Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 - Cold War History Book | Perfect for History Students & Political Science Enthusiasts

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… refuges of all kinds. The roads, footpaths, tracks, and trains were crammed full of ragged, hungry, dirty people. The scenes in the railway stations were particularly horrific to behold. Starving mothers, sick children, and sometimes entire families camped on filthy cement floors for days on end, waiting for the next available train.” Applebaum writes: “Strictly defined, a totalitarian regime is one that bans all institutions apart from those it has officially approved. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code… Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both totalitarian regimes, and as such were more similar than different… in 1947… Truman declared that Americans must be “willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes.” This idea became known as the “Truman Doctrine.”” Applebaum writes: “following the end of [WWII] and the Red Army’s march to Berlin, the leadership of the Soviet Union did try very hard to impose a totalitarian system of government on the very different European countries they then occupied… the eight European countries that the Red Army occupied in 1945… had vastly different cultures, political traditions, and economic structures… the eight nations of Eastern Europe took very different paths, and it has become routine to observe that they never really had much in common in the first place…” Applebaum writes: “The terms “Stalinism” and “totalitarianism” are often used interchangeably, and rightly so. But by the late 1930s Stalinism was in crisis too. Standards of living were not improving as fast as the party had promised. Poorly planned investments were beginning to backfire. Mass starvation in Ukraine and southern Russia in the early 1930s, while of some political utility to the regime, had created fear rather than admiration. In 1937, the Soviet secret police launched a public campaign of arrests, imprisonments, and executions, initially directed at the saboteurs, spies, and “wreckers” who were allegedly blocking society’s progress and eventually spreading… But Stalinism—and Stalin—was… rescued by [WWII]" Applebaum writes: “First… the Soviet NKVD, in collaboration with local communist parties, immediately created a secret police force in its own image, often using people whom they had already trained in Moscow… Secondly, in every occupied nation, Soviet authorities placed trusted local communists in charge of the era’s most powerful form of mass media: the radio… which could reach everyone from illiterate peasants to sophisticated intellectuals… Thirdly… Soviet and local communists harassed, persecuted, and eventually banned many of the independent organizations of … Finally… Soviet authorities, again in conjunction with local communist parties, carried out policies of mass ethnic cleansing, displacing millions of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and others from towns and villages where they had lived for centuries…” Applebaum writes: “In Poland, the communists tested the ground with a referendum, and when that went badly its leaders abandoned free elections altogether. In Czechoslovakia, the communist party did well in… an initial set of elections, in 1946, winning a third of the vote. But when it became clear that it would do much worse in subsequent elections in 1948, party leaders staged a coup…” Applebaum writes: “Two major uprisings followed in 1956, in Poland and in Hungary… Over and over, Poles and Hungarians… speak of how desperately they sought education, ordinary work, a life without constant violence and disruption. The communist parties were perfectly poised to take advantage of these yearnings for peace. In any case, damage to property was easier to repair than the demographic damage in Eastern Europe, where the scale of violence had been higher than anything known on the western half of the continent. During the war, Eastern Europe had experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness.” Applebaum writes: “By 1945… the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of not one but two totalitarian states had marched… back and forth across the region, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes. To take one example, the city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was called L’viv, not Lwów; it was no longer in eastern Poland but in the western part of Soviet Ukraine; and its Polish and Jewish prewar population had been murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside… The Germans considered Slavs to be subhumans, ranked not much higher than Jews, and in the lands between Sachsenhausen and Babi Yar they thought nothing of ordering arbitrary street killings, mass public executions, or the burning of whole villages in revenge for one dead Nazi… In 1939, and again in 1944 and 1945, the Red Army and the NKVD would arrest not only Nazis and collaborators in their newly conquered territories but anyone who might theoretically oppose Soviet administration… Of the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the vast majority were from Eastern Europe.” Applebaum writes: “…the Polish Institute of National Memory estimates that there were some 5.5 million wartime deaths in the country, of which about 3 million were Jews. In total, some 20 percent of the Polish population, one in five people, did not survive… Some 6.2 percent of Hungarians and 3.7 percent of the prewar Czech population died too. In