatness before the eyes of the world, so as to warn the coming generations against repeated attempts to contrive a heaven on earth?"

Slezkine does all of this in language you will understand. At first, I wondered why he was engaging in selective repetition of certain phrases or ideas. It's actually a clever trick to help you remember what you are reading over 980 pages.

So you remember that even as high-level party members went to their deaths, they did so assuming that they had done something wrong, even a fleeting thought that perhaps Trotsky was right. They did so writing pleading letters to Stalin, because Lenin had allowed them to have existential crises about the Soviet way. And you remember that Slezkine has set up an iron-bound argument aligning Bolshevism with the truest believers of major world religions, simply noting that while the core beliefs can be switched out, the actions of the faithful are always, in a very banal way, the same.

[Arnis · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://poseidons99.wordpress.com/201...

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not for a casual reader. Slezkine's history is ,like the former Bolshevism he writes about, beyond ambitious. Intensely,insanely detailed, almost in a stream of consciousness technique, dense with parables, allegories, philosophical musings, stuffed past the brim with personal anecdotes, literary analysis, terrible deeds, and head-shaking stupidity, reading this book is like falling directly into the rabbit hole of the 1917 revolution. You know the ending but the torturous tunnels you traverse keep you traveling and hoping for daylight, sooner than later. One wonders what cosmic joke the universe intended by having Stalin and Hitler live at the same time.If life indeed is a circle, we are certainly spinning into a similar absurdity.

[Marina the Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even though I am not a casual reader on Russia and Communism, and even though I found a lot of interesting and thought provoking parts, overall it was too long and repetitive. I had to skip here and there. I stayed with it until the bitter end, but I am not satisfied. The change in perspective of the old bolsheviks from total enthusiasm to horror, rejection and cynicism is absent. I grew up in a communist country, and I consider this transformation the most important psychological element of that era.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Еще более литературное этнографическое… ладно, сравнительно-историческое — описание большевизма, эдакая история КПСС с картинками и разговорами. Выросла книга, как нам сообщает вот в этом прекрасном интервью автор (https://istorex.ru/page/slezkin_yul_y...), из «Еврейского столетия», но этот текст все ж больше Литература сам по себе: тут, например, есть такие персонажи: https://www.facebook.com/max.nemtsov/....
Интересно, конечно, как воспримет эту книгу российская институционализированная интеллигенция (это та, которой по должности и происхождению положено быть интеллигенцией, а не та, что в психушке; понятно, что она, среди прочего и есть главный коллективный герой «Дома правительства»), может, и сочувственно. Две предыдущие его книги, как мы уже отмечали, она в массе своей не заметила: Слезкин же пишет о ее прошлом неприятные (а точнее — просто объективные) вещи, ну и обвиняют его, натурально, в широко понимаемой русофобии. И действительно, даже просто читать на английском советские банальности и бессмыслицу, осточертевшие мантры и заклинания вроде «пролетариату нечего терять, кроме своих цепей», — это, гм, освежает. В переводе этих глупостей с языка вялого, рыхлого и хаотичного на дисциплинированный всегда было что-то антисоветское. Впрочем, как нам рассказывают, автор сам готовит русское издание (что логично, с таким объемом русского материала), и этот эффект может отсутствовать.
Излагать, о чем книга, я не стану, скоро это будет на всех заборах, коротко скажу о странных недочетах. Мелкое — это то, что у пионеров не было «звездочек»: «звездочки были у октябрят, у пионеров были «звенья». Выверт покрупнее — говоря о литературных корнях сектарианского большевизма, Слезкин отчего-то ни разу не упоминает Рахметова как ролевую модель (а эта фигура была важна, как нам известно); он вообще о «Что делать?» Чернышевского упоминает редко, глухо и походя. Это загадочно. Объяснимый кикс — всю книгу он строит на метафоре Болота, но символом чего стала Болотная площадь в последние годы, не говорит (может, в ру-издании скажет; английское вышло, когда Болотная в общем уже случилась, но еще не осмыслилась, видимо). А необъяснимый: когда он говорит об эпидемиях поисков козлов отпущения, вроде охот на ведьм или сталинских чисток, он делает обширное отступление об эпидемии педофилии в Штатах в 80-х (эдакое #metoo с поправкой на преимущественно аналоговую среду обитания), но, опять-таки, не использует российский материал последних лет (гей-пропаганда и прочее), а смысла бы в этом было гораздо больше — и работало на идею книги, а не против нее. Так же это напоминает нарочитую фигуру умолчания.
А вообще читается книга, конечно, со смесью интереса и омерзения: смотреть на всех обитателей Дома правительства — как наблюдать за жизнью мучных червей или еще каких-нибудь смутно неприятных и прожорливых каннибалистых насекомых. Литература, надо сказать, у них при таком взгляде, была столь же отвратительна. Так что у автора все получилось, я бы сказал.

[Andrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

real life Soviet Game of Thrones, basically

[Omar Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yuri Slezkine has written a number of interesting books, and “The House of Government; a Saga of the Russian Revolution” is his latest and greatest offering. At over 1000 pages, it is not a lightweight book, literally or metaphorically. What he does is follow the lives of a large number of Bolshevik revolutionaries, from their origins as young rebels (they were almost all very young; very few were over 40 when they took over the largest country in the world) to the heady days of the Bolshevik revolution, to the civil war that followed, the first compromise (the NEP), the second and more serious attempt at “true communism” (the five year plan), the terrible violence and suffering of collectivization, the victory of communism under Stalin, the insane purge and auto-annihilation that followed that victory, the second world war, the desiccation and death of revolutionary ideology, and, perhaps most strikingly, the coming of age of the next generation without any sincere transfer of the purported official ideology, leading to the final, inevitable collapse of the entire experiment.

The characters in the book are mostly second tier revolutionaries, who all held important positions, but who were not for the most part at the very top (there are some exceptions, Sverdlov and Bukharin are discussed in detail and they were no doubt first tier, Sverdlov practically led the revolution until his early death in March 1919 and Bukharin was a first tier leader until the late 20s and had the prestige of one well into the 1030s). As Slezkine himself makes clear in the beginning, the characters he has selected are first and foremost distinguished by the fact that they left a record; either they or their near and dear ones (wives, children) wrote diaries, letters and books that allow Slezkine to paint this incredibly detailed portrait of their lives. Still, it is worth keeping in mind that this is a group that may not may not be completely typical, but he has selected a large enough sample that we can be confident that we are getting at least a very important part of the picture.

The Bolshevik revolution (aka “The October Revolution”) was, strictly speaking, the second Russian revolution; the first was the popular upheaval that overthrew the Czar in February 1917 and that led to a few months of genuine freedom (and chaos). The second was the Bolshevik coup that overthrew the provisional government and established the dictatorship of the (relatively small, certainly not a majority in terms of popular support) Bolshevik party. The party may not have had vast popular support (the Socialist Revolutionaries, SRs, certainly had greater popular support, as indicated by their showing in the only elections ever held in Russia that year) but they had the clearest conception of what they wanted, and the most willingness to use violence to achieve it. This group established control, won the civil war, and created the Soviet Union. Which brings us to the first thing this book is not; it is not a history of the Soviet Union. The reader is expected to know that history in some detail already. There is a lot of detail about what happened, but not a lot of summary history. It will help if you read some general books about the revolution before or alongside this great work.

The house of government referred to in the title was a very large set of apartments build across the river from the Kremlin for the senior officials of the Soviet Union. Most (but not all) of the characters in the book lived in this building at some point and the house serves as a device to hold together the various lives that make up this book. The house had over 500 apartments as well as a theater, music hall, health clinic, hair salon, grocery store, and repair shop. It offered opportunities for tennis, chess, fencing, painting, skating, skiing, singing, sewing, boxing, theater, volleyball, basketball, photography, stenography, target shooting and radio-building. The residents lived comfortably, served by hundreds of maids, handymen, housekeeping workers and guards. While the adults tended to socialize (if at all) with smaller circles of friends and comrades, the children of the house of government grew up playing together going to the same schools, visiting the same entertainments (nearby Gorky park had everything from circuses to carousels, bumper cars and concerts, given by 10 different orchestras a day). But beyond this function of holding the various story lines together in one physical location, the house actually plays a relatively limited role in the narrative. If there were no such house and the characters lived scattered across the various converted hotels of central Moscow (repurposed as the various “houses of Soviets”), the book would have been little different.

The other (and more significant) organizing principle of the book is religious. Slezkine describes the Bolshevik party as

“..millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse. .consecutive episodes in the Bolshevik family saga are related to stages in the history of a failed prophecy, from an apparent fulfillment to the great disappointment to a series of postponements to the desperate offer of a last sacrifice. Compared to other sects with similar commitments, the Bolsheviks were remarkable for both their success and their failure. They managed to take over Rome long before their faith could become an inherited habit, but they never figured out how to transform their certainty into a habit that their children or subordinates could inherit.”

