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3.5 

Iron Curtain

By Anne Applebaum
Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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.

88 Reviews

3.5
Thumbs Up“Iron Curtain was an engaging read that broadened my understanding of Eastern Europe and Communism. Anne Applebaum is a great writer who took complex ideological issues and makes them accessible. The research really drove home how communist/authoritarian regimes see independent groups as a threat, whether religious, nonprofit, or political. I wish Applebaum had featured more of the Communist regimes in the Balkans, eg. Bulgaria, Romania, & Albania, however I understand her narrower focus on East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The first-hand interviews and thorough research made it a 4-star book for me.”
Thinking Face““Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its spills were manipulated. They need to know particular details, not general theories, and they need to hear individual stories, not generalisations about the masses. They need a better grasp of what motivated their predecessors, to see them as real people and not as black and white caricatures, victims of villains. Only then is it possible, slowly, to rebuild.””
Thinking Face“Applebaum’s clear organization of such a complex subject is admirable. I really enjoyed this! I loved the use of primary and secondary sources throughout. I’ll definitely go back to this author!”

About Anne Applebaum

ANNE APPLEBAUM is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate. Her previous book, Gulag, won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for three other major prizes. Her essays appear in The New York Review of Books, Slate, and The London Spectator. She lives in Washington, D.C., and Poland with her husband, Radek Sikorski, a Polish politician, and their two children.

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