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The most striking thing about the building was, and is, its history. In the nineteen-thirties, during Stalin’s purges, the House of Government earned the ghoulish reputation of having the highest per-capita number of arrests and executions of any apartment building in Moscow. No other address in the city offers such a compelling portal into the world of Soviet-era bureaucratic privilege, and the horror and murder to which this privilege often led.

The popular mania about the building today holds it to be a kind of phantasmagoric, haunted museum of Russia’s past century. I asked Tolya what he made of our building’s notoriety. “Why does this house have such a heavy, difficult aura?” he said. “This is why: on the one hand, its residents lived like a new class of nobility, and on the other they knew that at any second they could get their guts ripped out.”A hundred years ago, in the turbulent autumn of 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took advantage of a moment of political chaos in Russia. The empire had grown weak and feckless, and, the previous February, Tsar Nicholas II had left his throne, bringing to a close the era of the Romanovs, a royal dynasty of more than three hundred years.

That October, Lenin and the Bolsheviks overturned the interim government, seizing power and setting in motion the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the time, the Bolsheviks were not the country’s largest or most popular socialist party, but they were the most fervently certain of their own prophecies. They were, in essence, the first faith-based apocalyptic sect to take charge of a country. This is the opening argument of a magisterial new book by Yuri Slezkine, a Soviet-born historian who immigrated to the United States in 1983, and has been a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for many years. His book, “,” is a twelve-hundred-page epic that recounts the multigenerational story of the famed building and its inhabitants—and, at least as interesting, the rise and fall of Bolshevist faith. In Slezkine’s telling, the Bolsheviks were essentially a millenarian cult, a small tribe radically opposed to a corrupt world. With Lenin’s urging, they sought to bring about the promised revolution, or revelation, which would give rise to a more noble and just era.

Of course, that didn’t happen. Slezkine’s book is a tale of “failed prophecy,” and the building itself—my home for the past several years—is “a place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution went to die.”In the years following the Great October Socialist Revolution, as it would be called in Soviet literature, Bolshevik leaders found themselves refashioned as Communist Party officials. They faced the conundrum of how to turn their sect into a church—that is, how to transcend the end-of-days rhetoric and create a stable system of governance.

Lenin died in 1924, and Stalin, after maneuvering into power, proclaimed that global revolution was not necessary, and that the socialist utopia could be established in one country, the U.S.S.R. The “building” of socialism was the operative metaphor for what became known as the Stalin Revolution, which was defined by rapid urbanization and industrialization. The fury of construction was meant as a kind of creation myth: on the first day, the Communist Party built the Magnitogorsk steel mill; on the second, the Kharkiv tractor factory.

In Moscow, citizens were amazed by the metro, which began operation in the mid-thirties; its cavernous stations, with their chandeliers and marble, felt like palaces for the new Communist era.Inevitably, the builders of this new state needed a home of their own. After the revolution, top Party officials had taken rooms in the city’s most storied addresses, occupying the Kremlin, the National and Metropol Hotels, and a prominent Orthodox seminary. Such housing was thought to be a temporary necessity that would quickly give way to collective living arrangements. The early post-revolutionary years were a time of utopian experimentation, in architecture as well as in social engineering; the Constructivist Konstantin Melnikov drew up blueprints for giant “sleep laboratories,” in which hundreds of workers could simultaneously drift off to mechanically produced scents and calming sounds. By the late twenties, however, Stalin had dampened the freewheeling spirit in the arts, and, anyway, top Party officials had grown used to the comforts of their hotel suites and noble mansions. Construction on the House of Government began in 1928, with a design, by Boris Iofan, of the “transitional type”—that is, a building with communal services but which, for the moment, allowed residents to live in traditional family apartments.

When it opened, in the spring of 1931, Slezkine writes, it boasted. A cafeteria capable of serving all House residents, a theater for 1300 spectators, a library, several dozen rooms for various activities (from pool-playing to symphony orchestra rehearsals), and above the theater, both tennis and basketball courts, two gyms, and several shower rooms.

There was also a bank, laundry, telegraph, post office, daycare center, walk-in clinic, hairdresser’s salon, grocery store, department store, and movie theater for 1500 spectators. With cafe, reading room, and band stage. 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.”.