This, in brief, is the whole argument of the book, the rest is details. The argument is made with great verve and deep learning; Slezkine gives us a general history of sects, including wonderfully concise histories of Christianity (moving from the initial apocalyptic vision to its taming and successful routinization by the Eastern and Western churches, to its fracturing with the Reformation and the slew of baby sects that followed), early Islam and the various (almost all Christian) millenarian movements that arose in the lands devastated by Christian colonists. He makes a very convincing case, but like all such cases, it is never completely settled. It may well be that there is no single explanation, but while it may not be the only explanation, it is certainly one explanation, and probably an important one.

The third aspect of the book is literary; As he himself states:

“For the Old Bolsheviks, reading the “treasures of world literature” was a crucial part of conversion experiences, courtship rituals, prison “universities,” and House of Government domesticity. For their children, it was the single most important leisure activity and educational requirement.”

While he also insists that “this is a work of history, any resemblance to fictional characters is purely coincidental”, this is not really true. The book is as much “War and Peace” as it is a work of history, and it is the richer for it.

But irrespective of your opinion of his meta narratives, the book is worth reading because the reader does not really have to accept his core thesis to benefit from it. The details are what makes this book great; you will learn more about the Russian revolution and its movers and shakers than you ever knew as Slezkine describes the lives of these characters, their loves and domestic problems, their hopes and ideals, their everyday lives, the books they read and the books they wrote, the plays and movies they watched (and in some cases, made) and ways they (frequently gruesomely) built the new world and the way they met their (frequently gruesome) fate in this new world.

And what details these are; a “left deviationist” locked up in a prison called a “political isolator” incessantly writes to her family asking about the five year plan and how it is going. The secret policeman Mironov is rounding up enemies of the people and torturing and shooting them in a desperate attempt to meet Stalin’s increasingly insane quotas while his wife is focused on fashionable dresses and describes sumptuous dinners and feasts of caviar in the midst of thousands of “kulaks” starving to death and reduced in some cases to cannibalism (including pickling and eating their own children). I will post some excerpts to give you a flavor:

“The Morozov District chairman claimed that, having received a telegram urging a “more energetic . . . implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat,” he “got drunk to dull the pain, walked over to the jailhouse, picked up a list of prisoners, summoned them by number one by one, and executed the first sixty- four of them.”.

“The house of the Ataman was searched from top to bottom, but he was nowhere to be found. He had fled. The soldiers began shouting: “If you don’t come out, we’ll kill all your children!”
The Ataman did not come out.
They began to slaughter the children. Grovelling on her knees with her braids streaming down, the Ataman’s wife clutched desperately at the soldiers’ legs. One of them turned to her and said reproachfully:
“Why are you yelling like a stuck pig? I had a daughter just like yours—a three- year- old. We buried her up there in the mountains, but I didn’t yell.”
And he hacked down the little girl and then crushed the skull of the hysterically laughing mother.”

“In the village of Ust- Inza, Lunin District, during the dekulakization of the kulak Imagulov, the entire family was evicted at 1 a.m. and forced out into the winter cold. The baby froze to death and ”

“The Lower Volga and Ukraine, along with the North Caucasus, accounted for the largest total number of famine deaths, but, per capita, the most affected area was Kazakhstan, where, according to estimates based on official statistics, 2,330,000 rural residents (39 percent of the whole rural population) were lost to death and emigration between 1929 and 1933. The ethnic Kazakh population was reduced by about 50 percent: between 1.2 million and 1.5 million died of starvation, and about 615,000 emigrated abroad or to other Soviet republics”

There are moments of joy and genuine elation. The revolutionary heroine Larissa Reissner is described by a contemporary
“In front, on a black stallion, rode a woman in a soldier’s tunic and a wide, light- blue and navy checkered skirt. Sitting gracefully in her saddle, she galloped bravely across the ploughed field. Clods of black earth flew from under the horse’s hooves. It was Larisa Reisner, Chief of Army Scouts. The rider’s enchanting face glowed from the wind. She had light gray eyes, chestnut hair pulled back from her temples and coiled into a bun at the back of her head, and a high, clear brow intersected by a single tiny, stern crease”

