Discusses the creation of the Communist regimes that took hold in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and describes what daily life was like in these countries in the author's follow-up to the her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag. 75,000 first printing.
Discusses the creation of the Communist regimes that took hold in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and describes what daily life was like in these countries.
Applebaum, a Pulitzer award winning author who has written about Soviet history before, presents a history of the Soviet expansion into Europe following World War II up to 1956. She focuses on Hungary, Poland, and East Germany. She explains how the USSR imported the Soviet system into occupied nations, how the Soviets controlled radio-broadcasting in satellite nations, how Soviets encouraged, and how civil society organizations and small businesses were marginalized by and ultimately destroyed by communists. She draws both on archival and other historical sources, but also went to Poland, Hungary and Germany to conduct interviews. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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.
