The story of the House on Arbat Street in Moscow is the story of Russia in the twentieth century. Built in the early 1900s in the then-popular "moderne" style, this grand apartment building was a residence for families of wealth and privilege. Then, following the Revolution of 1917, it was turned into a collective housing unit. Through historical footage and the reminiscences of former residents, the incredible story of the House on Arbat Street comes alive. One resident describes how "every day you could hear doors banging: they had come to arrest someone." Another muses, "Today I am sure of nothing. There was so much hypocrisy and lying that everything I thought to be good was perhaps no more than an illusion. The only truly real thing was the people." The narrator remarks: "For seventy years all of Russia was like this building—a strange family indeed."