Slezkine, Yuri The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 585 Slezkine, Yuri. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2017. xvii + 1104 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographical references. Appendix. Index.£29.95: $39.95. The sudden, unexpected demise of the Soviet Union and Russian Communism poses questions that will exercise historians for many years to come. But all future chroniclers and analysts seeking an answer to the riddle of Soviet dissolution will have to contend with Yuri Slezkine’s huge, complex and compelling book, The House of Government. Slezkine’s work is a fruitful combination of architectural history, literary analysis, religious/philosophical disquisition and collective biography wrapped in brilliant, moving prose. In Slezkine’s hands the apartment building called the House of Government, constructed in Moscow in the early 1930s, becomes a microcosm of the Soviet system, a metaphor for its fate, and a microscope through which to view the struggles, dreams, loves and ultimate destruction of many of the building’s residents, men and women who sought to realize the prophecy of Karl Marx and raise the world on new foundations. Slezkine sees Bolshevism as a millenarian sect whose adherents preached, suffered and struggled in the hope of witnessing ‘the Real Day’. And then it came — or so it seemed. The apocalypse of World War One, the collapse of tsarism, the October seizure of power, all appeared to herald the ‘end of times’. This was followed by the ‘Exodus’ from the old world during the Civil War and the simultaneous effort to leap from ‘the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom’. The Bolsheviks sought to destroy the ‘prison of peoples’, abolish private property, outlaw traditional marriage and usher in a new existence. But despite the exertions of this ‘heroic period’ of War Communism, the millennium did not arrive. The Bolsheviks retreated into the New Economic Policy, a partial acceptance of capitalism. Then came the death of Lenin, the beloved leader; the ‘Great Disappointment’ ensued. The millenarian expectations were unrealized, and the Bolsheviks learned to wait and ultimately to adjust the prophecy. The ‘most immediate tasks were to suppress the enemy, convert the heathen, and discipline the faithful’ (p. 273). The final apocalypse and the fully Communist millennium might be slow to arrive, but the Bolsheviks could establish clear and correct doctrine and build ‘socialism’ in one country. In a ‘transitional period’ of Five Year Plans they might collectivize the peasantry and industrialize the Soviet Union, laying the steel and concrete foundations for the new world to come. Slezkine employs architecture, literature and biography to explain the course and fate of the Bolshevik sect, making the House of Government, its inhabitants and their family histories his focus. Like the Lenin Mausoleum, SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 586 the design of the House expressed the ‘transitional’ moment of the Five Year Plans, combining classical forms with elements of the avant-garde. Standing above a swamp, it lay physically and symbolically between the old Moscow and the projected Palace of Soviets, which was to rise on the site of the destroyed Church of the Redeemer and be ‘the ultimate wonder of the world’ (p. 361). It was ‘transitional’ in another important way. If the Communist house of the future was to be ‘a true-believing, hardworking, coeducational monastery that permitted procreation and incorporated a day-care center’ (p. 335), the House of Government’s 507 apartments were homes to families resembling traditional types, albeit often with shifting boundaries and memberships. The ‘sagas’ of these families, members of the ruling elite of the Soviet Union, make up the heart of Slezkine’s book. In telling the stories of their labours, loves, domestic travails, moral struggles, happy childhoods, youthful aspirations and personal tragedies, Slezkine utilizes, in addition to government documents, a vast collection of intimate sources — diaries, memoirs, letters — many still in private hands. Interviews and a large array of photographs supplement the written record. Slezkine shows the Bolsheviks to be a literate and literary bunch; they wrote and wrote, but they also read and read, not only the Marxist classics, but even more important, the ‘treasures of world literature’, great works of the past from which they drew the...