The House of Government
"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."--Provided by publisher.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
3people
2020–2024years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A few of this year's highlights for me and my notes on the books, where available.
Fiction -
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/2ab29d16-0cb1-4ef8-8cde...
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/65214629-29ac-45a6-b474...
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/bd090cb4-bc9a-41cb-9833...
Nonfiction -
The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine (my luckiest find of the year)
Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/13ebec0d-0859-4858-864a...
Vienna by Richard Cockett - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/c0e1d1fb-dea7-456b-a95e...
The House That Madigan Built by Ray Long (an interesting history of a legendary figure in Illinois state politics)
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
- The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine.
- The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine.
- I don’t think totalitarian is a useful way to describe Tsarist Russia. It was so far from exercising thought control that vast numbers of its citizens embraced an ideology dedicated to its downfall. (Source: Slezkine’s fabulous book The House of Government).
Related
House of Bush, house of Saud
1 recommend · 2
The Sublime Object of Ideology
8 recommend · 13
The Law
17 recommend · 37
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
14 recommend · 52
The transparent society
30 recommend · 82
The machinery of freedom
37 recommend · 91
Understanding Power
27 recommend · 57
