The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution Hardcover – August 22, 2017 by Yuri Slezkine (Princeton University Press)

This is a very unusual book exploring depth-dimensions of the Soviet Union which are neglected by most of the discourse on Communist Russia. It does so by discussing the fate of high-level Communist officials (see partial list pp. 983-994) who lived for some time in a special “Government House, together with analysis of main writings which reflected elite thinking..
Insights stemming from the book include, among others, the following:
1. Russian Communism was in many respects an apocalyptic millenarian sect. Much of the Nomenklatura was exhilarated by taking part in what they regarded as creating a new civilization and believed in its mission (though personally seeking and often achieving a high standard of living).
2. The Communist regime failed to pass on its doctrine to the children of the ruling elite. These read Pushkin and Goethe, not Marx. As put by the author: “Revolutions do not devour their children; revolutions, like all millenarian experiments, are devoured by the children of the revolutionaries” (p. 955).
3. The “masses” constituted material to be shaped and used by the ruling elite, without any traces of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
4. The hegemonic Marxist ideology was based on the basic fallacy that changing material conditions will produce a new kind of humans: “Focused on political economy and ‘base’-derived sociology, Marxism developed a remarkably flat conception of human nature. A revolution in property relations was the only necessary condition for a revolution in human hearts.” (p. 952).
5. Therefore, unavoidably, “Bolshevism, unlike Christianity, Islam, and a few other millenarianisms, was a one-generation phenomenon” (p. 943).
This book is essential reading for all interested in the history of the Soviet Union and of radical revolutions in general. But its importance is broader: Humankind is moving into a new epoch characterized, inter alia, by novel modes of production. But these by themselves will not change main propensities imprinted genetically on our species. This dissonance is likely to disrupt societies, creating “revolutionary” situations.

My impression is that “putting books to the test of life and putting life to the test of books” (p. 129) will show that contemporary humanity is totally unprepared for this emerging challenge. This book can make a contribution to overcoming this serious lacuna.