Germany itself, casualties came to between 6 million and 9 million people… or up to 10 percent of the population. It would have been difficult, in Eastern Europe in 1945, to find a single family that had not suffered a serious loss.” Applebaum writes: “The years 1945, 1946, and 1947 were years of refugees: Germans moved west, Poles and Czechs returned east from forced labor and concentration camps in Germany, deportees came back from the Soviet Union, soldiers of all kinds… returned… between 1939 and 1943 some 30 million Europeans were dispersed, transplanted, or deported. Between 1943 and 1948, a further 20 million were moved as well… between 1939 and 1950 one Pole out of every four changed his place of residence… The vast majority of these people arrived home with nothing. Immediately, they were forced to seek help from others—from churches, charities, or the state—in whatever form it took… The mentality of a refugee, forcibly expelled from his home, is not that of an emigrant who leaves to seek his fortune: his very circumstances fostered dependency and a sense of helplessness he might never have known before… To make matters worse, the extraordinary physical destruction in Eastern Europe was also matched by extraordinary economic destruction, and on an equally incomprehensible scale.” Applebaum writes: “In 1945 and 1946, Hungary’s gross national product was only half of what it had been in 1939. Budapest, the capital, suffered damage to three-quarters of its buildings… The population was reduced by a third. The Germans took much of the country’s railway rolling stock with them when they left the country; the Soviet army, in the guise of reparations, would take much of the rest… Most of these abandoned properties were eventually nationalized—if they had not already been packed up and moved, lock, stock, and barrel, to the Soviet Union, which considered all “German” property legitimate war reparations—with surprisingly little opposition. By 1945, the idea that the ruling authorities could simply confiscate private property without providing any compensation whatsoever was an established principle in Eastern Europe. When larger-scale nationalization began, nobody would be remotely surprised.” Applebaum writes: “During the occupation, it became normal to change one’s name and profession, to travel on false papers, to memorize a fabricated biography, to watch all of one’s money lose its value overnight, to see people rounded up in the street like cattle… Taboos about property broke down and theft became routine, even patriotic. One stole to keep one’s partisan band alive, or to feed the resistance, or to feed one’s children… Though the looting fever eventually subsided in Poland and elsewhere, it may well have helped build tolerance for the corruption and theft of public property that were so common later on… Violence had also become normal and remained so for many years… Weapons were still available, murder rates were high.” Applebaum writes: “Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of state, compared negotiations with Soviet delegates in the summer of 1944 to “dealing with an old-fashioned penny slot machine … One could sometimes expedite the process by shaking the machine, but it was useless to talk to it.”… Roosevelt’s main concern at Yalta was the shape of the new United Nations… and he needed Soviet cooperation to construct this new international system… These concerns were simply more important to him than the fate of Poland or Czechoslovakia… Although central to Stalin’s postwar plans, Eastern Europe was only of marginal interest to the American president.” Applebaum writes: “This was the Red Army: hungry, angry, exhausted, battle-hardened men and women, some dressed in the same uniforms they’d been wearing at Stalingrad or Kursk two years earlier, all of them carrying memories of terrible violence, all of them now brutalized by what they had seen, heard, and done. The final Soviet offensive began in January 1945, when the Red Army crossed the Vistula, the river that runs through the center of Poland. Quickly marching through devastated western Poland and the Baltic States, the “Ivans” had conquered Budapest after a terrible siege by the middle of February… poised for the final assault… on May 7, General Alfred Jodl unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in the name of the Wehrmacht High Command… the Red Army’s arrival is rarely remembered as a pure liberation. Instead, it is remembered as the brutal beginning of a new occupation.” Applebaum writes: “In part, the Soviet soldiers seemed foreign to Eastern Europeans because they seemed so suspicious of Eastern Europeans, and because they appeared so shocked by the material wealth of Eastern Europe. Since the time of the revolution, Russians had been told of the poverty… and misery of capitalism, and about the superiority of their own system. But even upon entering eastern Poland, at that time one of the poorest parts of Europe, they found ordinary peasants who owned several chickens, a couple of cows, and more than one change of clothes.” Applebaum writes: “FROM THE VERY beginning, the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties pursued their goals using violence… selective, carefully targeted forms of political violence: arrests, beatings, executions, and concentration camps… The American troops… liberated Buchenwald in April 1945… Four months later, the Soviet troops… installed prisoners in those same barracks… The Russians renamed Buchenwald Special Camp Number Two… In total there would be ten such camps built or rebuilt in