The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Book One: On the Way

An extraordinary audiobook created at the intersection of historical research and a sweeping family epic.

Yuri Slezkin tells the history of the Soviet Union through the history of one of its most famous, revealing, and tragic symbols: the House of Government—also the First House of Soviets—also the legendary House on the Embankment. Here lived the elite of the USSR. Scientists and writers, actors and party figures, marshals and inventors, all-powerful tyrants and their victims—those whom were eagerly waiting for at the entrance for an autograph, and those whose name people were afraid to say even in kitchens. Deymian Bedny and Alexander Serafimovich, Svetlana Alliluyeva and Vasily Stalin, Lavrenti Beria and Nikita Khrushchev, Aleksey Stakhanov and Artyom Mikoyan, Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Bagramyan, Yuri Trifonov and Pavel Postyshev, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Vasily Blyukher. In the 1930s and 1940s, about 800 residents of the building were repressed. During the era of the Great Terror, some apartments changed owners several times in a month. «The House of Government» is a documentary account of how this house was born, developed, and died—and with it, the entire country.

Book one, «On the Way», presents the old Bolsheviks as young people and tells how they embraced a new faith, lived in prisons and in exile, preached the coming revolution, won the Civil War, established the dictatorship of the proletariat, mourned the postponement of socialism, and argued about what to do while waiting.