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Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 [Hardcover]

Anne Applebaum
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
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Book Description

4 Oct 2012

From Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag, comes a major new work of historical and moral reckoning: the story of life behind the Iron Curtain.

Once the Nazis were defeated in 1945, the people of Central and Eastern Europe expected to recover the lives they had led before 1939. Instead, they found themselves subjected to a tyranny that was in many ways as inhuman as the one which they had just escaped. This book explains how Communism was imposed on these previously free societies in the decade after the end of the Second World War. Applebaum describes, in calm but devastating detail, how political parties, the church, the media, young people's organisations - the institutions of civil society on every level - were all quickly eviscerated. Ranging widely across new archival material and many sources unknown in English, she follows the communists' tactics as they bullied, threatened and murdered their way to power. She also chronicles individual lives to show the rapid choices people had to make - to fight, to flee, or to collaborate.

Within a remarkably short period after the end of the war, Eastern Europe had been ruthlessly Stalinised. Iron Curtain is a brilliant history of a brutal period in European history, but also a reminder of how fragile free societies are, and how vulnerable they can be to the predations of determined and unscrupulous enemies.


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Product details

  • Hardcover: 656 pages
  • Publisher: Allen Lane (4 Oct 2012)
  • Language: Unknown
  • ISBN-10: 0713998687
  • ISBN-13: 978-0713998689
  • Product Dimensions: 16.2 x 4.4 x 24 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 7,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

Iron Curtain is an exceptionally important book which effectively challenges many of the myths of the origins of the Cold War. It is wise, perceptive, remarkably objective and brilliantly researched. (Antony Beevor )

Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain [is] certainly the best work of modern history I have ever read. (A.N. Wilson Financial Times )

Applebaum's description of this remarkable time is everything a good history book should be: brilliantly and comprehensively researched, beautifully and shockingly told, encyclopedic in scope, meticulous in detail... it is a true masterpiece. (Keith Lowe Sunday Telegraph )

In her relentless quest for understanding, Applebaum shines light into forgotten worlds of human hope, suffering and dignity... 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. (John Connelly Washington Post )

Iron Curtain is modern history writing at its very best; assiduously researched, it wears its author's considerable erudition lightly. It sets a new benchmark for the study of this vitally important subject. (Roger Moorhouse Independent on Sunday )

Anne Applebaum's masterly book gives for the first time, a systematic explanation of the other, largely untold, side of the story... it is a window into a world of lies and evil that we can hardly imagine. (Edward Lucas Standpoint )

About the Author

Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist, a regular columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, and the author of several books, including Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. She is the Director of Political Studies at the Legatum Institute in London, and she divides her time between Britain and Poland, where her husband, Radek Sikorski, serves as Foreign Minister.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 36 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars 'Iron Curtain' by Anne Applebaum 5 Nov 2012
By Patrick
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Anne Applebaum's last book, 'Gulag' related events that were so horrifying that you were almost glad when the book came to an end. The story here is also of cruelty and failure, but not on such a terrible scale. It shows how ordinary, decent people were made to conform, partly at least because of the threat of terror, and how the Soviet backed governments in Eastern Europe tried to divert attention from their failure to get public support or to significantly improve living standards. It ends with the doomed attempts at rebellion in East Germany and then Hungary.
A lot of research must have gone into this book, but the author manages to present her ideas clearly and simply. Partly of necessity, she has to concentrate on only three countries, Hungary, Poland and East Germany. She shows that the conventional picture of the Cold War only breaking out in 1948-9 is misleading. The communists genuinely believed, after the War, that they could win popular elections. But they were soon disabused of these ideas. Instead, they effectively seized power and crushed any opposition.
By relating the personal stories of many of the people that she was able to interview, the author is able to make the story that she is relating much more interesting. A major theme is how private institutions were not allowed to survive for very long under Communism.
This book is well worth reading. It extends our knowledge of what happened in Eastern Europe after the War, and never fails to interest the reader.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Questions unanswered 4 Mar 2013
By S. Hare
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Though well reasearched, Applebaum's book (that concerns only three countries, Hungary, Poland and East Germany), is hardly satisfying. Nowadays, it is not enough to show that Communists were unforgiving in crushing democracy and, step by step, transferring all government power in their hands. This we already knew since long. More has to be understood as to how they succeeded in doing it. Communists, though a minority, had some popular support. Not only the armed force of occupying Soviet troops, but also working class militias, had a role in overwhelming other political parties. Both convinced militant intellectuals and cynical opportunists joined the Communist ranks. But exactly how even many believers were swiftly disappointed - in East Germany, as soon as 1953? Maybe, some novels by dissident local authors had already explained this better.
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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars OK, but... 4 Jan 2013
Format:Hardcover
Wasn't expecting too much from someone married to the Polish foreign minister, but that is simply an ad hominem. Let's get to some meat.