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Like the passing of a black and furious storm, the arrests ended. The last people killed were officers in the N.K.V.D.

“Having waked up after the orgy, Stalin and the surviving members of the inner circle needed to get rid of those who had administered it,” Slezkine writes. It was not long before a new tragedy befell the residents of the building, and the country: the invasion by Nazi Germany, in June, 1941. The House of Government was evacuated, its residents scattered to towns across the Soviet Union. Slezkine reports that around five hundred people from the building went off to the war; a hundred and thirteen of them were killed. In the Soviet consciousness, the war was an event as powerful as the revolution. The conflict, Slezkine writes, “justified all the previous sacrifices, both voluntary and involuntary, and offered the children of the original revolutionaries the opportunity to prove, through one more sacrifice, that their childhood had been happy, that their fathers had been pure, that their country was their family, and that their life was indeed beautiful even in death.”. Perhaps the defining event in the building’s postwar life came in 1976, when Yuri Trifonov, a former resident, published his novella “,” a loosely fictionalized account of his boyhood there.

Trifonov, who was six years old when his family moved in, describes the building as a “huge grey block with its thousand windows giving it a look of a whole town.” His father had a high-ranking job at the Council of People’s Commissars; his mother was an economist at the Commissariat of Agriculture.Trifonov’s father was arrested as an enemy of the people in June, 1937, when Trifonov was eleven. The next April, N.K.V.D. Agents came for his mother. They took her out wearing thin canvas sneakers and a gray jacket—clothes she would wear all through the first winter at a Gulag camp in the frozen steppes of Kazakhstan. She paused for a moment on the landing, her arms held behind her, and looked up toward her children. She did not offer the usual words of comfort about her innocence or her imminent return, but instead a piece of advice, which Trifonov remembered for the rest of his life: “Children, no matter what happens, don’t ever lose your sense of humor.” What Trifonov did not know then was that his father was already dead, and he would not see his mother until eight years later, when she returned, weakened and sick, from the camps. Trifonov wrote “The House on the Embankment” when he was fifty-one years old, and the book’s characters are children of his generation, but he alludes to the trauma of the purges only through supporting characters who suddenly vanish, and the narrator’s passing remark that “people who leave the house cease to exist.”.

The book was an immediate sensation among Soviet readers, and it gave the building a new life: from then on, it was known as the House on the Embankment. Trifonov died in 1981, but his widow, Olga, who is seventy-eight, is a proud chronicler of her husband’s life and work. We spoke this summer at the small museum dedicated to the House on the Embankment, where Olga is the director. The museum, an apartment on a courtyard of the building, is full of original artifacts, like the custom wooden furniture that Iofan, the building’s architect, designed for tenants.

A stuffed penguin sits near the entrance; it was brought back, alive, from the Antarctic by Ilya Mazuruk, a famed polar explorer, who lived in the building in the thirties and forties and, legend has it, took the penguin for evening walks along the embankment. Trifonov and his siblings were evicted from the building after his mother’s arrest, and he never returned. As Olga told me, he rarely spoke of his years there. “He was not a man who loved to talk about the past,” she said. “He saved that for his literature.”In the early eighties, Olga said, the couple lived in a run-down apartment above a food store. Trifonov’s popularity was immense. His name had been floated for a Nobel Prize nomination.

One day, a high-ranking Soviet official approached Olga and proposed that the couple move to a four-bedroom apartment in the House on the Embankment. It seemed a fantastic stroke of good fortune. “I came back upstairs with this silly smile, and right in the hallway I told him, ‘We are being offered to move into the House on the Embankment!’ ” Trifonov recoiled: “Do you really think that I want to move back there?” Needless to say, they declined the offer. “For him,” Olga said, “this building contained his most cheerful memories from childhood, the bitterest, and the most tragic, all of that mixed up together.”.Tolya told me that as he grew older he became curious not just about the story of his grandfather, whose medals and Orders of Lenin were displayed in the family bookcase, but also about the many periods of Soviet history that were never discussed. When he was around ten, he read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “,” a tale of existence in Stalin’s camps.

Later, he made his way through Solzhenitsyn’s “,” a three-volume opus that appeared only in samizdat. By his university years, he, like many of his peers, was an anti-Sovietchik—not fully a dissident, but thoroughly disillusioned with official ideology.

