The Insatiable Utopia - Reason.com

The Insatiable Utopia - Reason.com
"In February 1917, a 30-year-old Bolshevik named Valerian Osinsky wrote to his 22-year-old mistress about a coming revolution that would wipe away czarism and deliver what Christianity couldn't: the kingdom of heaven on earth. 
"Only in the world of insatiable utopia," he wrote, "will the simplest ethical rules become real and free from exceptions and contradictions."
Twenty-one years later, he would be executed as an "enemy of the people" for his blasphemies against the Soviet Union.
Stories like that abound in the Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine's 1,100-page epic, The House of Government, which chronicles the lives of elite Bolsheviks and their families from their early days of revolutionary awakening through the overthrow of the czar, the building of "the dictatorship of the proletariat," Joseph Stalin's Great Terror, and their children's loss of faith.
Divided into three volumes, The House of Government isn't just history. It's art that self-consciously, and successfully, mimics Tolstoy's War and Peace and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
...By the end it's also a horror story of grotesque proportions, as the "insatiable utopia" devours its own.
Forced collectivization was both an economic and a human rights disaster.
The servants of the state were given production quotas that couldn't be met, then beaten when they failed to produce.
"They whine and whimper that there's nothing left," wrote one party official responsible for grain procurement, "but when you grab them by the throat, they deliver both grain and hay, and whatever else they're required to."
Mass death resulted. "The determined enforcement of ambitious production plans," notes Slezkine, "resulted in a famine that killed between 4.6 and 8 million people." 
Some resorted to cannibalism to fill their bellies.
Meanwhile, the elite had more than enough.
A short time after witnessing the Kazakhstan countryside starving to death, one secret policeman's fashionista wife wrote about how they dined on "roast suckling pig."...
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