Yuri Slezkine Interviewed by Nick Higham

Historian and writer Professor Yuri Slezkine tells the extraordinary story of an enormous Moscow apartment building where Communist true believers lived until they were all sent to prison or their deaths in Stalinist purges.

The House of Government, across the river from the Kremlin, was completed in 1931. Its 505 flats made it the largest residential building in Europe and it housed the people who ran the Communist state. Slezkine uses a gripping narrative technique in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace to tell the story both of the residents and of the Russian Revolution.

“A Soviet War and Peace.” Sheila Fitzpatrick, London Review of Books

Slezkine, a Russian-born American historian and writer, is Jane K Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Jewish Century, winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Here he talks to BBC journalist Nick Higham, who was the BBC’s first ever media correspondent and, until recently, presenter of Meet the Author on the BBC news channel.

History