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Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012)

by Anne Applebaum

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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1,3512613,794 (4.09)72
History. Nonfiction. HTML:

In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

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» See also 72 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 23 (next | show all)
Appelbaum dissects the way that civil society in Eastern Europe was eradicated in the years following WWII, and replaced by a monolithic, state-run apparatus that controlled all aspects of peoples' lives. In her epilogue, she uses the example of the reemergence of the Polish Women's League in Lodz to show how freedom and democracy require groups such as these - non-profit advocacy groups that are dedicated to accomplishing what the state cannot. Appelbaum aptly points out that the Russian government still persecutes many of these groups within their own country.

What was most shocking to me was the way that the Red Army and the Soviet government treated potential allies in the Polish Home Army, and other anti-Nazi leftists. Some of the concentration camps used in the Holocaust were reused to imprison political dissidents. Some people who were liberated from concentration camps were then sent to the Gulag for not being "politically correct". The communist project in Eastern Europe might have been more successful if they had not sown such bitter seeds at the beginning. ( )
  jonbrammer | Jul 1, 2023 |
Got to page ~200 after two weeks. This was a good read-myself-to-sleep book. I learned a lot about how much the Soviet communists sucked 1944-1946, but at some point, the thrust of information felt directionless. I gave up.
  Gadi_Cohen | Sep 22, 2021 |
This book begins with the Yalta Conference and ends with the Hungarian Uprising. And tells the story of how Stalin and his secret police chief Beria set out to convert a dozen very different easter European countries to communism. Applebaum describes in frightening detail how the lives of people in these countries was turned upside down when the new ruling regimes challenged every belief they held and took away almost everything they had accumulated.

The Soviet bloc collapsed 32 years ago so Applebaum’s picture of this lost civilization that was governed through cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics is riveting. ( )
  etxgardener | Aug 15, 2021 |
It's really hard to believe that its been twenty-four years since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. I remember following the news on CNN at the United States Mission in Geneva, Switzerland. A communist Eastern Europe seemed to be a permanent fixture just weeks before.

Applebaum does and excellent job describing the Eastern Europe after WWII. She brings some excellent points to history. Terrorized by the Nazi's then liberated by the Soviets. Why weren't people anxious to go to the West? People remembered that France and England did little to prevent the Nazism in Poland and Eastern Europe. The Soviets were liberators, or so it seemed for a short while.

Nationalism in stateless communism is compared to medieval Europe where there were nationalities, but first and foremost everyone was Catholic, much the same vision was planned for Communism in Eastern Europe.

Promising starts turn bad quickly for Eastern Europeans. Progress is slows to a stop. West Germany recovers and prospers while East Germany falls behind. Free elections end up as one party systems. Although official policy is not "one party system" but the consolidation of many parties to form an anti-fascist front.

Applebaum, once again, does an outstanding job. Not just repeating history but breaking the book into sections: Economy, High Stalinism, Homo Sovieticus, Youth, Radio, and other topics. Topic driven history works well to present a full picture of Eastern Europe in the dozen years after WWII. Extremely well documented with a copius amount source material. A very worthwhile read. ( )
  evil_cyclist | Mar 16, 2020 |
Just one long bleak chapter after another.

Sobering what is facing us if we cannot muster an electoral victory in this country later this year. ( )
  kcshankd | Jan 18, 2020 |
Showing 1-5 of 23 (next | show all)
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012). Applebaum’s tour-de-force describes how the Iron Curtain descended on Eastern Europe. What distinguishes her writing is that she goes beyond describing how Josef Stalin succeeded in imposing his domination over Eastern Europe to describe the lives of ordinary people suddenly forced to live under Soviet rule.
 
The Polish story is the heart of Anne Applebaum’s remarkable book, “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe” (Doubleday), a book that reanimates a world that was largely hidden from Western eyes, and that many people who lived and suffered in it would prefer to forget.

 
Applebaum writes movingly and with insight into the “tiny compromises” made by ordinary people, not to say the terrors they faced. She uses the stories of everyday life, gleaned from a huge range of sources and interviews, to show how tyranny insinuates itself into societies and how people learnt to survive. Applebaum takes us into the dark heart of totalitarianism.
 
In her relentless quest for understanding, Applebaum shines light into forgotten worlds of human hope, suffering and dignity. Those who know little of Europe behind the Iron Curtain will find themselves edified; those who know much will learn much more. Others have told us of the politics of this time. Applebaum does that but also shows what politics meant to people’s lives, in an era when the state did more to shape individual destinies than at any time in history.
 
A Russian woman who visited East Germany in 1986 on a Soviet school trip described to me recently how their East German official hosts explained the Berlin wall as a necessary defence against the hordes of West Germans who wished to storm into East Germany to escape West German economic misery and join in East Germany's success. And she and her 13-year-old Soviet friends had at the time no reason to doubt this, never in their lives having been told anything different. The eventual complete collapse of communism in eastern Europe has naturally tended to focus subsequent attention on its shambolic and incompetent aspects; but its effectiveness as a system of thought control should not be underestimated......
added by marq | editThe Guardian, Anatol Lieven (Oct 26, 2012)
 

» Add other authors (14 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Applebaum, Anneprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Campbell, CassandraNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Dauzat, Pierre-EmmanuelTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Eklöf, MargaretaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
The loss of freedeom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, justice, the good of the people . . . Lies, by their very nature partial and ephemeral, are revealed as lies when confronted with language's striving for truth. But here all the means of disclosure had been permanently confiscated by the police.
- Aleksander Wat, My Century
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. - Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless
Dedication
This book is dedicated to those Eastern Europeans who refused to live within a lie.
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(Introduction) Among many other things, the year 1945 marked one of the most extraordinary population movements in European history.
Explosions echoed throughout the night, and artillery fire could be heard throughout the day.
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History. Nonfiction. HTML:

In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

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Penguin Australia

An edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia.

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