The House of Government

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book took many years to write. I am grateful to the Hoover Institution for one of the quietest years of my life and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, for one of the happiest; to the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the University of California, Berkeley, for financial support; to Christiane Büchner, for letting me watch the making of her film and teaching me how to record interviews; to Olga Bandrimer, for transcribing those interviews and contributing her own stories; to Artem Zadikian, for being the world’s most observant and generous photographer; and to Michael Coates, Nicole Eaton, Eleonor Gilburd, Clarissa Ibarra, Jason R. Morton, Brandon Schechter, Charles Shaw, I. T. Sidorova, Victoria Smolkin, A. G. Tepliakov, and Katherine Zubovich, for help with research. I am particularly grateful to the friends and colleagues who have read the entire manuscript and offered suggestions ranging from the inspiring to the debilitating: Victoria E. Bonnell, George Breslauer, John Connelly, Brian DeLay, Victoria Frede-Montemayor, Gregory Freidin, David Hollinger, Sergei Ivanov, Joseph Kellner, Joachim Klein, Thomas Laqueur, Olga Matich, Elizabeth McGuire, Eric Naiman, Benjamin Nathans, Anne Nesbet, Joy Neumeyer, Daniel Orlovsky, Irina Paperno, Ethan Pollock, Hank Reichman, Irwin Scheiner, James Vernon, Mirjam Voerkelius, Edward W. Walker, Amir Weiner, Katherine Zubovich, and all the members of the Berkeley Russian History Reading Group (kruzhok).

Jon Gjerde kept asking me how I would go about writing this book until I decided to go ahead and write it; Reggie Zelnik would have noticed the presence of a character who never lived in the House of Government; Brigitta van Rheinberg never wavered in her enthusiasm and helped reshape and rethink the manuscript; Chris Ferrante, Beth Gianfagna, Dimitri Karetnikov, and Terri O’Prey turned the manuscript into The House of Government; and Zoë Pagnamenta showed me what a good agent can do.

My greatest debt is to the women who created the House on the Embankment Museum and invited me in: the late Elena Ivanovna Perepechko, Tamara Andreevna Ter-Egiazarian, and Viktoria Borisovna Volina, and my very special teachers and friends Inna Nikolaevna Lobanova, Tatiana Ivanovna Shmidt, and Olga Romanovna Trifonova. This book is for them.

Finally, reciprocity is inversely related to intimacy. A stranger’s favor must be returned promptly; a close friend can wait twenty years for a book to get written; all happy families are happy in the same way because they lie outside the cycle of fair exchange. Which is the reason I do not have to thank Peter Slezkine and Lisa Little for their contribution to the writing of this book.