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yurguis's review against another edition
5.0
Amazing. Incredible in its breadth, depth, and breathtaking relevance. Analytically brilliant & historically compassionate. A luminous source of knowledge.
dbstandsfor's review against another edition
3.0
Infuriating to read-- so repetitive, needlessly echoing phrases and explanations constantly. Could definitely have done without the long explanations of novels and plays, episodes from the bible, etc. But still fascinating and really difficult to put down.
marisbest2's review against another edition
5.0
This book was fascinating and deep. I know next to nothing about communism and bolshevism or Soviet history, but this was a fascinating deep analysis and very detailed. Its biggest flaw is its thesis that Bolshevism was a millinarian cult and it ends with the question of why Bolshevism was a failed millinarian cult. The obvious answer should be that it wasn't just a millinarian cult...
Nonetheless, the book and the detail and the writing were all excellent. The analysis was excellent as well, if not quite accurate in the historical sense then still meaningful in the literary sense
Nonetheless, the book and the detail and the writing were all excellent. The analysis was excellent as well, if not quite accurate in the historical sense then still meaningful in the literary sense
edulaia's review
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
Even though the book is very long especially as an audiobook (43h!) it was interesting to listen to, and very nicely read. I would not say that I got every detail (and there are so many of them) but I now have a better knowledge about the Russian Revolution and the people who build it. History is made by people, and this book highlights that.
grete_rachel_howland's review against another edition
4.0
A beautiful balance between informative and moving, critical and sympathetic, primary sources and smart, humane analysis. This book is a commitment, but it goes faster (and more smoothly) than you'd think. Sometimes it was hard to keep track of the main players, but Slezkine re-introduces people frequently. I was especially intrigued by his dissection of the Revolution & Soviet Union vis a vis millenial religions (a comparison that worked well for me as a person raised in conservative/evangelical Christianity), and I thought the inclusion of so many photos from the period made what could have easily been a dry, dense narrative into a history of real, tragic lives.
booksaremyjam's review against another edition
It is totally disingenuous to ping this book as "read," but I think I deserve credit for the limping I was able to do.
The House of Government was name-dropped in an article I was reading. After skimming a book jacket that promised "A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers... [the] conversion to Communism and... children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union," I was on board, and reserved it from our newly re-opened library. I don't know much about Russian history; now's a good as time as any to learn.
My first shock was being handed a book so thick you could easily concuss someone with it. I hadn't looked at the page count, and so wasn't expecting such a magnum opus, despite a comparison to Tolstoy that that same book jacket had made.
Then I opened it.
The first part was all about geography and societal set-up. It reminded me of Victor Hugo; you want to get to the meat of the story, but he just wants to tell you about flying buttresses for 20 pages. However, I appreciated that Yuri Slezkine wanted to paint a rich picture of the living conditions pre-revolution, so my eyes marched forward.
The second part was entirely about religion. I had absolutely 0 interest in this, and blatantly skipped that part.
The third part started to get into what I would call "the good stuff:" the tsar is overthrown, etc. But Slezkine is writing the driest recounting of history here, and feels the need to provide names and backgrounds for the hundreds of players in the social and political spheres. He also assumes a certain level of background knowledge on the part of his readers, which is laughable when you remember he spent 50 pages on fucking Christianity. I couldn't do it. Life is too damn short. I returned the book to the library.
I am positive that this book is a banger for some people. I know, for instance, that the 1K+ paged book The Brontes isn't devoured by others like it was by me. But, unfortunately, I'm just not enough of a Russian history nerd to have the pre-requisites to follow this story, nor do I have the patience to slog through the type of minutia in which Slezkine seems to excel. This book is written for some one(s) out there... but it ain't me, babe.
The House of Government was name-dropped in an article I was reading. After skimming a book jacket that promised "A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers... [the] conversion to Communism and... children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union," I was on board, and reserved it from our newly re-opened library. I don't know much about Russian history; now's a good as time as any to learn.
My first shock was being handed a book so thick you could easily concuss someone with it. I hadn't looked at the page count, and so wasn't expecting such a magnum opus, despite a comparison to Tolstoy that that same book jacket had made.
Then I opened it.
The first part was all about geography and societal set-up. It reminded me of Victor Hugo; you want to get to the meat of the story, but he just wants to tell you about flying buttresses for 20 pages. However, I appreciated that Yuri Slezkine wanted to paint a rich picture of the living conditions pre-revolution, so my eyes marched forward.