The poor peasants of mostly rural Russia were a particular bete noir of the urban, intelligentsia-origin Bolsheviks, who regularly described them as stupid, primitive, moronic, etc. As the Soviet state destroyed orthodox Russian Christianity, these peasants sometimes asked for replacements. Mikhail Koltsov describes a visit by a group of peasants who want “a godless Soviet liturgy for deceased, honest, non- Party peasants, as well as a full schedule of Red Baptisms (‘Octoberings’) and a register of revolutionary saints’ names for each day of the year for the naming of peasant infants.” The narrator’s reaction is predictable: “I tried to convince them that this was all nonsense and did not matter at all, and that what was important was not rituals but libraries, the
liquidation of illiteracy, agricultural cooperatives, mutual aid committees, collective plowing, the fight against moonshine production, tractors, agronomists, newspapers, movies, and rural mail deliveries.”
The visitors persist, however, and the narrator “commits an act of bourgeois philistinism and intellectual backwardness at the level of one village” by taking them to a stationary store and helping them buy “portraits of leaders, red lampshades, ribbons, slogans, and posters. . . . A cardboard poster ‘Save Time: When Your Work Is Done, Go Home’ may soon rustle above the head of a corpse. A fancy picture of airplanes and gas masks may well be displayed over the respectfully bent heads of newlyweds. A ‘No Smoking’ poster may hang before the tiny blue eyes of an unschooled newborn.

The revolutionaries were great fans of Russian literature (a group used to toast “Marxism, Russian literature and new machines”) and authors and artists frequently became members of the Soviet elite, provided dachas and maids, tolerated and cultivated even when they were not orthodox Bolsheviks. This was especially true of Stalin, who invested much time and energy into bringing Maxim Gorky back to the Soviet Union and tried to protect (non-communist) writer Bulgakov from censorship by apparatchiks who were more keen on orthodoxy than literature.

Sverdlov, who played such a critical role in making the revolution (and ordered the killing of the Czar and his family, including the children), was a fan of Heine, and his favorite stanza was:

A different song, a better song,
will get the subject straighter:

let’s make heaven on earth, my friends,
instead of waiting till later.

As Slezkine writes:

“Reading had been central to their own conversion and their early efforts to convert others; reading imaginative literature was of special significance because of the “enormous power of feeling” that it could generate. As Osinsky wrote to Shaternikova, it was “comparable to revolutionary enthusiasm” in its “power, clarity, and purity,” and it could fan or temper that enthusiasm, if directed accordingly. He himself could not think of a better representation of the “psychology of future times” than Verhaeren’s poem, “The Blacksmith”; Bukharin attributed his discovery of love without God to Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent; Voronsky had found the best portrait of a ruthless revolutionary in Ibsen’s Brand; Sverdlov’s favorite prophecy of future perfection came from Heine’s “Germany”; and Sverdlov’s (and Voronsky’s) friend Filipp Goloshchekin, who oversaw the massacre of the tsar’s family, had left behind an epitaph from Heine’s “Belsazar.” Fiction had structured, nuanced, and illustrated the Bolshevik experience.

The violent and frequently cruel struggle against the peasants and the bourgeoisie also strained the nerves of the revolutionaries, and they needed frequent trips to sanatoriums and rest-homes to recover. There were dozens of these rest homes, and hundreds of revolutionaries went there on extended holidays, availing themselves of healing mineral baths and massages for weeks and months on end, then coming back to the fray, revitalized. But this did not last. After the horrors of collectivization and famine were over and millions had been killed, Stalin turned on his own party and state apparatus, shooting 680,000 of them in the course of two years of terror in 1937-38. Slezkine manages to fit this into his religious framework too, identifying it with the ancient cultural practice of finding and killing a “scapegoat”. He describes the witch hunts of medieval Europe and is able to show some similarities in the way people were guilty once charged, with extreme tortures ensuring that confession as well as the naming of co-conspirators would be forthcoming in almost all cases. Most interestingly, his other example is from the United States, with the “daycare child sexual abuse” scare that swept the United States in the 1980s and early 90s. He is able to show some similarities with how accusation alone was sufficient to set that process in motion, with prosecutors and police using extreme coercion and other inducements to get fantastic confessions out of people who had committed no crime.

But ultimately his schema remains as unsatisfactory an explanation of this period of madness as all the others that have been proposed to date. The horror of the Soviet purges was simply too large, and too insane, to be explained by any rational explanation, even one as imaginative as this one.

Anyway, to get a flavor of Slezkine’s thesis, see this excerpt about the trial of Radek and Bukharin (both of whom were sincere communinsts who had served at the very highest levels of the Soviet state):

“Radek offered himself—along with Bukharin, among other friends— as a scapegoat, a metaphor of unopposed temptation, the embodiment of forbidden thought. He may not have murdered anybody, or even conspired with any murderers, but in Bolshevism, as in Christianity or any
other ideology of undivided devotion, it was the thought that counted. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” The interchangeability of acts and thoughts was the main theme of Radek’s exchange with the state prosecutor, A. Ia. Vyshinsky.
The fact of having had sinful thoughts was proof of the reality of criminal actions..

