Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 Paperback – August 13, 2013

This well-researched book brings many aspects of this oppressive period including violence, ethnic cleansing, politics, and economy, control of youth, radio, and arts, which makes it a very interesting read.The book concentrates on three countries: Poland, East Germany, and Hungary, “because they were so very different.”It is worth noting that the author starts with explanation of the term “totalitarian,” which was the idea of “total control” and nowadays it is “applied to so many people and institutions that it can sometimes seem meaningless.” And the difference between Soviet Union and the countries occupied by Soviet Union, which still in present time some people have trouble distinguishing, for example Poland was occupied by Soviet Union; it was not part of Soviet Union.What happened before WWII? “In 1939, after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and agreed to divide Poland, Romania, Finland, and the Baltic States into Soviet and German spheres of influence. On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland from the west. On September 17, Stalin invaded Poland from the east.”What happened after WWII? April 1945, the liberation day across the capitals of those three countries is described as quiet or silent. The next day the Red Army arrived in Poland and a new chapter of history had started. “In Poland, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, the Red Army’s arrival is rarely remembered as a pure liberation. Instead, it is remembered as the brutal beginning of a new occupation.”The regime of Soviet Union, including its ethnic cleansing turned out to be pretty extensive and violent. It was all done on purpose as they knew that “disoriented and displaced, the refugees were easier to manipulate and control than they might have been otherwise.”Also it has to be mentioned that the Soviet Union soldiers did good for millions of Jews freeing them from concentration camps. Their arrival “made it possible for Poles in the western part of Poland to speak Polish after years of being forbidden to do so in public.” At the same time, “the Red Army left extraordinary devastation in its wake.” The Soviet soldiers were overwhelmed by what seemed to them as richness. “More horrific, and ultimately of deeper political significance, were violent attacks on civilian. (…) Women of all ages were subject to gang rapes and sometimes murdered afterwards.”“In Hungary they seemed unsure of how, exactly, a fascist might be identified. As a result, the first arrests were often arbitrary. Men were stopped on the streets, told they would be taken away to do a little work. They would then disappear deep into the Soviet Union and not return for many years.”In regards to economy, “the Bolshevik Revolution’s first slogan had been ‘Peace, Land, and Bread!’ From the moment they arrived, Red Army troops vigorously tried to enforce the same policy, confiscating land from richer owners and redistributing it to poorer peasants. But in Eastern Europe, this simple formula did not have the impact that Soviet officers expected or that their communist colleagues hoped.”“Land reform was greeted with even greater suspicion in Poland, where collectivization carried particularly negative connotations. In the eastern part of the country, many people had family and friends across the border in Soviet Ukraine, whose peasants had experienced first land reform, then collectivization, then famine. So strong was their fear of this scenario that many Polish peasants opposed partial land redistribution – even knowing they might personally benefit...”In Hungary, “many peasants thanked the communists for their new land. But many were made uneasy by the receipt of someone else’s property,” particularly as the clergy were often preaching against it.”As nationalization progressed, the shortages worsened. Shortages and imbalances lasted for about four decades, 1947-1987.Already in 1950, during the communism, the private sector proved to be more profitable, popular and efficient than state run business. But Soviet Union’s response was, “more control, not less, was what the communist parties of the region believed would stop the strikes, fix the shortages, and raise living standards to the level of the West.”During the era of High Stalinism, 1948-1953, religion was being suppressed. “Many children were expelled from school for refusing to publicly renounce religion – estimates vary from 300 to 3,000 – and far more were expelled from universities. (…) The closure of monasteries followed soon after.”Oppression of teachers, arrests in some cases and raids were designed to punish the entire institution if “ideologically correct atmosphere” was not maintained.Another debilitating aspect of economy was “socialist competitions” – competing to finish given quota quickly, but this never made the economy more productive as quality was ignored.“The second part of this book describes techniques: a new wave of arrests; the expansion of labor camps, much tighter control over the media, intellectuals, and the arts.” It included control of artistic production. “Private galleries had disappeared almost entirely, along with the rest of the private sector.” On the other hand, Wanda Talakowska, polish art teacher, designer, curator was inspired by folk art created by peasants and favored by Communists. She saw an opportunity to inspire and create new designs in folk art. She saw an opportunity, where others saw none. Unfortunately, the Poles saw her as a Communist collaborator.As Warsaw was being rebuilt after the war, the Soviet Union tried to make it as Moscow with wide streets, but this is not how Warsaw was built originally. Warsaw with narrow cobbled streets - this is how people remembered it and this is how they wanted it to be rebuilt. It wasn’t an easy process, but to keep people quiet and to avoid riots, little by little the Soviets allowed the rebuilt of Old Town as it used to be. And personally, I am grateful to those who fought for it, as a lover of art and architecture I am a great admirer of Old Towns and folk arts, which make every culture so much richer.