The second part was entirely about religion. I had absolutely 0 interest in this, and blatantly skipped that part.
The third part started to get into what I would call "the good stuff:" the tsar is overthrown, etc. But Slezkine is writing the driest recounting of history here, and feels the need to provide names and backgrounds for the hundreds of players in the social and political spheres. He also assumes a certain level of background knowledge on the part of his readers, which is laughable when you remember he spent 50 pages on fucking Christianity. I couldn't do it. Life is too damn short. I returned the book to the library.
I am positive that this book is a banger for some people. I know, for instance, that the 1K+ paged book The Brontes isn't devoured by others like it was by me. But, unfortunately, I'm just not enough of a Russian history nerd to have the pre-requisites to follow this story, nor do I have the patience to slog through the type of minutia in which Slezkine seems to excel. This book is written for some one(s) out there... but it ain't me, babe.
blackoxford's review against another edition
4.0
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.
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.
alismcg's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.5
"This is a work of history. Any resemblance to fictional characters, dead or alive, is entirely coincidental." 😂
"All millenarian sects committed to poverty and fraternity are men’s movements. Bolshevism was aggressively and unabashedly masculine. Its hero was a blacksmith, énorme et gourd, and its most iconic war poster was Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. Its main enemy was the swamp and everything 'resembling jelly.' Women produced children; women and children formed families; and families 'engendered capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale.' The only women who did not threaten the rule of the iron scepter were mothers of prophets or Amazons..."
Slezkine presents Bolshevism as a millenarian sect ... I've never read anything quite like "The House of Government". How much time will it take for me to process ... that Lenin and Stalin followed in the path of an Apocalyptic Jesus ? I loved all the literary references. And I loved his conclusion of why Bolshevism failed to survive beyond the revolutionaries' own generation.
"The children of the Bolshevik millenarians never read Marx- Engels- Lenin- Stalin at home, and, after the educational system was rebuilt around Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy, all Soviet children stopped reading them in school. At home, the children of the Bolshevik millenarians read the 'treasures of world literature' ..."
Definitely worth every bit of time invested.
"All millenarian sects committed to poverty and fraternity are men’s movements. Bolshevism was aggressively and unabashedly masculine. Its hero was a blacksmith, énorme et gourd, and its most iconic war poster was Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. Its main enemy was the swamp and everything 'resembling jelly.' Women produced children; women and children formed families; and families 'engendered capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale.' The only women who did not threaten the rule of the iron scepter were mothers of prophets or Amazons..."
Slezkine presents Bolshevism as a millenarian sect ... I've never read anything quite like "The House of Government". How much time will it take for me to process ... that Lenin and Stalin followed in the path of an Apocalyptic Jesus ? I loved all the literary references. And I loved his conclusion of why Bolshevism failed to survive beyond the revolutionaries' own generation.
"The children of the Bolshevik millenarians never read Marx- Engels- Lenin- Stalin at home, and, after the educational system was rebuilt around Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy, all Soviet children stopped reading them in school. At home, the children of the Bolshevik millenarians read the 'treasures of world literature' ..."
Definitely worth every bit of time invested.
cameroncl's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
The pros: brilliantly illuminating. Slezkine approaches the Bolshevik intelligentsia of the pre-Second World War USSR by framing it as a Millennarian religious sect (which was a common analogy during the anticommunist panic of the 1950s that was never fully unpacked), and it makes for an incredibly fascinating and insightful book. Packed with an incredible level of detail about the lives of the Soviet intelligentsia living in the House of Government apartment complex, along with deep dives on Soviet literature and their own diaries to unpack how they viewed themselves and the events unfolding around them - especially "The Great Disappointment" of the 1920s and the purges of the 1930s.
The cons: this ends up being two books in one - a book on Bolshevism as a Millenarian sect and a book on the professional and family lives of the Soviet intelligentsia. Which means the reader is treated to a lot of tangents about the schooling of Soviet children, the dynamics of their family lives, where they took vacations. Excluding references and notes, the book clocks in at around 1,000 pages; with a better editor and slightly more focus, it could have been 300-350 pages shorter.
The cons: this ends up being two books in one - a book on Bolshevism as a Millenarian sect and a book on the professional and family lives of the Soviet intelligentsia. Which means the reader is treated to a lot of tangents about the schooling of Soviet children, the dynamics of their family lives, where they took vacations. Excluding references and notes, the book clocks in at around 1,000 pages; with a better editor and slightly more focus, it could have been 300-350 pages shorter.