.. The following morning, Pravda published an article by the head of its arts and literature section, I. Lezhnev (Isai Altshuler), titled “Smerdiakovs”: “Sitting in the dock are the monstrous offspring of fascism, traitors to the motherland, wreckers, spies, and saboteurs—the most evil and perfidious enemies of the people. They appeared before the court in all their loathsome nakedness, and we saw a new edition of Smerdiakov, a disgusting image become flesh and blood. The Smerdiakovs of our day provoke combined feelings of indignation and revulsion. They are not just the ideologues of the restoration of capitalism, they are the moral incarnation of the fascist bourgeoisie, the product of its senile dementia, mad ravings, and creeping putrefaction.

..The Bolshevik inquisitorial procedure, like its numerous Christian, Buddhist, and post- Freudian counterparts, assumed that a wholly virtuous life was impossible, but that partial reconciliation could be achieved through confession and that an unconfessed sin could be forgiven if it was honestly forgotten, not deliberately concealed. The difference between honest forgetfulness and deliberate concealment, apparent to God, history, and perhaps an experienced interrogator, was, in most human interactions, a matter of trust. But, as Stalin would tell Bukharin at the December 1936 Central Committee plenum, after Kirov’s murder, no one, even those who “volunteer to personally execute their friends,” could be trusted. It was a “hellish situation”: sincerity, as the events of the previous two years had demonstrated convincingly, had become a relative, and therefore irrelevant, concept.”

Communism failed because it did not destroy or successfully coopt the family. Whether you agree with Slezkine or not, you should read this book. It is much much more than its primary thesis. The devil is in the details, and the details are all here. Lives, books, movies, art, everything.
Well, everything but the economics. Ironically for a book about an economist philosophy, Slezkine has little or nothing to say about economics. The striking thing is, it does not seem to matter.

[Anastasiya · Rating 5 out of 5]

огромная работа, внутри которой автор и его идеи иногда оказываются погребены под обилием непрерывно продуцируемых метафор. но это очень спокойный рассказ об огромной трагедии, в котором авторское имхо удобно отделяется от того огромного количества живых отдельных разных людей, которые хотя бы на страницах книги - живые люди, а не фарш

[Lisajean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully researched and quite interesting. As with The Jewish Century, I find Slezkine’s style overblown. Cutting the book by 200-400 pages would also have made it much more readable.

[Robert Varik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Selle suve suur lugemine sai eile otsa. Tegemist on raamatuga, mis mõtestab suurepäraselt kogu Nõukogude eksperimendi 1917. aastast kuni Hruštšovi sula alguseni. Teos teeb seda, vaadates kommunismi poliitilise religioonina, ja seeläbi toob paralleele kõiksuguste usundite ja usuvooludega, mis on läbi ajaloo eksisteerinud (eeskätt ususektid, vähem institutsionaliseerunud usundid), ja läbinud samu faase, mis bolševism ja Nõukogude Liit, proovides niiviisi anda Nõukogude "saagale" "loomulikku" kohta inimajaloos.

Teose tuumaks on arvukad tegelased läbi kelle isiklike lugude ka Nõukogude Liidu lugu lahti rullub. Autor on teinud tööd massiivse allikahulgaga ning seeläbi avaldub peaaegu pool raamatu sisust läbi n-ö bolševike enda suu (st tsitaatide).

Paraku on see ka teose suurim miinus. Tegelaste mõtted on liigselt korduvad ning raamat võinuks olla oluliselt lühem, et teha selgeks oma peamine sõnum. Tean aga, et see oli autori sihilik otsus, mitte lühendada oma tegelaste mõtteid, vaid neid täielikul kujul avaldada. Muidugi on see mõistetav ning paljudele lugejatele võib see ka meeldida (eriti võibolla ajaloolastele, kes häid allikaid otsivad).

Mõistagi on siin raamatus veel aspekte, läbi mille autor Nõukogude riiki analüüsib. Nt huvitab teda kuivõrd suurel määral põhines bolševike maailmavaade klassikalisel kirjandusel ning kuidas viimane seega Nõukogude reaalsust voolis. Igatahes annab raamat mõtlemisainet palju ning on minu arvates soovitatav kirjandus kõigile, keda huvitab Nõukogude riik. Aeg aga peab lugejal endal olema.