This is a deeply insightful work that provides great detail and illumination on the subjects it covers. A minor fault is that it really only covers East Germany, Poland and Hungary and a little bit of notice is given to Czechoslovakia. The rest of Eastern Europe is really totally ignored. There are very few mentions of Bulgaria and Romania and less than a handful of Albania. However, it covers its subject in great depth without any outdated anticommunist hysteria.I would give the book five stars but I refuse to on the grounds that the Kindle edition, though better than many that I have purchased, is not well done. This may reflect the generally awful editorial work that is done in publishing today, but it is very visible when the text has been scanned and OCR'ed and then not proofread ("tbat" is not a word that is any spellchecker and would have been noticed if the text had merely been read.). I don't think that eBooks will ever totally replace the printed book but that will become even larger if they are held to higher editorial standards.

Anne Applebaum's "Iron Curtain" is the first volume-length full treatment of the crushing of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. It is vital to the preservation of liberty to understand what liberty's absence means in concrete terms, and this well-researched account, which includes maps and great pictures, of the establishment of totalitarianism focuses on East Germany, Poland, and Hungary in the first decade or so following World War II.Applebaum notes that there were significant differences between the nations that fell under Communist control, but that in each country subdued the common methods used by the Communists were the establishment of a secret police force (the author informs the reader how the secret police forces operated), the use of radio for propaganda purposes, and the banning of independent organizations. Other tragic outrages of the time included ethnic cleansing and forced population transfers, liquidation of potential counterrevolutionaries, and show trials with bogus, fabricated evidence.Totalitarians demand just that--total loyalty, and early on the Communists sought to crush civil society to eliminate any rival sources of thought or community. Free speech and free press rights were smothered, the arts were corrupted, religion was banned or greatly undermined from within, established holidays were replaced, and even apolitical organizations were banned. The Communists especially focused on youth, attempting to mold and shape their characters via propaganda while manipulating those who would not conform with ostracism. Adults were kept busy with Party activities and gatherings, likely to deprive them of free time that they could have used to consider their actual condition under Communism.The author describes how taxation and regulation were introduced to strangle private enterprise, and how the obvious poor performance of the economy in the wake of these disastrous policies only led the Communists to double down on economic statism. In both the economic and social spheres, people were not free to speak their minds, and Applebaum limns the resulting psychological consequences to ordinary Eastern Europeans that resulted as they felt that they had to lead double lives to survive.People with even a modicum of knowledge of the human condition would expect Communism to be about as popular as gangrene, but the Soviets actually expected their system to be affirmed in the first elections after the war in the Eastern bloc countries. When it was not, the Communists could not believe it, and in their tantrums that followed their rejection they labeled those who saw through them as "ignorant" and "too autonomous" (viz., wise enough to know that apparatchiks and central planners never have their best interests at heart). When the Communists failed in convincing the people of their right to rule, they knew their only route to power was naked imposition of their system, and when the failures of that system became manifest, they simply and ham-handedly doubled down on their propaganda efforts.Marxist regimes, be they economic or cultural, decide issues and resolve conflicts on the basis of power instead of by reason and truth, and expect those on the business end of those movements to live a lie of one form or another; as surely as spring follows winter, active and passive opposition rapidly arise, and both did so even in an environment like mid-twentieth century Europe in which people did not have the Internet to find unauthorized opinions about news and politics and to locate and connect with other dissidents.If everyone under a totalitarian regime decided to resist either actively or passively the regime would disappear in about ten seconds, but there are always varying responses to totalitarianism--everything from support to resignation to resistance. The author describes the quislings who submitted in order to flourish in a society in which certain careers were closed to those who held forbidden opinions on social or economic issues, and also noted the honest differences of opinion by resisters on the degree to which they should rebel--some limited their subversion to jokes that highlighted the absurdity of the Communist system. Applebaum also lists some of the true heroes of the book--those who voted with their feet, got out of Dodge, and sought a new life in a non-Communist country. The author closes by recalling some of the riots and revolutions that erupted in the Eastern bloc during the Communist era.This volume recounts great brutality on the part of Communists, but the book is ultimately reassuring. Applebaum asserts that people are not as stupid and easily manipulable as totalitarians think--she quotes a sniveling East German Leftist who wailed that "We've done so much education and training, but none of it was absorbed." "Iron Curtain" documents the amorality, brutality, and hauteur that resided in the corroded "souls" of the totalitarian rulers, but also spotlights the resisters' courage, wisdom, fierce intelligence, resilience, and love of liberty as well.