The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Book Three: Under Investigation

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 story about how this house was born, developed, and died—and with it, the entire country.

Book three, «Under Investigation», tells of the devastation of the House of Government, the final victim of the old Bolsheviks, «mass operations» against secret saboteurs, the difference between loyalty and betrayal, the family life of professional executioners, the long old age of rehabilitated widows, the redemption and treachery of the children of the revolution, and the end of Bolshevism as a faith in a thousand-year kingdom.