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Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 Hardcover – 4 Oct 2012

by
Anne Applebaum (Author)
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Anne Applebaum (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 175 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 656 pages
  • Publisher: Allen Lane (4 Oct. 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0713998687
  • ISBN-13: 978-0713998689
  • Product Dimensions: 16.2 x 4.4 x 24 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (175 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 319,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

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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Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsThe Suffocation of Central Europe
By S. Matthews on 7 Feb. 2014
Format: Hardcover
I am just about old enough to remember 'Eastern Europe'; I can remember school books and soon-to-be-outdated atlases in which Europe was neatly divided in half, West and East. I can just about remember the 'fall of Communism', specifically I remember the tanks on the street of Romania, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and later the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of my headteachers actually managed to get hold of a piece of concrete he solemnly told us was a piece of the Berlin Wall. I got an idea of Eastern Europe as a strange and homogenous region with identical cultures, histories, and similar sounding place names, all built out of concrete. Later, I learnt about spheres of influence, the Warsaw Pact, the Cold War, and Totalitarianism, all of which seemed to reinforce these ideas.

Later still, and I started to meet people from 'Eastern Europe' and found my ideas were challenged. Not least, people from the Czech Republic and Poland aren't especially impressed with the 'East/West' dichotomy and see themselves as inhabitants of central Europe, a place that was never in my old books. I have visited both countries, and found that the old Habsburg cities survived the horrors of World Wars and Communism, if not intact, then with their historic hearts still beating. I realised that my earlier ideas weren't just challenged, but wrong. So was Communist 'Eastern' Europe just a veneer, or a piece of Western propaganda? How did the Soviet Union come to dominate such a large territory so completely?

So it was with some interest I looked forward to the paperback publication of this book; the title alone seemed to be exactly what I was looking for.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 stars'Iron Curtain' by Anne Applebaum
By Patrick on 5 Nov. 2012
Format: Hardcover 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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5.0 out of 5 starsDestroyer of Myths
By Dr Barry Clayton TOP 500 REVIEWER on 1 Oct. 2012
Format: Hardcover
Readers of the Washington Post will be familiar with the lucid and knowledgeable writings of Anne Applebaum.
Her book about the Gulag rightly won her acclaim as an historian of the first rank. This outstanding book of over 650 pages will cement that reputation.

For the very first time we are given a detailed and meticulously researched account of what happened after 1945 in those Baltic states that fell under the tyranny of the Soviets. In so doing Applebaum gives us a new and much needed perspective on the so-called Cold War.

She also destroys the myth that Eastern Europe was a homogeneous grey,backward and poor mass. She also rightly points out that the fighting did not end in 1945. In one or two cases it lasted into the 70's.

The book tells us again of the brutal and murderous treatment by the soviets of anyone accused of being a dissident. Torture, 'show trials' and blackmail were commonplace. Applebaum reveals how Stalin's wartime allies fully consented to the ethnic cleansing that was carried out with typical soviet brutality.Thousands died as a result.Rape was commonplace as were confessions obtained under torture. The Cardinal of Hungary, for example, was forced under torture to admit taking part in plot to steal the crown jewels and begin a new world war.

Soviet totalitarian rule attacked and in some cases destroyed any institutions such as the Catholic Church, fearing any form of rival belief.

'Iron Curtain' will make very uncomfortable reading for those in the West who blamed Western warmongers for Soviet terror, indeed for any of the many apologists for Stalin' monstrous regime. Applebaum exposes the frantic desire of the Soviet system to exterminate any form of independent life, for example, Freemasons.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsA very good book
By A. P. In Reading U.K. on 29 Dec. 2013
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
I enjoyed this book very much. I have always wanted to understand why Russia and the West fought together against Germany in the Second World War, and then went on to become enemies with the division of Europe. This book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this period of European history, and the background to the subjugation of Eastern Europe by Russia after the Second World War.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Her best book. Rigourously researched and eloquently written.

Published 22 days ago by Delboy45
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Quick dispatch, item exactly as described.

Published 29 days ago by MR MIROSLAV BLAHUT
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Great. condition as described

Published 2 months ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsExtremely accessible. A fine book.

As a previous reviewer has mentioned, this book might be more easily understood after a history of the 2nd world war but I think that it's still an extremely accessible stand-alone... Read more

Published 8 months ago by D. Obermaier
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Great.

Published 10 months ago by Carys
5.0 out of 5 stars... fall on well researched she is one of the great authors of our...

very readable fascinating fall on well researched she is one of the great authors of our time

Published 11 months ago by julia wilson
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Excellent

Published 11 months ago by matt gregory
5.0 out of 5 starsAs academic as a PhD thesis, yet as readable as a novel

Anne Applebaum has provided a full and complete study of the USSR's total subordination of an entire region over the period of a decade. Read more

Published 11 months ago by Adrian J. Smith
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

very well eritten...live it as you read it..

Published 11 months ago by kraknaine
5.0 out of 5 starsA vision of carefully constructed hell

Brilliant but chilling -- still hard to finish, long after I bought it, the aura of betrayal and brutality is so overwhelming. Read more

Published 14 months ago by Michael S. Rohan

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