Soviet-occupied Germany, along with several prisons and other less formal places of incarceration. These were not German communist camps but rather Soviet camps… The special camps were not death camps [per se] … But they were extraordinarily lethal nonetheless. Of some 150,000 people… incarcerated in… camps in eastern Germany… about a third died from starvation…” Applebaum writes: “By agreeing to move Poland’s border with the USSR to the west, they also tacitly accepted that there would be transfers of millions of Poles to Poland from Ukraine, and millions of Ukrainians to Ukraine from Poland. Although transfers of Hungarians from Czechoslovakia and Slovaks from Hungary did not appear in the Potsdam agreements, nobody in the international community objected very much when they took place. For its part, the Soviet Union had already presided over the mass deportation of some 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania to the USSR in January 1945, six months before the Potsdam treaty was signed.” Applebaum writes: “In the summer of 1945, the Czechs forced Germans to wear white armbands marked with the letter “N”—for Nemec, which means “German” in Czech—painted swastikas on their backs, and forbade them to sit on park benches, walk on pavements, or enter cinemas and restaurants. In Budapest, it happened that crowds of Jewish survivors attacked and beat former fascist officials on their way to or from war crimes trials... In some cases, former prisoners now ruled over former guards, and they beat and tortured them just as they had been beaten and tortured themselves.” Applebaum writes: “Over time, the expulsions of Germans from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and eventually Hungarians from Czechoslovakia as well—did become more orderly… By the time it was finished, the resettling of the German populations of Eastern Europe was an extraordinary mass movement, probably unequaled in European history. By the end of 1947, some 7.6 million “Germans”—including ethnic Germans, Volksdeutsche, and recent settlers—had left Poland, through transfer or escape… By October 1946, according to Soviet documents, 812,668 Poles had left Soviet Ukraine for Poland. In total, 1,496,000 Poles would leave the USSR for Poland, moving from Lithuania and Belarus as well as Ukraine… This was a major cultural shift: the Poles leaving Lithuania, western Belarus, and western Ukraine were abandoning towns and cities that had been Polish-speaking for centuries. Many were moving to towns and cities that had been German-speaking for centuries… Ukrainians who found themselves on the western, Polish side of the new border were if anything even angrier and more resistant to moving. Having heard stories of the 1932–33 Ukrainian famine, engineered by Stalin in part to quell Ukrainian nationalism, most had no illusions about the Soviet regime. They didn’t want to go to Soviet Ukraine and some who did go there soon tried to return.” Applebaum writes: “Between 1945 and 1948, some 89,000 Hungarians were thus “persuaded” to leave Slovakia for the Sudetenland, where they replaced the missing Germans, or else to cross the border into Hungary itself. Some 70,000 Slovaks arrived from Hungary in their place. Not a word of protest was heard from outside the region. One Hungarian historian has declared that this was because “the fate of the Hungarian minority did not interest anyone.” But, in truth, the fate of none of the minorities interested anyone. The world hardly noticed the ethnic war between Poland and Ukraine… Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and eastern Germany, like all of Eastern Europe, were violent places after the war. It was dangerous to be a communist official, dangerous to be an anticommunist, dangerous to be German, dangerous to be Polish in a Ukrainian village, dangerous to be Ukrainian in a Polish village.” Applebaum writes: “BETWEEN THE SIGNING of the Yalta treaty… and Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech... The Red Army brought Moscow-trained secret policemen into every occupied country, put local communists in control of national radio stations, and began dismantling youth groups and other civic organizations. They arrested, murdered, and deported people whom they believed to be anti-Soviet, and they brutally enforced a policy of ethnic cleansing. These changes were no secret, and they had not been concealed from the outside world.” Applebaum writes: “The first and easiest change was land reform. Across the region, huge estates were empty and ownerless. Jewish properties that had been confiscated by the Nazis and German property abandoned after owners died or fled now lay fallow. In the eastern half of Germany, most of the largest landowners had escaped to the west in advance of the arrival of Soviet troops. Since much of this land seemed at the time to belong to no one, there were few objections when the state took it over... Some “new farmers” received property but no farm tools, draft animals, or seed. They began to starve very quickly… 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… Even as a theoretical idea, land reform had never been as popular in Poland as elsewhere… the Soviet occupiers… forced the provisional government to carry out land reform immediately...” Applebaum writes: “Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the other nations of Eastern Europe had been recognizably capitalist societies. Small workshops, small factories, and retail shops had all been in private hands… Though their businesses were technically legal in 1945 and 1946, Eastern Europe’s