The House of Government

Author: Yuri Slezkine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400888174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1128

Book Description
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

The House of Government

Author: Yuri Slezkine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691192723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's ... narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. [An] ... account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union"--Provided by publisher.

The House of Government

Author: Yuri Slezkine
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691176949
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0

The U.S. House of Representatives

Author: Matthew Spieler
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250040361
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
In the third in this unique civics series, Matthew Spieler clearly and concisely explains the functions and importance of the United States House of Representatives

Gorbachev: His Life and Times

Author: William Taubman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245683
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Book Description
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction The definitive biography of the transformational Russian leader by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Khrushchev. "Essential reading for the twenty-first [century]." —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world’s two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system’s gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev’s unique character that, by Gorbachev’s own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.

Clean House

Author: Tom Fitton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501137069
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Corruption Chronicles comes a devastating expose of the scandals of Obama's second term. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton reveals what the largest watchdog agency in America has uncovered in its battles against Obama secrecy. Clean House takes us through incriminating documents from the attack in Benghazi, Hillary Clinton’s secret emails, the IRS scandal, and the Obamacare swindle. As the president of Judicial Watch, America’s largest non-partisan government watchdog, Tom Fitton has investigated the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Judicial Watch is the group that helped impeach Bill Clinton and took the Bush White House secrecy all the way up to the Supreme Court. Since the beginning of the Obama administration, this grassroots group has filed over 700 open records demands and dozens of lawsuits, including a successful fight over the secret Obama White House visitor logs. Americans are rightly worried they are losing their country. How did five Congressional committees miss the smoking gun on Benghazi? How did Hillary Clinton keep a secret email server quiet for years? Does the IRS audit you because of your politics? Did the first American target of Obama’s drone program work for the US government? How did Congress commit fraud to get Obamacare taxpayer subsidies? In Clean House, Tom Fitton answers these questions and provides shocking evidence of the corruption endemic to the Obama White House.

Setting the Agenda

Author: Gary W. Cox
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521853798
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
Demonstrates that the majority party seizes agenda control at nearly every stage of the legislative process.

Fighting for the Speakership

Author: Jeffery A. Jenkins
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Book Description
The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the most powerful partisan figure in the contemporary U.S. Congress. How this came to be, and how the majority party in the House has made control of the speakership a routine matter, is far from straightforward. Fighting for the Speakership provides a comprehensive history of how Speakers have been elected in the U.S. House since 1789, arguing that the organizational politics of these elections were critical to the construction of mass political parties in America and laid the groundwork for the role they play in setting the agenda of Congress today. Jeffery Jenkins and Charles Stewart show how the speakership began as a relatively weak office, and how votes for Speaker prior to the Civil War often favored regional interests over party loyalty. While struggle, contention, and deadlock over House organization were common in the antebellum era, such instability vanished with the outbreak of war, as the majority party became an "organizational cartel" capable of controlling with certainty the selection of the Speaker and other key House officers. This organizational cartel has survived Gilded Age partisan strife, Progressive Era challenge, and conservative coalition politics to guide speakership elections through the present day. Fighting for the Speakership reveals how struggles over House organization prior to the Civil War were among the most consequential turning points in American political history.

United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions

Author: Us Congress
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
The Plum Book is published by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and House Committee on Oversight and Reform alternately after each Presidential election. The Plum Book is used to identify Presidential appointed and other positions within the Federal Government. The publication lists over 9,000 Federal civil service leadership and support positions in the legislative and executive branches of the Federal Government that may be subject to noncompetitive appointment. The duties of many such positions may involve advocacy of Administration policies and programs and the incumbents usually have a close and confidential working relationship with the agency head or other key officials. The Plum Book was first published in 1952 during the Eisenhower administration. When President Eisenhower took office, the Republican Party requested a list of government positions that President Eisenhower could fill. The next edition of the Plum Book appeared in 1960 and has since been published every four years, just after the Presidential election.

Congressional Record

Author: United States. Congress
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1414

Book Description
The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)