An amazing audiobook created at the intersection of historical research and large-scale family epic.
Yuri Slezkin tells the history of the Soviet Union through the history of one of its most famous, illustrative and tragic symbols. Government House, aka the First House of Soviets, aka the legendary House on the Embankment. The elite of the USSR lived here. Scientists and writers, actors and party leaders, marshals and inventors, omnipotent tyrants and their victims, those who were eagerly awaited at the entrance for an autograph, and those whose name they were afraid to pronounce even in kitchens. Demian Bedny and Alexander Serafimovich, Svetlana Alliluyeva and Vasily Stalin, Lavrenty Beria and Nikita Khrushchev, Alexey Stakhanov and Artyom Mikoyan, Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Baghramyan, Yuri Trifonov and Pavel Postyshev, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Vasily Blucher. In the 1930s and 1940s, about 800 residents of the house were repressed. During the Great Terror, some apartments changed several owners a month. Government House is a documentary story about how this house was born, developed and perished. And with him the whole country.
Book One, On the Road, introduces the old Bolsheviks as young people and tells how they converted to the new faith, lived in prisons and exile, preached the coming revolution, won the Civil War, established the dictatorship of the proletariat, grieved over the postponement of socialism and arguing about what to do while the wait lasts.
© Yuri Slezkine, 2017
© Y. Slezkin, translation into Russian, 2019
© A. Bondarenko, layout, 2019
© Ast Publishing House LLC, 2019
CORPUS ® Publishing House
© Artwork by Francesco Bongiorni
© Jacket design by Chris Ferrante
© Andrey Bondarenko’s layout
Photos provided by the Museum of the House on the Embankment, with the exceptions indicated in the captions
© & ℗ LLC «Audiobook», 2019
Audio Recording Producer: Tatiana Plyuta
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