small-scale capitalists understood right from the start that they were operating in a hostile environment… The economies of Eastern Europe grew after the war… but they quickly fell behind their counterparts in Western Europe. They never did catch up.” Applebaum writes: “… trials diverted the blame for manifold economic failures away from Stalin (in the 1930s) and the little Stalins (in the 1940s). Simultaneously they rid the party leaders of their most dangerous internal enemies by terrorizing potential party opponents into silence… communist Europe had not surpassed capitalist Europe, if infrastructure… projects were flawed or delayed, if food supplies were poor and living standards low, then the show trials provided the explanation: foreign spies, nefarious saboteurs, and traitors, posing as faithful communists, had hijacked progress… To be successful, Soviet secret policemen thought that show trials needed a complex story line, a conspiracy involving many actors, and so Soviet advisers pushed… colleagues to link the traitors of Prague, Budapest, Berlin, and Warsaw into one story.” Applebaum writes: “All the while, Germans kept moving from East to West. Between October 1945 and June 1946 some 1.6 million people crossed into the American and British zones from the Soviet zone… In total, 3.5 million people, out of a population of 18 million, are thought to have left East Germany between 1945 and 1961… By the early 1950s, West Germany’s economy had left East Germany’s economy far behind, as everyone could see”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 describes this within the first chapter or two and it’s sadly obvious that an entire book could have been written about this brief time period alone. Imagine the horror of living in Poland under Nazi control, only to find that once your oppressors were defeated, the victors were twice as bad and ten times as oppressive as Adolph Hitler and his gang of lunatics.Applebaum does a wonderful job of setting the stage for the bulk of her book within the introductory chapters. She informs her readers that the focus of her book contains the countries of Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. She chooses these nations, she tells us, because these countries were vastly “different” from each other. Strangely, I didn’t see much of a difference as I read through the decade of atrocities within these three countries. This isn’t a criticism, merely an observation. I suppose there probably were vast differences among these three countries, but the stories of the people are so awfully similar, that the horrors seem to blend.The premise of this book is essentially that communism is a failed ideology, yet when you have a brutal dictator such as Joseph Stalin calling the shots, ego gets in the way and those in power refuse to admit that this newfangled way of governing is a sad failure. Stalin and company are so blinded by their visions of utopia that they can’t see the brutal reality around them. Either that or they simply don’t care. So when the people and the economy don’t respond as they should, the vice is simply squeezed harder causing millions a lifetime of oppression and totalitarianism. On a side note, this behavior isn’t really that surprising. I think about people on social media who blindly follow a leader or a political party. They refuse to admit that their “side” might be in error and when they argue, they would rather chew their leg off like a trapped wolf than admit that they’re wrong about anything.Although this is a history book, this book really doesn’t focus on the leaders of these puppet governments. We do hear the names Walter Ulbricht, Boleslaw Bierut, and Matyas Rikosi from time to time (the respective communist leaders of East Germany, Poland, and Hungary during this time), yet they mostly remain in the background. Even Joseph Stalin doesn’t get a lot of detailed attention. Instead, his presence tends to hover over this book like a satanic phantom. Applebaum instead focuses on the everyday people and how the brutal communistic regime destroys their everyday life and literally sucks all hope out of humanity. The majority of the chapters in this book focus on different concepts such as youth, radio, religion, and culture. Within these chapters she details the general feeling of the people before communism came into place, and how the ideology is forced down everyone’s throats while always making the overall effect worse. It does no good for these people to resist. In fact, resistance becomes dangerous. Since resistance is a sign of failure for the powers that be, defiance must be wiped out by any means possible. By now, we all know the means and methods the governments took to enforce this, but reading firsthand accounts makes it much harder to stomach.The subtitle of this book “1944-1956” is a bit a vague distinction. The story really doesn’t start nor end with these years, but it’s a good enough marker. For those who might not know much about history, Joseph Stalin died in 1953, and his “successor” Nikita Khrushchev admitted publicly in 1956 that much of what Stalin did in power was, in fact, deplorable. This was incredibly controversial at the time within Russia, yet it marked the slow beginnings of change. Very slow. Sadly, Khrushchev still firmly believed in the idea of Communism, so the disease never really went away until the late 80s-early 90s for these European countries. So Applebaum essentially ends her narrative around the mid-1950s. Ironically, I felt there could have been so much more to this book. One wishes she would have kept the narrative