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Loading... Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012)by Anne Applebaum
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 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. 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.
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...... Belongs to Publisher SeriesAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)947.0009History and Geography Europe Russia and eastern Europe [and formerly Finland] Russian & Slavic History by Period RussiaLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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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. ( )