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.
About Anne Applebaum
ANNE APPLEBAUM is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate. Her previous book, Gulag, won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for three other major prizes. Her essays appear inThe New York Review of Books, Slate, and The London Spectator. She lives in Washington, D.C., and Poland with her husband, Radek Sikorski, a Polish politician, and their two children.
“Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe” by Anne Applebaum
The Washington Post Book Review – October 26, 2012 (Excerpt)
Two of the 20th century’s iconic moments took place within a few hundred yards of each other in the German capital, Berlin: the storming of the Reichstag by Soviet troops in April 1945 and the scaling of the Berlin Wall by East Germans 44 years later. We sense that the two are related — Soviet troops brought the communism that East Germans toppled in 1989 — but the years between those events are a vacuum in the minds of most Americans.
Even a quarter-century after the opening of Eastern Europe’s archives, we know virtually nothing about how people lived behind the Iron Curtain, though billions of U.S. tax dollars were spent to keep that kind of life from being exported further west. How was it that Eastern Europe — a mostly agricultural region, deeply conservative and religious, historically hostile to Russia — was made by 1949 to look much like Stalin’s heavily industrial and atheist Soviet Union? Surely the outcome had much to do with the Red Army. Yet after Iraq, most will agree that occupation troops do not create political regimes.
In her new book, “Iron Curtain,” one of the most compelling but also serious works on Europe’s past to appear in recent memory, Anne Applebaum begins constructing an answer. The initial conditions for building Soviet power were far worse than most readers can imagine. [Read the full article...]
‘Crushing Eastern Europe’ Behind The ‘Iron Curtain’
NPR Book Review – November 8, 2012 (Excerpt)
If you read Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain as a manual on how to take over a state and turn it totalitarian, the first lesson, she says, would be on targeted violence. Applebaum’s book, which was recently nominated for a National Book Award, describes how after World War II, the Soviet Union found potential dissidents everywhere.
“It really meant anybody who had a leadership role in society,” she tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “This included priests, people who had been politicians, people who had been merchants before the war, and people who ran youth groups.”
The Soviets tried to control as many aspects of life as possible in the Eastern European countries they took over, Applebaum says. Everything was a potential source of dissent. “If you say, ‘All painters have to paint like this because the state says so,’ and then when one painter says, ‘I don’t want to do it that way; I want to paint an abstract painting,’ then you’ve made him into a political dissident, even if in another society, he would have been apolitical,” she says. [Read the full article...]
Stalin’s Shadow - ‘Iron Curtain,’ by Anne Applebaum
The New York Times Book Review – November 21, 2012 (Excerpt)
Having brilliantly documented the horror of Stalin’s Soviet terror machine in her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gulag,” Anne Applebaum now offers a bulky sequel, “Iron Curtain,” about the brutal effort of that same machine to crush and colonize Eastern Europe in the first decade after World War II. Her evidence, once again drawn from archival research and some survivor interviews, is overwhelming and convincing. But the heart of her story is hardly news.
That Soviet tanks carried Moscow-trained agents into Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany was known in the West at the time and has been well documented since. When those agents set out to produce not only a friendly sphere of Soviet influence but also a cordon of dictatorships reliably responsive to Russian orders, Winston Churchill was moved to warn, just days after the Nazis’ surrender in 1945, that an Iron Curtain was being drawn through the heart of Europe. (He coined the metaphor in a message to President Truman a full year before he used it in public in Fulton, Mo.) And Matyas Rakosi, the “little Stalin” of Hungary, was well known for another apt metaphor, describing how the region’s political, economic, cultural and social oppositions were to be destroyed by “cutting them off like slices of salami.” [Read the full article...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith. - 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS
