House on Old Square

Andrei Kolesnikov is an expert at the Moscow Center of Carnegie, the author of several books, including “Speech -Schools”, “Seventies and Earlier”, “Cold War on Ice”. His father - Vladimir Kolesnikov, an employee of the apparatus of the CPSU Central Committee - left short memories. And the son “answered for the father”-wrote comments, personal and historical, sociological, to these memoirs. Pre -war childhood, military adolescence, post -war youth. The circumstances of the arrests that occurred and not occurred. Love for a Jewish, the daughter of an enemy of the people who became a wife in the era of the fight against the cosmopolitans. Career of a party worker. A series of Soviet politicians passing through the narrative, as in the corridors of the building of the Central Committee on the Old Square ... and portraits of close friends from the Soviet middle class, who found the war and thaw, stagnation and restructuring, who took new times or did not humble them.
This book is an attempt to understand the Soviet Atlantis, which sank, but still sending signals from under the thickness of the heavy water of history, and a belated conversation of his son and his father about what was the main thing in the life of several generations