A review by cameroncl
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine
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.