On the a centesimal anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic tale of a major condominium construction the place Communist real believers lived earlier than their destruction

The condominium of Government is in contrast to the other booklet concerning the Russian Revolution and the Soviet scan. Written within the culture of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the real tale of the citizens of an immense Moscow condo construction the place best Communist officers and their households lived prior to they have been destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vibrant account of the private and public lives of Bolshevik precise believers, the e-book starts off with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s lack of religion and the autumn of the Soviet Union.

Completed in 1931, the home of presidency, later often called the home at the Embankment, used to be situated around the Moscow River from the Kremlin. the most important residential development in Europe, it mixed 505 supplied residences with public areas that integrated every thing from a film theater and a library to a tennis court docket and a taking pictures variety. Slezkine tells the chilling tale of the way the building’s citizens lived of their flats and governed the Soviet nation until eventually a few 8 hundred of them have been evicted from the home and led, one after the other, to legal or their deaths.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and that includes hundreds and hundreds of infrequent pictures, The condo of Government weaves jointly biography, literary feedback, architectural historical past, and engaging new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. the result's an unforgettable human saga of a construction that, just like the Soviet Union itself, turned a haunted apartment, endlessly disturbed by way of the ghosts of the disappeared.