The House on Staraya Square

This audiobook is both an attempt to understand Soviet Atlantis—sunk, yet still sending signals from beneath the heavy waters of history—and also a long overdue conversation between a son and his father about what was most important in the lives of several generations.

Andrey Kolesnikov is an expert at the Moscow Carnegie Center, the author of several books, including “Speechwriters,” “The Seventies and Earlier,” and “The Cold War on Ice.” His father is Vladimir Kolesnikov, a worker in the apparatus of the CPSU Central Committee—left only brief memories. And the son “answered for his father”—writing personal and historical-sociological commentaries to those memoirs. Prewar childhood, wartime adolescence, postwar youth. The circumstances of arrests that happened and arrests that didn’t. Love for a Jewish woman—the daughter of an enemy of the people—who became his wife in the era of the struggle with the “cosmopolitans.” A career as a party functionary. A series of Soviet politicians passing through the narrative like corridors of a Central Committee building in Old Square... And portraits of close friends from the Soviet middle class who experienced war and the thaw, stagnation and perestroika—either accepting new times, or not agreeing to them.