He developed a split consciousness toward the house. “Of course, on a rational level, I know this building’s history, who lived here, and all about the repressions,” he said.

“But there is also a more personal experience: I was born here, grew up here, and have spent a large part of my conscious life here.”In 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union was treated with excitement and relief by many of those who lived in the House on the Embankment. Its residents were no longer true believers in Communism; by then, it seemed that there was hardly a true believer left in the empire. The nineties in the building, as in Russia as a whole, were a time of anarchic opportunity, exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. Pensioners moved out, their apartments snapped up by Russia’s nouveau riche. Gangsters from across the former Soviet expanse bought apartments at the city’s most central address, which, for many, still carried a whiff of privilege and power.

Underground casinos popped up in some apartments; others were turned into cramped hostels for migrant workers. My apartment was rented to an American oilman, then to an investment banker, after which came a professor from France, and finally, before me, a young socialite who threw raucous parties that upset the neighbors.The most visible symbol of the era was a Mercedes logo mounted on the roof, an advertisement several stories tall that towered over the building. The logo had been placed there in a murky deal that wasn’t discussed with, let alone approved by, the building’s residents. A rental fee of a million rubles a month was paid to the city-owned company in charge of maintaining the building. When the sign finally came down, after ten years, the company suddenly threatened bankruptcy and said that the cash was gone.If the nineties were defined by untrammelled commerce and the collapse of authority, then the early Putin years, beginning with Putin’s ascension to the Presidency, in 2000, were a time of increasingly centralized state power. The Kremlin subsumed other centers of authority, including the Orthodox Church, under its control.

In 2012, these forces came together with symbolic absurdity in a nasty and protracted lawsuit between neighbors in the House on the Embankment. A woman living in an apartment that belonged to Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church, sued her neighbor, a high-profile surgeon named Yuri Shevchenko, for six million dollars, to cover damage, she said, that was caused by construction dust emanating from Shevchenko’s apartment, which was being renovated. For his part, Kirill—who at the time was facing corruption allegations tied to a luxury Breguet watch—said that the apartment was a gift from Moscow’s former mayor, and that he used it only to store his extensive collection of antique books. A Moscow court ruled against Shevchenko, who, in order to come up with the money, sold the apartment and left the building. In a final twist, the Patriarch’s apartment looks out onto the Church of Christ the Savior, the city’s main Orthodox cathedral, which, that same year, became the site of Pussy Riot’s punk-art protest—a performance meant to satirize the Church’s intimacy with politics under Kirill. Another friend, Shakri Amirkhanova, a thirty-eight-year-old magazine publisher, had a similar view of the building.

Her grandfather was a revered Soviet-era poet who secured an apartment in the House on the Embankment for Shakri’s parents. Now Shakri lives there with her boyfriend and five-year-old daughter. She told me that she was wary of the scale and intensity of the building’s history crowding out her own experience.

“It’s my space, with my childhood memories—playing cards with my sister at night, listening to Beatles tapes, taking piano lessons in the living room,” she said. “And now it will be home to my daughter’s memories.”Tolya told me that he was not a “mystic” about the House on the Embankment.

Yet he saw a satisfying parallel in the fact that the square across the road had become the central location for a series of large-scale anti-Kremlin demonstrations in 2011 and 2012. Protesters were angry about election fraud—observers had documented ballot stuffing and other irregularities during the country’s recent elections—but also about the cynicism and corruption that had come to define the Putin state. Tolya and his wife participated in the marches and protests. He said that, in a way, this political consciousness might be the truest inheritance from his grandfather, even though his grandfather’s prescription for change was wildly different from his own. “It seems to me that this yearning, this energy, which ultimately threw itself into revolution, is definitely passed along,” he said. “It’s a natural process. The revolutionary furor softens and adapts, becomes bourgeois, part of the system—and appears again in new forms.”Over the years, Putin has had a difficult time articulating a coherent position on the events of 1917, and on the revolutionaries who eventually occupied the House on the Embankment.

His logic, however contradictory, seems to be that fomenting revolution is bad, but being a superpower is good. He sees the Bolshevik revolutionaries as forerunners to those who might challenge his power today.

“Someone decided to shake Russia from inside, and rocked things so much that the Russian state crumbled,” he told a gathering of students and young teachers. “A complete betrayal of national interests!