Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe by Anne Applebaum

(Doubleday, $35)

It was among the most brazen land grabs in history, said Frank T. Csongos in The Washington Times. When the Red Army marched into Berlin in 1945, the ground was laid for a Soviet takeover that lasted half a century and encompassed a territory stretching from eastern Germany to the Adriatic. In her “important, highly readable” new book, Pulitzer winner Anne Applebaum focuses on the first decade of the Cold War to show how the Soviet Union was able to impose its system on so many previously independent cultures. “It’s a shocking story, one for which Western readers are ill prepared,” said Karen R. Long in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. We rarely study how World War II unfolded on the Eastern Front, let alone understand how millions in the region lived once the Iron Curtain fell.

Applebaum doesn’t blame violent coercion only, said John Connelly in The Washington Post. The Red Army raped and pillaged its way to Berlin, but that doesn’t explain why hundred of thousands of Europeans embraced the communist takeover. Applebaum never loses sight of the outrage caused by random arrests and mass relocations, but she reminds us that the war-weary Eastern Europeans were eager for any semblance of normalcy. Some even believed that Moscow offered a promising future. Until the first elections, the Soviets played along, said The Economist. But when Communist candidates lost badly, the results were falsified and the real victors arrested or chased into exile.

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“The heart of Applebaum’s book” is the push for conformity that followed, said Keith Lowe in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). But once the Soviet project invaded day-to-day life, failure was inevitable—even after the Soviet army crushed Hungary’s 1956 uprising. Applebaum reports only on how the story played out in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, but Iron Curtain is otherwise “everything a good history should be: brilliantly and comprehensively researched, beautifully and shockingly told, encyclopedic in scope, meticulous in detail.” It’s “a true masterpiece.”