Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

✍ Scribed by Applebaum, Anne

• Book ID: 108310435
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: German
• Weight: 1 MB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780385536431

✦ Synopsis

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.

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

Review

"... a greatly needed work, one that refuses to allow the victims of the Soviet slave labour and concentration camps to be degraded into historical pie charts. Culling from a wide range of sources, Gulag is an astonishingly comprehensive testimony, the first of its kind in English, meticulously documenting the history and apparatus of the camps." -- Globe and Mail