La casa eterna

Designed by the visionary architect Borís Iofán and inaugurated in 1931, the Government House is a colossal building of more than five hundred apartments that stands on the banks of the Moskva River, in front of the Kremlin, originally intended to house the main leaders and intellectuals Soviets and their families. Yuri Slezkine traces the history of the devotees and ideologues of the Bolshevik cause who ruled the ussr and ended up becoming victims of the Stalinist purges. A text that skillfully combines biography, literary criticism and history with fascinating theories about revolutions, millennial prophecies and utopias. The result is the story, in the tradition of War and Peace, Life and Destiny and the Gulag Archipelago, of the vicissitudes of the tenants of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, was a disturbing human experiment and ended up inhabited by the ghosts of the disappeared who, despite the efforts of the regime, never fell into oblivion.