going for 35 more years (perhaps a sequel one day?) So she does wrap things up with a nice postscript, but this book was so rich and engaging, that I really wish there would have been more.A tragic story indeed. Sadly, one could argue that mankind still hasn’t learned its lesson. It would be really nice if we would read more stories about people who passionately believed in a leader, a political party, or an ideology, yet one day realized they were wrong and admitted it. Maybe then, we could right the many wrongs without decades of needless suffering.Exemplary book on a period of history (a particular focus on the years immediately after WWII) that often receives comparatively scant attention, since there is almost a prevailing narrative of a simple transition from the chaos of WWII to a gradual formation of Communist Bloc until its dissolution with the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent economic liberalisation of the countries involved. Yet this period of history is as horrifying, fascinating, tangled, and every bit as complex as the events of WWII, and the ideological indoctrination and terror of the Stalinist Soviet regime arguably as complete as that under Nazi Germany.This is a meticulously researched book that is obviously the result of painstaking effort and care, but perhaps most importantly it is a brilliant, riveting and timely read in our current era that occasionally likes to delude itself - dangerously - into thinking we are somehow living in a "post-ideological" world, now immunised from the allure of toxic political regimes that purport simple solutions to complex problems.Engrossing: thoroughly recommended.Detailed and a difficult read, but important, as although the Communist era recedes into history Totalitarianism most certainly does not. To some extent in my reading of Anne Applebaum I find myself at variance. In Twilight of Democracy she locates the base of her political thinking with Thatcher and Reagan. Neither I nor most of my country (Scotland) have fond memories of those two idealogues. In Chapter 17 of this book she writes of a reported miracle as if it was real, and is elsewhere sympathetic to the Church, as if it was not also a totalitarian organisation with as much torture and mind control behind it (and sadly in front) as any other dictatorial regime. Her writing in both of these areas therefore jars with me. I believe in a mixed economy and politics by reason. That said, she knows her subject(s), and she can write. Personal caveats aside, I recommend this book as I do all of her work.This book is comprehensive and well-researched, and provides a good explanation of how the Russian military and secret police clamped down on eastern Europe at the end of World War II. In describing the events of 1945 - 1956 it goes a long way to explaining why the European countries of the former Soviet Union fear Russian aggression today. Personal recollections of individuals who lived through this period are used to good effect, as is the way that Communist groups in East Germany, Hungary, and Poland were controlled by Russia. The only thing that I found lacking across some 500 pages of text was an analysis of to what extent these countries were exploited economically for the benefit of the Russian economy - i.e. to what extent was the Soviet Union a colonial project, with Moscow its imperial centre ?Anne Applebaum has provided a full and complete study of the USSR's total subordination of an entire region over the period of a decade. As such, Applebaum has produced one of the most thorough and detailed histories this reader has yet read. Rather than serving as a political chronology, as many such studies today often are, Applebaum has examined every aspect of political, economic and cultural life wherein the Soviets asserted their influence.The book begins with the definition of totalitarianism as originally coined by Mussolini, as a system wherein everything is by and for the state, and then proceeds to illustrate how the progenitor of Fascism's vision was implemented by his supposed ideological opposites.Iron Curtain follows a chronological narrative, beginning with the end of WWII and detailing the various conferences, Yalta and Potsdam, and how the so called agreements were never honoured. From there a particularly harrowing account of Soviet occupation follows. The second half of the book treats the cultural and civic takeover of communism in more detail, concluding with the failed uprisings in East Berlin in 1953 and more importantly, Hungary in 1956.While the book offers a vivid account of the crushing of East Germany, Poland and Hungary, one feels that an account of perhaps Romania and Bulgaria could have been incorporated, however, Applebaum makes it clear in the introduction that the primary focus of the book would be those three countries, and others would feature only in passing.As such, Applebaum did not overstretch what is already a vast study, and as a unified whole has few faults.Overall, an indispensable work for anyone interested in 20th Century history, international relations or Eastern Europe.A detailed account of how The Soviet Union imposed its cruel system on three of the European countries that were unfortunate enough to have been left inside its sphere of influence at the end of the Second World War.The author paints a sad picture of the systematic crushing of freedoms as Soviet ideology is gradually established. But it is a picture that is superbly draw. The full horror and deep cynicism inherent of totalitarian communism is vividly displayed.A truly evil system.