[Frederick · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me more than three months to read this saga of the Russian revolution , a book actually consisting of three parts. Interestingly, it tells the story of the revolution based on the house of government, the huge building near the Kremlin, where nearly all government officials lived and thrived during the first part and from where they were eventually led away after a nocturnal knock on the door to a camp or prison following the Great Terror Stalin unleashed after the murder of Kirov in 1934.
The most unique part of the book is that it consistently compares communism to religion. Communism as a faith where truth and faith are inseparably intertwined. In the show trials for instance it was not about finding the truth, but about looking for scapegoats. Slezkine compares this to the witch hunts in the past and to the search for Satanist in Reagan's USA.. A glimpse of the titles of the different chapter proves the religious approach of the book: eg "The preachers", "The faith", "The reign of the saints" and "The last judgement".
Another advantage is that he also consistently uses Soviet fiction to illustrate his point of view.
As a conclusion: a great work of non-fiction with an original approach!

[Arianne X · Rating 4 out of 5]

The House of Hypocrisy

The House of Government was the transformative socialist dwelling project built with the traditional comforts of home, complete with capitalist cost overruns. It also had a bloated staff, high debt, and opaque accounting practices. It was a socialist dwelling place with traditional family apartments, a contradiction not addressed by Communist theory. It was a communal house with individualized, and by the standards of the time, opulent appointments, and luxurious comforts as well as premium common use areas such as theaters, gyms, hair salons, department stores, grocery stores, clinics, basketball and tennis courts, band stage, internal post office, bank, day-care facilities, live-in maid service, billiards/game rooms, reading rooms, library, etc. Many of the amenities exceeded those offered in the best New York City hotels and apartment buildings of the time. The residents of the House, many with private dachas, become the new aristocracy when compared to the squalor found in the single room barracks and communal apartments for the workers of Revolution. The House as such was rationalized as being ‘transitional’, just like the entire story of Soviet oppression and privation, it was part the transition to Communism (for which any sacrifice was not too much) which has not yet arrived – and never would. But in keeping with Communist doctrine, the House was built with conscripted labor to restore humanity to its lost paradise. Typical of Soviet era projects, the sacrifice in the present was real for the ideal of the future which never arrives.

The Soviet Union was a contradictory fusion of socialist realism and Augustinian idealism to render what the author calls the “Soviet Augustinian Age”. The Soviet Union was ultimately an experiment in Romanticism. How was this House of Government to model the new ideal of social relations? Part of the reality was that those authorizing, planning, designing, and building the House were also its intended residents and were also the administrators and perpetrators of the unspeakable suffering and horror of the forced starvation resulting from the enforced confiscation and collectivization policies managed from the House of Government by a cadre of Stalin worshipers. Pre-revolutionary Russia, after all, was an aristocratic, not a bourgeois, society. This made for an incongruous revolution.

The Haunted House or The Hobbesian Hell House

As the author states, every occupant was besieged within the House and the House became a besieged fortress within the Soviet Union as the Soviet Union was a beleaguered nation within a wider world. There was no longer a distinction between the personal and the Party. Like any religion or cult, there is always a sense of permeant moral panic which makes the cult leadership see implacable moral enemies everywhere, both within and outside the cult. Every religion or cult compels witch hunts against imaginary enemies and Communism was no different. In the U.S., we see this today with the MAGA Christian cult which presents an immense danger to civil society. The Russian Revolution started to consume its own, facts and reason became irrelevant. Just as in religion, many loyal Party members were randomly selected scapegoats for redemptive sacrifice. Christians today will do the same with secular people if they obtain the power. Many Party members were charged with crimes and convicted no matter how absurd the charges and nonexistence the evidence. These were not ideological political purges in that having the correct beliefs, loyalty, and devotion was not enough to save one from the all-consuming blood purge. Facts and reason were declared irrelevant. The more one argued in one’s own defense, the more one became entangled in the deathtrap. As with all cults, Bolshevism and Christianity included, thoughts are more important than acts and thoughts become interchangeable with acts thus creating the thought crime for which one can be persecuted or prosecuted. Sinful thoughts become proof of sinful acts whether or not such acts occur in reality. Offenders became anonymous and interchangeable. The Soviet Union descended into a Hobbesian hell of all against all. Anyone could be arrested for anything and forced to confess to everything. Friends would volunteer to execute their friends to demonstrate their purity which could never be pure enough. Saying that an accused person was not guilty was itself a crime and the cause of arrest and impressment or death. One’s duty to the Party, if arrested, was to confess to nonexistent crimes, name their conspirators, and plead guilty to false charges. In the twisted logic of the Bolshevik mind, one was first found guilty and then arrested, i.e., one was arrested because they were guilty. Self-sacrifice was now the standard for Party loyalty. There was no longer any such thing as mistake, chance, natural disaster, accident, all mishaps as well as any deviation from the Communist plan, was the work of the ubiquitous dark forces aligned against the virtuous U.S.S.R. The witch hunts and scapegoating reached fever pitch. Crimes could occur; therefore, they were assumed to occur. The guilt of the accused was assumed. The accusations soon spread to the families of nannies who worked in the House, as well as guards, laundry workers, and stairway cleaners. The accused was obligated to confess and repent, not to defend and later the accuser becomes the accused in the cannibalistic process which created the empty haunted House. In a form of pareidolia mania (false pattern recognition) fascist symbols were found everywhere, not even cookies and candy were safe. Combinations of light, shadow and color in a painting were seen as proof of fascist infiltration and subversion or as counterrevolutionary acts.

