The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press) | Mechanics' Institute

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The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press)
Seize the Day: A Russian Revolution Centennial

Author Professor Yuri Slezkine, UC Berkeley in conversation with Bertrand Patenaude, Hoover Institute, Stanford

Co-sponsored by the Institute of Historical Study.

In time for the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, here is an unforgettable story of revolution, terror, and a building. This book’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.

 

Yuri Slezkine is a Russian-born American historian, writer, and translator. He is the Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley where he serves as professor of Russian history and Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

His book The Jewish Century (Princeton) won the National Jewish Book Award. His other publications include In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) and Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) to name a few.

Bertrand M. Patenaude is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a lecturer in history and international relations at Stanford University. His most recent book is Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, published by HarperCollins in 2009. He is also the author of A Wealth of Ideas: Revelations from the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford University Press, 2006), a richly illustrated coffee-table book that showcases the Hoover Archives’ extraordinary collections, which span the entire twentieth century. His first book, the Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002) won the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize and is the basis for a forthcoming documentary film produced for the award-winning PBS series American Experience. 

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