Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

 

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum

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.