The executioners kept executing until they themselves were executed. After the blood orgy of the purges, one final act of sacred violence was left to be performed, viz., on Stalin’s orders it was time to liquidate the liquidators; time to murder those who carried out the murderous purges on behalf of the Party and the State at Stalin’s orders. The irony of all this was that the Party haunted down, tortured, imprisoned, and murdered countless numbers of its own to defeat fascism and in doing so only made the Soviet Union a weaker and easier target for the real fascist attack of 1941.

Christianity is a form of Bolshevism, and Bolshevism is form of Christianity.

Both, Christianity, and Bolshevism are examples of faith-based groups in conflict with a mundane world that does not conform to their expectations. The early Bolsheviks tried to imitate the Puritan model of personal behavior to instill party discipline on its members. Both faith-based groups believe in an incoherent combination of free will and prophetic destiny. To guarantee the success of a faith-based cult, predestination is made to be dependent on free will. In both cases, once the faith is accepted, everything, without exception, becomes proof of its truth. Truth gets lost when it becomes linked to faith. With millenarian cults, whatever is needed to advance the cult becomes inevitable and the inevitable is deemed desirable by all. Christianity, and Bolshevism are examples of millenarian, apocalyptic, eschatological cults requiring personal conversion on the part of true believers. Both have their holy warriors in the perpetual struggle of ‘us’ against ‘them’. For both, human existence is inadequate, and salvation is sought. Both are totalitarian and require complete commitment, universal participation, total ascent, unending penance, and ceaseless activism as the price of hope for the future. Bolshevik indoctrination was also like Christian indoctrination in that it was about creating a childlike mentality of unqualified and absolute trust in the minds of adherents to the cult and to the leader. Soviet Communism, like Christianity, creates a children’s world for adults. For this, the true believers get a sense of purpose, power and belonging based on the secret knowledge only available to those who have converted to the new faith.

The whore of Babylon changed from Rome to Capitalism. But in both cases, the prophecy failed, and the cult leader died. In the case of Christianity, it institutionally transformed itself into a form of ossified scholasticism and then transferred the millenarian, apocalyptic, eschatological prophecy into a story of personal salvation. When the fever broke, the prophet died and dream faded, Christianity became an institutionalized cult. Bolshevism had no such flexibility, it could not live on the ruins of its own failure like Christianity, it never emerged from its phase of ossified scholasticism after the prophetic failures become evident, it instead collapsed whereas Christianity had the reformation, but this was not possible for Bolshevism, Gorbachev tried. The Bolsheviks and communism itself was missing the supernatural dimension of magic and miracles needed to sustain the faith after the failure. In Bolshevik thinking, if the prophecy failed, the revolution must have been betrayed. The solution was merciless prosecution and constant self-purging to yield a pure monastic order of belief to the core. The Bolsheviks used exile from the One Party and execution, Christians used excommunication from the One Church and execution. The Bolsheviks were a lot like the Christian Puritans who came to America to setup a theocratic dictatorship. This allowed Christians to continue taking the prophecy seriously based on a sense of personal choseness. In the Soviet Union, it was no longer possible to take the Bolshevik faith seriously. By the mid to late twentieth century, it was understood that only a fool took the official ideology seriously. Both faiths refused to compromise with life in the real but mundane world. In both cases, no one lives according to the original precepts of the faith, but Christianity could survive this by transforming the faith into a personal mystic experience and transferring it to another world. When communism did not arrive, there was no next or other world that could be promised in the Augustinian tradition. Marxism did not have a transcendental feature allowing believers to escape into the mysticism of personal faith as with Christianity and all religions to this day. The great Communist contradiction of course is that a revolutionary millenarian sect cannot take over the state and become a bureaucracy while maintaining its revolutionary zeal.

