Apartments were distributed among those in charge of the nascent Communist project. Nikolai Podvoisky, a former seminarian who led the storming of the Tsar’s Winter Palace, in 1917, moved into Apartment 280. Boris Zbarsky, a chemist who presided over the embalming and maintenance of Lenin’s body inside its mausoleum, on Red Square, was given Apartment 28. Nikita Khrushchev, then the forty-year-old head of the Moscow Party Committee, moved into No. 206. Iofan himself took a penthouse.

My apartment, in a less desirable wing of the building, was occupied by the family of Mikhail Sergushev, who was born to a peasant family in 1886 and became interested in socialist politics while working in a porcelain factory in Riga. My landlady, Marina, Sergushev’s great-granddaughter, told me that, in the years following the revolution, Sergushev travelled around half a dozen regions, helping to establish Communism across the Soviet domain. His word alone could decide the fate of local officials, even of entire villages and farming coöperatives. At first, Sergushev moved into a seven-room apartment in a mansion that once belonged to a count, where his son would ride a bike from room to room. Yet Sergushev’s health was poor, and in 1930 he died of tuberculosis. The next year, his wife and son moved into the House of Government.

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The “transition” that the building was meant to bring about never came to pass. Instead, its residents moved further from collectivist ideals, and adopted life styles that looked suspiciously bourgeois. Residents had their laundry pressed and their meals prepared for them, so that they could spend all day and much of the night at work and their children could busy themselves reading Shakespeare and Goethe. There was a large staff, with one employee for every four residents. Slezkine compares the House of Government to the Dakota, in New York City—a palace of capitalism along Central Park, where residents could eat at an on-site restaurant and play tennis and croquet on private courts. A report prepared for the Soviet Union’s Central Committee in 1935 showed that the cost of running the House of Government exceeded the Moscow norm by six hundred and seventy per cent. To the extent that the House of Government facilitated a transition, it was the metamorphosis of a sect of ascetics into a priesthood of pampered élites.

Just as the building fell short of its promise, so, too, did the early Soviet Union fail to deliver on its prophecies of a just, classless society. Food shortages, cramped housing, and life’s many other indignities continued. All millenarian movements face this moment sooner or later: this is the “Great Disappointment,” a term Slezkine borrows from the story of William Miller, a farmer in Massachusetts who prophesied that the apocalypse would occur in 1843, and, when it didn’t, shifted the date to October 22, 1844. The Soviet Union had experienced two revolutions, Lenin’s and Stalin’s, and yet, in the lofty imagery of Slezkine, the “world does not end, the blue bird does not return, love does not reveal itself in all of its profound tenderness and charity, and death and mourning and crying and pain do not disappear.” What to do then?

The answer was human sacrifice, “one of history’s oldest locomotives,” Slezkine writes. The “more intense the expectation, the more implacable the enemies; the more implacable the enemies, the greater the need for internal cohesion; the greater the need for internal cohesion, the more urgent the search for scapegoats.” Soon, in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the purges began. There would be no such thing as an accident or an error—any deviation from virtue and promised achievements was the result of deliberate sabotage. This is the logic of black magic, of spirits and witches, and of the witch hunt. It was only natural that the hunt’s victims be found among those who set the original prophecy in motion.

It is hard to imagine now, with a children’s playground in one of its courtyards and a pan-Asian noodle bar on the ground floor, but throughout 1937 and 1938 the House of Government was a vortex of disappearances, arrests, and deaths. Arrest lists were prepared by the N.K.V.D., the Soviet secret police, which later became the K.G.B., and were approved by Stalin and his close associates. Arrests occurred in the middle of the night. A group of N.K.V.D. officers would pull up to the building in a Black Raven, the standard-issue secret-police automobile, which had the silhouette of a bird of prey. A story I have heard many times, but which seems apocryphal, is that N.K.V.D. agents would sometimes use the garbage chutes that ran like large tubes through many apartments, popping out inside a suspect’s home without having to knock on the door. After a perfunctory trial, which could last all of three to five minutes, prisoners were taken to the left or to the right: imprisonment or execution. “Most House of Government leaseholders were taken to the right,” Slezkine writes.

No one publicly mentioned the accused or spoke of their plight to surviving family members. On the whole, Slezkine writes, those who lived in the House of Government “believed that enemies were in fact everywhere,” and that any innocent victims were isolated mistakes in an otherwise virtuous bloodletting. He quotes a diary entry of Yulia Piatnitskaya, whose husband, a Comintern official, was arrested, along with their seventeen-year-old son, at the House of Government in 1937. Piatnitskaya is in anguish over her son, and torn between two opposing images of her husband: an honest revolutionary and a purported enemy of the people. When she thinks of the first, she writes, “I feel so sorry for him and want to die or fight for him.” But when she ponders the second: “I feel tainted and disgusted, and I want to live in order to see them all caught and have no pity for them.” In total, according to Slezkine, eight hundred residents of the House of Government were arrested or evicted during the purges, thirty per cent of the building’s population. Three hundred and forty-four were shot.

Before long, the arrests spread from the tenants to their nannies, guards, laundresses, and stairwell cleaners. The commandant of the house was arrested as an enemy of the people, and so was the head of the Communist Party’s housekeeping department. So many enemies of the people were being uncovered that individual apartments were turning over with darkly absurd speed. In April, 1938, the director of the Kuznetsk steel plant, Konstantin Butenko, moved into Apartment 141, which had become vacant after the arrest of its previous tenant, a deputy commissar from the Health Ministry. Butenko occupied the four rooms for six weeks before he himself was arrested, and his family evicted. Matvei Berman, one of the founders of the Gulag, took over the space. Berman was arrested six months later, and shot the next year.

One afternoon not long ago, I visited a woman named Anna Borisova, whose apartment is across a courtyard from mine. Borisova is an amateur artist and poet, and her photographs cover the walls of her living room, alongside faded family portraits. The space has the feel of an airy salon. Borisova put out a pot of tea, and slices of salty cheese and cake. She told me about her grandfather Sergey Malyshev, who was a Soviet official in charge of food markets and trade. Borisova explained that he spent 1937 in a fit of anxiety. “He felt a premonition,” she said. “He was always waiting, never sleeping at night.” One evening, Malyshev heard footsteps coming up the corridor—and dropped dead of a heart attack. In a way, his death saved the family: there was no arrest, and thus no reason to kick his relatives out of the apartment. “Since he died his own death, it all stayed with our family—the apartment, everything,” Borisova said. “And after that no one ever touched us.”