Once the House of Soviets reached twenty-one stories, the engineers realized that it wasn’t going to be safe to complete without risking collapse. Construction was halted in the 1980s, and the giant structure stood empty until I laid eyes on it, an unfinished ruin. It did not take a literary mind to see the unpleasant concrete structure as a metaphor for the Soviet Union itself: an ideal that triumphed in war but proved incapable of meeting the basic needs of human beings or keeping pace with a changing world.