Both cults required the abandonment of family and natural human relations for the good of the sect (the Bolshevism or Christianity). All sects demand its members transcend the bonds of family, friendship, and love. The sect dissolves these bonds in the common devotion to the sect and its promise of salvation. But the contradiction arises in that the family is the best place for indoctrination of the young into the cult. Bolshevism and Christianity are aggressively and unabashedly masculine. Women produce children which creates families which is a threat to the primacy of the cult. But the family is needed to pass on cult beliefs. As with all such sects, after the prophecy fails, the task becomes to suppress enemies, convert heathen, and discipline the faithful.

Let use quote from Scripture a verse, though from the Old Testament, is fitting for both Bolsheviks and Christians alike, Psalm 137:9:

“Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock: the children represent the future generations, and so must be destroyed if the enemy is truly to be eradicated.”

Enter the Trump MAGA Cult

The Trump cult also demands immediate sacrifice for the promise of a utopia that will never arrive. Trump maintains a permanent enemies list and a sense of siege to keep the exploited MAGA masses loyal and focused on imaginary internal threats to distract from the failures of the leader and the cult, justify additional sacrifices and continued unquestioned loyalty. As time goes on, the purity tests become more absurd and onerous as each cult (Christianity, Bolshevism and MAGA) proceeds to consume itself like my pet Ouroboros. Sounds like the Trump cult is at the height of its salvation enthusiasm to me. MAGA is both an identity and an act of faith just like Christianity and Bolshevism. MAGA provides many of the same fixes as regions such as a sense of belonging, community, ownership, purpose with an inspiring leader, and reinforcement of shared beliefs. Believing the 2020 election was stolen is the equivalent of taking Old Testament Bible stories such as Noah literally, which is of course laughable. But such laughable beliefs are required by the cult as proof of sincerity. Each cult creates scapegoats, the ubiquitous main character in all human drama upon which to cast blame. After the scapegoat is expunged, the cult can come together for renewal and healing. One redeeming quality of Trump is that he is the perfect vehicle for discrediting Christianity which is a toxic religion full of retribution, revenge, judgement, and rejection based on the legend of a human sacrifice, one of history’s oldest, cruelest, vile and most barbaric practices of faith. The standard bearer for Christianity is now a degenerate fascist.

Minor Criticism:

The history of the House is primarily told through a review of the literature of the time and place. The author frames the narrative history of the Revolution, the House, and its occupants through the lens of literary criticism resulting in a somewhat prolix and over written text. Much of the length, nearly a thousand pages of text, is devoted to a review of the fictional literature and theater events, both classical and those produced during the construction and existence of the House. The actual or physical history of the House itself is really a footnote to the book.

[Kinga · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Revolutions do not devour their children: revolutions like all millenarian experiments, are devoured by the children of the revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks, who did not fear the past and employed God-fearing peasant nannies to bring up their children, were particularly proficient in creating their own gravediggers."

A dense, but very readable book on the rise and fall of Communism in Russia. I thoroughly enjoyed an insight into the country which dominated my own for so many years. There are times when this book reads like a novel with a cast of thousands and the only negative about this book for me was the inclusion of so very many long quotes and the detailed re-telling of books written by and for the Bolsheviks.

[Мария Бахарева · Rating 4 out of 5]

Я бы эту книгу сократила на четверть как минимум — и не пот��му, что «слишком много текста», а тупо по объективным причинам: например, пересказы разных произведений советских писателей объемом от пяти страниц (это прям очень кратко, обычно больше) кажутся мне немного излишними — это явно прямое следствие того, что книга писалась для западного читателя и в российской версии выглядит излишним.
В остальном довольно увлекательно, труд проделан титанический и ключевая теория (большевики как милленаристская секта) кажется мне симпатичной.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fabulous book about the Bolsheviks. The book uses the House of Government, a building built after the Bolshevik’s took over power in Russia to tell the story of the people behind the revolution. This book is an indepth telling of these people through the use of their diaries and letters. A well researched book and an excellent story. If you like a detailed history about the people behind the Russian revolution then I highly recommend this book.

[Alexander Morozov · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very long book but it is worth it. The story of the revolution through Soviet people, not that heavy on ideology, I had to check with wikipedia who wanted what.
I was surprised to learn that the majority of the leaders of the revolution were quite young and very educated and that almost all of them died by 1938, some by natural causes, the majority were killed by the regime they helped to establish.
The third part is very heavy - the final dismantling of the dream of classless society and turning it into murderous tyranny.
There are some bizarre pieces about religion ("Chapaev just like Moses was destined to see the promised land" WAT?) and some very obscure literature, otherwise it's perfect. I listened to it in Russian but English is supposed to be the original and should be great as well.