The House of Government

The Book

I saw a reference somewhere online to Yuiri Slezkine’s The House of Government and thinking it was a book about a single building a giant 1931 block of flats in central Moscow opposite the Kremlin I ordered my kindle copy and started reading. I had no idea it was an 1100 page work covering the birth of Bolshevism and its first death in Stalin’s Great Purges. A heavyweight work of History. In my ignorance I couldn’t have been more right or more wrong as it turned out. It is basically about one large apartment block and it’s inhabitants. But also because of the nature of the building it’s really about the birth life and death of the revolution which just happens to be able to be well mapped out onto bricks and mortar.

I was not prepared for the size and scale of this book. For it’s epic nature both as a detailed reconstruction of the moment of revolutionary history or of its personal histories all intertwined and related back to The House of Government building itself. It’s a majestic work of History and maybe almost a literary masterpiece.

Yuri Slezkine has researched and captured both big and small lives involved. The details and the grand sweeps. It is enchanting to see laid out so clearly just how strange the revolution was. How middle class, sectarian, literary and insular. How cultish.¹

Mapping the Russian Revolution onto an apartment building whether or not as a metaphor is a big move. In Owen Hatherley’s review of the book in The Guardian he points out that Slezkine has made this trick before in his earlier essay The USSR he already explicitly referred to communist multiculturalism by way of an architectural metaphor of the thinly subdivided “kommunalka” flat.

So this is a trick or blueprint already used by Slezkine. Here it serves two purposes it allows him to jump in and out of the lives of the inhabitants all higher up party officials. Making use of diaries, personal recollections etc he can move around an apartment floor ringing on different door bells, or opening up personal diaries and interviews. This allows him to weave the story he wants to tell in with the personal stories of those very actors in the scenes he describes. Novels and plays are also widely are quoted illustrating the internal psychology of the revolution as it were.

But it also allows for a way to superimpose a greater scale when wanted. Here this apartment block serves as the vessel/metaphor for the Bolshevist birth, life and death cycle. External Historical events reflected directly in the lives of the inhabitants.

Be careful the detailed histories will engulf you, and although at the beginning I enjoyed them they quickly started to wear me out. Perhaps too the book tops and tails the whole story of revolutionary Russia a bit too much. The subjects of the book that live in the House of Government are upper level apparatchicks but not the very top, Lenin and Stalin are reported second hand. Also the peasants and factory workers are not represented here they are the people that the revolution happens to.

The Building

House on The Embankment photo source

But what about the building Itself? The House of Government more or The House on the Embankment ² as it is more widely known sits on the opposite bank of the Moskva to the Kremlin in the center of Moscow. It was designed in the late 20’s by the architect Boris Iofan for the Soviet elite to live in and finished in 1928.

Iofan was a Russian who had emigrated to Italy in 1914 and while there had joined the Communist party came back to Russia in 1924. Famous for his Palace of the Soviets competitions there is much written about him.³ He famously sketched out the House of Government in 1926 on the floor of Alexi Rykov’s flat ⁴. Rykov was the Premier of the SFSR who helped get the giant commission controversially at the time without a competition.

The construction of the building started in 1928 did not go smoothly and ran over time and budget. But at the beginning on 1931 the first residents moved into their apartments.

The giant block of flats was a mini neighbourhood to itself;

Halfway between bourgeois individualism and communist collectivism, it combined 505 fully furnished family apartments with public spaces, including a cafeteria, grocery store, walk-in clinic, child-care center, hairdresser’s salon, post office, telegraph, bank, gym, laundry, library, tennis court, and several dozen rooms for various activities (from billiards and target shooting to painting and orchestra rehearsals). - Yuri Slezkine ⁵

It was the largest residential building in Europe at the time a group of many units connected around three courtyards over 50m in height and about 12 floors high. With a 1,300 seat theater and a 1,500 seat cinema also included.

On 1 November 1932, 2,745 people lived in the house: 838 men, 1311 women, and 596 children. -via

It’s design encapsulated the change of attitude to architectural design at the time. The revolution changed so much about Russia and Architecture and design was no exception. The constructivist style was the child of revolutionary thinking and it started with the modernisation of politics, industry and also the family which would eventually be swept away.

But like all cults after the revolutionary phase comes a phase of retrenchment and certain norms reassert themselves. This time mirrors the transition of communist style from Constructivism to a neo-classical post-modernism. The House of Government sits across both these styles somewhat uncomfortably, it has presence and charisma but maybe not much beauty.

House on The Embankment source

Conclusion

For Slezkine the building encapsultes the revolution houses it physically and metaphorically.

It was the vanguard’s backyard; a fortress protected by metal gates and armed guards; a dormitory where state officials lived as husbands, wives, parents, and neighbors; a place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die.

In the great purges of the 1930s and 1940s some eight hundred people were evicted from the building and some three hundred killed.

Nowadays the Russian Empire grinds slowly on, eating itself while attacking it’s neighbours. The House of Government’s current residents are more likely pop stars and tv presenters than government officials but still the current upper-middle class living in luxury as the world around them slowly smoulders.

⚲ location: 55°44’41.1”N 37°36’40.9”E

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1. A key proposal in the book is that Bolshevism is a form of millenarian cult. This is not a new theory, I think even Lenin stated that it was true but is demonstrated many times in the book.↩︎

2. Also named Sovnarkom Residential Complex↩︎

3. See Stalins Architect by Deyan Sudjic](https://www.ribabooks.com/Stalins-Architect-Power-and-Survival-in-Moscow_9780500343555) for example.↩︎

4. See Stalin’s architect: Gillian Darley reviews Deyan Sudjic’s biography of Boris Iofan | RIBAJ)↩︎

5. Slezkine, Yuri. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (p. xi). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. preface page xi.↩︎

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