What I liked:

Applebaum's interviews with those who lived it are, of course, fascinating. Some of the discontent with Soviet rule in Poland actually resonates today, what with rich and powerful individuals and businesses evading tax on a massive scale, while the lower orders endure real-terms decline in living standards. On p.256, for example, a Polish communist official records the complaints of a typical worker:

"The Łódź worker cannot accept the fact his children can only gaze at cake from afar, and he is not satisfied that one like himself who works hard earns so little, while some parasite makes big money on the free market and the state gets nothing from him."

The book does an OK job of bringing together the various studies of the Sovietisation of Poland, Hungary and East Germany, so if you're never going to have time to read up on each of those cases yourself, this is an OK comparative compendium. The differences and similarities between the three cases are interesting. What would I most like to read more about having finished the book? Several things, but in particular I'm fascinated by the Hungarian People's Colleges Applebaum mentions (pp.181-5).

I've uploaded a whole bunch of stuff on Scribd if you're interested (change the %, obviously):
scribd%com/collections/4182986/Cold-War

And I'll finish with what I didn't:

Three stars is me being generous. Applebaum's interviews with those who lived it aren't just fascinating; they are about the only things that imbue the book with value, as the carefully worded praise from Timothy Garton Ash betrays. She makes John Lewis Gaddis sound like a revisionist.

In the conclusion of his chapter in Vol. I of The Cambridge History of the Cold War (CHCW), Norman Naimark writes, "From the perspective of more than a half-century later, the Sovietization of Eastern Europe can easily seem to have been designed from the very beginning of the Soviet occupation and even earlier. Appearances can be deceptive, especially when scholarly hindsight is at work". Applebaum, apparently, sees no need for caution.

In his chapter in Vol. I, Svetozar Rajak writes that the "five-year confrontation [during the late 1940s and early 1950s] between Yugoslavia and the USSR and its allies created a schism that destroyed forever any view of the Communist movement as a monolith." Applebaum seems to forget this at times.

In the preface to the first volume of his trilogy on the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans observes: "Recounting the experience of individuals brings home, as nothing else can, the sheer complexity of the choices they had to make, and the difficult and often opaque nature of the situations they confronted. ... [For this and other] reasons, it seems to me inappropriate that a work of history to indulge in the luxury of moral judgment." Indeed, and so Applebaum, having set out to write a book emphasising the human aspect of the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe, deserves (at best) only ridicule for writing this on p.418 (in her chapter called "Reluctant Collaborators"): Every printer who did not take a publish-and-be-damned approach to their work "somehow contributed to the creation of totalitarianism. So did everyone who endured a university course in Marxism-Leninism in order to become a doctor or an engineer; everyone who joined an artists' union in order to become a painter; everyone who put a portrait of Bierut in his office, in order to keep his job; and, of course, everyone who joined the crowd in singing 'the party, the party, the party is always right'." Yes: this is coming from someone who's just researched an ENTIRE BOOK about the "sheer complexity of the choices" and the "often opaque nature of the situations" Soviet Bloc citizens confronted. If it weren't for Gulag, who would be handing over their hard-earned money for this guff?

And a cynic would say that she chose her three countries wisely: Poland, East Germany, Hungary. And what if she hadn't maintained her tendentious, laser-like focus? Looking even just a bit wider, we have to confront Rajak's words again: "There is no evidence suggesting that Iosif Stalin possessed a blueprint for the establishment of a Soviet sphere of influence in the Balkans."

Here is a nice crisp summary of the state of play after WWII from Melvyn Leffler: "Most scholars looking at Soviet documents now agree that Stalin had no master plan to spread revolution or conquer the world. He was determined to establish a sphere of influence in eastern Europe where his communist minions would rule. But at the same time, Stalin wanted to get along with his wartime allies in order to control the rebirth of German and Japanese power, which he assumed was inevitable. Consequently, he frequently cautioned communist followers in France, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere to avoid provocative actions that might frighten or antagonize his wartime allies. Within his own country and his own sphere, he was cruel, evil, almost genocidal, just as Gaddis and other traditional scholars suggest. Yet U.S. and British officials were initially eager to work with him. They rarely dwelled upon his domestic barbarism. Typically, President Harry S. Truman wrote his wife, Bess, after his first meeting with Stalin: 'I like Stalin. ... He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise when he can't get it.' Typically, W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, remonstrated that 'If it were possible to see him [Stalin] more frequently, many of our difficulties would be overcome'." (I pinched this from p.65 of the March 2005 issue of the 'OAH Magazine of History').

