The House of Government

What an idea: to trace Russia's revolutionary generation, from its utopian beginnings to the paranoid purges of its end, via the massive Moscow apartment complex that was built to house the party's elite, many of whom were later sent to their deaths by their own comrades. Slezkine, a Russian-born Berkeley professor, traces hundreds of lives through those doors, humanizing the hopes and tragedy of the revolution through 1200 encyclopedic pages dense with personal stories, archival tidbits, and idiosyncratic digressions. It has all the ambition of the great, sweeping Russian novels—War and Peace, Life and Fate, The Gulag Archipelago—which leads you to imagine, with a kind of utopian fervor of your own, that if you read this whole book, you might understand everything.