The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine
‘Are there any fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot overcome? No, and there never will be . . . A person who is honest and who truly loves his motherland and the Party of Lenin-Stalin cannot die.’

Refusing to categorise War and Peace as either a novel or a work of historical non-fiction, Tolstoy said that it was what he wanted to say in the way he wanted to say it. Slezkine’s new book, epic in scale and theme in the same way as Tolstoy’s great work, is similarly difficult to classify. In the introduction, Slezkine provides some helpful notes to the reader on how to access the book, urging us to see its protagonists as ‘characters in an epic or people in our own lives’ and warning that ‘no family or individual is indispensable to the story.’ The tongue-in-cheek epigraph to the book tells us that ‘This is a work of history. Any resemblance to fictional characters, dead or alive, is entirely coincidental.’
The House of Government — a huge block of apartments which, in 1935, housed 2635 of the Soviet Union’s ‘state and party officials’ and their families (along with cleaners, maintenance staff, etc)— is the focal point of the book. The building (which still stands in Moscow and is now mainly inhabited by wealthy private owners and landlords), housed a theatre, a club, a laundry, grocery, cafeteria and various sports facilities. The house serves as the jumping off point from which Slezkine is able to analyse the lives of the inhabitants.
This was obviously a time of massive upheaval in the country, to the extent that ‘The USSR had no choice but to become “a gigantic construction site.”’ It is interesting to read about the dreams and ambitions of those involved in the construction of the new state, and how the bourgeois traditions of the tsarist era gradually crept back into daily life. Some of the architects had frankly absurd visions of future housing, envisioning ‘flying, floating and rolling individual dwellings, with each human being behaving “like a snail carrying its own shell.”’ Slezkine highlights the contrast between the ascetic, modernist style promoted by the early thinkers, and the ‘charming, antique’ interiors created by many of the leaseholders of the House of Government. ‘Some’, of the inhabitants, we are told, ‘took great care to cover up as much of the constructivist frame as possible.’
This is a huge book and a fairly daunting read. Some of its bulk is made up of Slezkine’s intriguing comparisons between the Bolshevik revolution and other religious and historical parallels. Early on in the book, Slezkine broaches the subject of whether Bolshevism could be seen as a religion. At the beginning of this discussion, he tells us that ‘it doesn’t matter’, before launching into hundreds of pages of analysis. Like Jesus and Mohammed, we are told, the Bolsheviks were ‘apocalyptic millenarian prophets . . . predicting an imminent and violent end to the world followed by a permanent solution.’ Slezkine sees authors such as Aleksandr Voronsky and Aleksandr Serafimovich as ‘Soviet gospel writers’ producing ‘scriptural texts’ which would guide and inform future generations. I’m simplifying things here but the argument is made in a cogent, inventive way, based on allusion and inference, as opposed to heavy-handed declaration.
Similarly interesting parallels are drawn between the 17th century witch trials and the Stalinist purges. In both cases, inquisitorial regimes were set up to scapegoat sections of society. In both cases, torture was used to elicit the responses desired by the inquisitors. In both cases, the ‘apostates’ were forced to turn on their ‘co-conspirators’, providing lists of names in order to further the vicious circle of interrogation. Slightly less convincing comparisons are created with the satanic ritual abuse accusations in the US in the 1980s. At their best, these correlations are cogent and illuminating, shedding new light on historical events. At their worst, they occasionally feel like unnecessary baggage.
The later chapters deal in detail with the purges and we hear what becomes of the residents of the House of Government during the terrible purges of 1937 (SPOILER ALERT: Lots of them are arrested and killed). The accusations flung at Bukharin and Rykov are depicted in horrendous detail and, as usual, the transcripts of the interrogations at the Central Committee plenum are chilling to read. Interestingly, and in an eerie similarity to modern politics, there appeared to be an anti-intellectual tinge to the purges: ‘He won’t be able to wash his little academic hands. Those little hands are covered in blood.’
Slezkine’s approach allows for a meticulous, forensic examination of the Soviet mindset, a psychology in which one’s inner thoughts are just as important (and incriminating) as one’s outward expressions. One victim of the purges is executed because ‘he did not understand, still distinguished between his private and public selves.’ The only possible way out of this labyrinth was to ‘repent, repent and repent again.’ The Party has a ‘way of making sure that lost members thought what they said and said what they thought.’
I loved reading this book. Although there are hundreds of books which ostensibly cover similar ground, the material is given real freshness here by approaching it from a new vantage point. The usual details a reader might expect from a book about revolutionary Russia are forced to the background: foregrounded are the lives of the people living in the Soviet state. We don’t hear, for example, much about the power struggle after Lenin’s death. We do learn, however, about the cigarettes these people smoked, the underwear they wore, the trials and tribulations of their daily lives under the mechanics of the Soviet system. The expansive nature of the book is, for me, its real pleasure: it allows the writer to examine the minutiae of Soviet life.
