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Cover of The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine |
Book Review
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (2017)
by Yuri Slezkine
Princeton University Press/Oxford University Press
Published August 27th, 2017
1126 pgs.
I went back and looked at all the books I read this year to see if there was anything I liked more than The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Finishing the first volume of Rembrance of Things Past by Proust was a real milestone, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses were all top 10 type titles. I liked Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the National Book Award and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Sunders, which one the Booker Prize. I also read four titles by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Kazuo Ishiguo, and I felt like his most recent book, The Buried Giant was sorely misunderstood by critics and audiences.
But it was The House of Government, which is a history book- not even a novel- which is my favorite book of the year. The House of Government is nothing short of a revelation, one of those history books that only comes along once or twice in a generation. I would compare it to Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer in terms of the impact on our understanding of the subject matter. Slezkine deserves recognition on every level: For his research, his construction of the book, his writing style and technique and the persuasiveness of his thesis, which is that Bolshevism was a millenarian religion like many others, and it's followers were like all millenarian followers.
The House of Government was a literal place, a bespoke apartment building for the elite of the revolutionary government. Slezkine traces the lives of the apartment dwellers: early days of prison, exile and revolution; a "heroic" period where the residents were deeply involved in cementing the success of the Russian revolution, the post revolution hangover and finally the extermination of the entire "old" Bolshevik elite during the Red Terror. Each period gets full attention. The House of Government clocks in at over a thousand pages with another 200 pages of addendum's and notes. It's researched like an academic history book but reads like a novel. Ultimately, it is a must for anyone interested in the subject, or advances in the discipline of history.