This is a massive hybrid work that tells the personal human story of the Revolutionary Soviet elite. The book is centered around the story of the massive housing complex in Moscow built for the elite around the time of the first five-year plan (around 1930). But the book doesn't limit itself to that scope. It looks both forward and back at the lives of those who lived there. One of the very best parts of the book is the coverage of these people's lives *before* the 1917 revolution.
The book is difficult to classify as a work. What makes it so interesting is that it able to be many things at the same time. Its a grand literary narrative of a large set of people in war and peace. Its a cultural and political history. It attempts to study and draw conclusions about a political system based on close study of those who led that system. It has grand diversions into literature, religion, russian intellectual history and all sorts of other matters. Its length and its tendency to cross so many traditional lines makes it exceptionally interesting but difficult to review. Its a book that could be reviewed in many different ways.
The book humanizes and explains the old party members better than any other work I can think of. He presents the revolutionaries as a millenarian movement of true believers. The old world was going to end and they were going to build paradise. One of the great strengths of the book is that it is a showcase in the difficulties involved in building a utopia. The pre-revolutionary strengths of the movement immediately turned into weaknesses once the Civil War was over.
They promised more than any revolution could deliver. Their stark dualist philosophy and discipline, which served them well as an underground movement, failed them once in power. The movement lacked any capacity to operate in a democratic fashion. It had no ability to accept dissent. Worst of all, the whole system was built on a lie. The lie that the revolution had brought utopia. Rather than being the product of one ruthless man, Stalinism seems within the context of the book to be the inevitable outcome of the system. If not Stalin, one of the others would inevitably have done something very similar.
The impression I got from the book was that for all the evils of Stalinism, the country might have suffered even more if the revolutionary far left had come to power. Where they were different is that they really believed in abolishing the entire existing structure of life. They wanted to sweep away marriage, children and family life. The author's religious analogy actually works in this case in that if their ideas had been implemented, it would have been like throwing the entire country into a monastery. Everyone would have been put in Monk's cells with everything being communal. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came closest to actually making that model real with all the well-known consequences. I came away seeing more clearly what a dramatic change Lenin's NEP was for the true revolutionary faithful and how it created splits within the party that were eventually only resolved through the purge trials.
There are parts of the book that tend toward excess. For example, he launches into an incredibly long intellectual diversion into the question of the Bolshevik party *as a religion*. Dealing with the question, he launches into a rambling history of nearly every religion in the world complete with lots of personal opinions an interpretations. An argument that should perhaps have been done in one or two pages consumes far, far more. The book is well over 1000 pages. Everything in the book is interesting, but not everything advances the core narrative of the book. There is a difference between telling a story and presenting an archive of material. His fault is tending on occasion toward the latter.
I don't think the book is too long for the tale it tells, The problem is more that the "tree" needed to be pruned. The narrative needed to be tightened up. At certain points in the book, someone needed to ask how certain material was advancing the narrative. But the book is so good and the material on many occasions so interesting that I find it difficult to fault it much. Certain matters should have been included in perhaps extended appendix sections where they could stand alone as diversions into topics rather than interruptions of the narrative.
This is not a "light" read. Its incredibly long. Its very dense. It expects a great degree of familiarity with Russian and Soviet history in all its aspects (political, historical, religious, cultural, literary, intellectual and more...) I personally found it very rewarding as a read. But reading it is a commitment and its not going to be for everyone. Its also not a comprehensive picture of Soviet society. Its narrowly focused on life at the very top of society and tending toward the stories of the true-believer party members.
What the book ultimately was to me was the story of a political tragedy. It showed how the organization of a political movement and its ideology out of power impacts its ability to rule once in power. It shows very clearly the price of fanaticism and ruthlessness in politics. As well, it shows how important it is for a political elite to believe in the system they are running. The book shows quite well how the pre-revolutionary dedication to the political vision died out after the first generation.
Again. This is a book that requires a large amount of knowledge going in and a commitment on the part of the reader. It will not be for everyone.
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