Applebaum's sardonic tone becomes tedious very, very quickly, and is completely unnecessary. Would any (sane) English-speaking reader not know that, when it comes to allocating resources, markets do a rather better job than central planning? or that the Soviet Union was a ghastly place and made every country it touched ghastly too? Indeed, Applebaum is so over the top that one can read, separated by one sentence, that Bierut was "deeply paranoid" but that "Bierut's paranoia was in a certain sense justified"! This is a historian in control of neither herself nor her material.

If I'm honest, the book seems, in part, like a suck up to Timothy Snyder after his Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin: her introduction, Snyder loves Hannah Arendt, her chapter titles...

Biggest substantive complaint is context. Save for the briefest handful of mentions, no background is provided to give insight into Soviet policy. All you're left with is the kind of analysis you'd expect out of the US National Security Council, and their academic and journalistic enablers, at the height of the Cold War: big red monster wants to conquer the world; we are the good guys, even though sometimes we make mistakes, have to dirty our hands for the greater good, and cry crocodile tears. Already mentioned, the he Cambridge History of the Cold War will furnish you with the introductory understanding required to marvel at her black-and-white viewpoint. She half-heartedly throws in occasional mention of some similar naughtiness committed by the US-UK (their blithe attitude regarding ethnic cleansing, for example), but others she either overlooks or "overlooks" (I don't know Applebaum; perhaps it's all tendentious omission, perhaps some of it's genuine ignorance).

Anyway, all the Soviet horrors take place within a praise-be-to-America vacuum. There're plenty of Soviet "provocations" and "aggression", though apparently Western politicians were never guilty of such things. The word 'paranoia' appears over and over again, but sadly Applebaum could find no space to mention McCarthyism, let alone make an interesting comparison of it with Soviet actions. Likewise, she condemns the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia and the Secret Police the Soviets used; but what about Iran in August 1953, and where did Iran's SAVAK then come from? There's nothing wrong with not mentioning Iran in a book on Eastern Europe, but she's the one who wants to play the comparison game (see p.8 for details, and, for a laugh, keep in mind the words of Christopher Browning (p.160 of his highly recommended 'Ordinary Men') pertaining to John Dower's 'War without Mercy': "Dower's account of entire American units in the Pacific openly boasting of a take no prisoners' policy and routinely collecting body parts of Japanese soldiers as battlefield souvenirs is chilling reading for anyone who smugly assumes that war atrocities were a monopoly of the Nazi regime." Someone tell the smug Ms Applebaum about Dower's study, she really needs to read less selectively...), and at least spare me the nauseating characterisation of Western politicians as noble, rational Cold Warriors, fighting the good fight against Communism.

Another example: she decries (p.71) the Soviets' unilateral use of 'its' Hungarian Allied Control Commission (ACC), "a body which technically included British and American representatives" but whose commander, Kliment Voroshilov, "regularly failed to consult the other Allies about anything. Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars Not an easy read but well worth the effort
I am by no means an expert on this subject and so my response is very much that of a reader reasonably well informed about the history of the second world war, but not so much its... Read more
Published 3 days ago by S. J. Williams
4.0 out of 5 stars Heavy but interesting
Much has been written and told about life behind the Iron Curtain since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, but it is always shocking to read the horrible facts of life under the... Read more
Published 4 days ago by Maria2222
4.0 out of 5 stars At times dark, but a valuable, compelling read.
The Cold War is still talked about - but generally only for the American side, and for the lingering shadow of nuclear weaponry - so feels less dusty than other history. Read more
Published 4 days ago by Mr. Steve Jansen
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and informative
My daughter read this, she's doing a level history. She said it was interesting, informative and not boring :) she would recommend it for anyone interested in history and/or the... Read more
Published 4 days ago by Nicolette Laurence
3.0 out of 5 stars Informative but not Revealing
The strength of my recommendation of this book largely depends on the type of reader. If you are new to the subject perhaps a university student or an interested general reader... Read more
Published 5 days ago by Eugene Onegin
4.0 out of 5 stars A well written history book
This was a well written and interesting book. I liked the writing style. I thought for me the book was the right length. Detailed and rigorous with being excessively so. Read more
Published 5 days ago by The Emperor
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating study
A well-written and comprehensive study of the first 12 years of the Soviet 'regime change' of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. Read more
Published 6 days ago by George Rodger
5.0 out of 5 stars Informative and engaging
This is a very well researched and well written book. It was a pleasure to read, though the subject matter is depressing. Read more
Published 7 days ago by J. R. Atkinson
4.0 out of 5 stars A weighty subject matter
And an equally weighty book, both literally and figuratively. I dropped it on my foot accidentally and it actually hurt. Read more
Published 7 days ago by D Peers
4.0 out of 5 stars The iron curtain pulled back
The greatest tragedy of Poland is her geography, trapped between Germany and Russia/USSR, she has been fought over and occupied for centuries. Read more
Published 8 days ago by Perfectbub
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