The Legacy of Soviet Rule: How the Iron Curtain Changed Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

Mrs. A. MULLINS: This book shows you how it really happened at the time of Cold War. Really good as I bought for my friend.

Germany on Sep 30, 2023

Edimilson Mario: A autora informa que o livro demorou 6 anos para ser escrito e tal fato pode ser observado pelas minúcias observadas no texto. Muitíssimo bem escrito e ao mesmo tempo informativo, o livro nos leva às loucuras impostas pelos comunistas aos países que ficaram sob o julgo dos soviéticos. Felizmente não vivemos um sistema onde o estado quer controlar cada aspecto da vida dos cidadãos.

Brazil on Jul 25, 2023

G. C. Carter: The 2012 book entitled: “Iron Curtain…” by Applebaum was read ten years after its publication by this reviewer. I was intrigued enough to purchase and read a book by Applebaum when I heard at least one TV celebrity speak highly of her work. I found that she has written several books and selected this one to read. I suspect that scholars will find it of extraordinary value. In addition to extensive, notes, references and other scholarly material it has an entertaining way of weaving in personal stories that make the dry historical material more enjoyable. That said, the bulk of the book reads a bit like a dry Ph.D. thesis. One coherent theme of the book is that communism as an economic theory failed time and again despite numerous governments offering various excuses and explanations for its failure.
As an example of the style and content of this book, Applebaum writes: “AMONG MANY OTHER things, the year 1945 marked one of the most extraordinary population movements in European history. All across the continent, hundreds of thousands of people were returning from Soviet exile, from forced labor in Germany, from concentration camps and prisoner-of-war… camps, from…...

United States on Apr 21, 2022

Clem: Oh what a depressing book this is. It’s an excellent book, but incredibly depressing.

As I write this review, the United States is in the throes of COVID-19, and the popular sentiment seems to be that the year 2020 is the worst year in civilization. People on social media are begging for a time machine so we can start the year over for a do over. Sometimes I think many of these people need to read more history books. If more people would read a book such as this one, they would go outside and kiss the ground and thank Almighty God that they are, in fact, alive in America in the year 2020; virus or no virus.

This book is a detailed account of the spread of communism at the conclusion of World War II until the mid-1950s. A brief history lesson: Most know that the U.S. and Britain were allies during the second world war with the U.S.S.R.. One of the main reasons, though, is that the allies saw Nazi-ism as a greater evil than Communism. Once the war ended, the leaders of the major players on the victorious side had to decide how to carve up the spoils. So Joseph Stalin and Russia were essentially granted a huge bloc of Eastern countries to control. Author Applebaum...

United States on Jul 12, 2020

Jeffrey Swystun: First off, how cool. Author Applebaum, who did a fabulous job with Gulag, hung out with Antony Beevor, Artemis Cooper, and Andrew Solomon while researching Iron Curtain. I would have loved to have been a dinner guest at that table. But I digress.

This is a fascinating and disturbing period in history. Specifically, 1944-46. The psychological trauma of the entire Second World War is clear but last year's impact is astounding. The number of German troops and civilians killed in the last six months was greater than the 5.5 years. The Soviet military steamrolled over friend and foe. Applebaum writes, "Constant, daily violence shaped the human psyche in countless ways, not all of which are easy to articulate."

This was the "disintegration of one's entire civilization". And in it, she rightly argues, was not a vacuum waiting to be filled by another ideology but a stunned populace exhausted and traumatized. Too tired to even formulate an opinion. All they wanted was the guns to stop, a roof over their head, and food.

No one saw the Soviets as benevolent heroes. Certainly not Poles, Ukrainians and Germans. Poland has already been divvied up between Stalin and Hitler....

Canada on Aug 30, 2018

O. G. M. Morgan: I have always admired Anne Applebaum's writing. She mines mountains of research and then creates superbly reasoned articles, reviews, or, as here, books. Her history of Gulag was outstanding, but this is even better. I don't think she consciously planned to follow Timothy Snyder's brilliant and heart-breaking "Bloodlands", but, in a sense, she has done so. Snyder's harrowing book dealt with the pre-1939 borderland and Applebaum discusses the borderland, after the border jumped to the west in 1945. In both cases, the role of the soviet union is central. Ms Applebaum demonstrates time and again how the requirements of the Russian army, or those of the soviet secret police, often the whims of Stalin himself, controlled the lives of millions in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Romania and Bulgaria are treated less thoroughly, but get some dishonourable mentions. Applebaum disarmingly admits, early on, to being unable to read Hungarian; very few people can, outside Hungary and Transylvania. The research in Polish and Russian, on the other hand, is mainly her own work, although she makes good use of the set of Solidarity-era interviews published as "Oni" ("They") by...

United Kingdom on Mar 01, 2013

Dr. R. Brandon: This magnificent book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum took six years to research and write and it quickly becomes clear why this should be so. The breadth of research into many different country and language archives is quite astonishing and Applebaum acknowledges the extensive research help she received.
The book is not a chronological narrative of the Communist overthrow and suppression of the Eastern Block after 1945 but rather it deals, in separate chapters, with different aspects of the Communist subversion of the democratic institutions and the supervision of all aspects of everyday life. The book confines itself to the period largely under the control of Stalin and does not deal with events running up to the collapse of 1989. Thus, the first half of the book includes chapters, amongst others, devoted to the establishment of the secret police, the role of violence, ethnic cleansing and the capture of the radio. The second half, which is aptly titled, `High Stalinism' deals with the systematic identification and elimination of supposed enemies of the state, the control of the arts and architecture and how the ordinary rank and file accommodated to these...

United Kingdom on Nov 06, 2012