Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government is certainly one of the most ambitious works on Soviet history to have appeared in many years. A sprawling, eccentric book with clear literary aspirations, it tells the story of the Soviet communist elite and its fate under Stalin, through the prism of the vast apartment complex on Moscow’s Serafimovicha Street — the “House on the Embankment” — where so many of them lived (and from which so many were plucked by Stalin’s secret police to end their days in prisons and labor camps).

By 1935, Moscow’s House of Government had 2,655 tenants — overwhelmingly families of state and party officials: “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.”

One might expect a thousand-page saga of the Russian Revolution, by one of the most talented and provocative Russian historians alive today, to garner the interest of socialists around the world. Perhaps the lack of serious Left engagement with such an important study is understandable, given the influence of the American academy and its capacity to churn out a seemingly endless stream of anticommunist works on the Revolution.