Book description
At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union unexpectedly
found itself in control of a huge swathe of territory in Eastern
Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen
radically different countries to a completely new political and moral
system: communism. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning
historian Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of
Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they
were complete.
Applebaum describes in devastating detail how political parties, the
church, the media, young people's organizations - the institutions of
civil society on every level - were quickly eviscerated. She explains
how the secret police services were organized, how the media came to
be dominated by communists, and how all forms of opposition were
undermined and destroyed. 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 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 Stalinized. Iron Curtain is a
brilliant history of a brutal period and a haunting reminder of how
fragile free societies can be. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost
civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and
strange aesthetics Anne Applebaum captures in the pages of this
exceptional work of historical and moral reckoning.
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.
