“Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe” by Anne Applebaum
By John Connelly,
Two of the 20th century’s iconic moments took place within a few hundred yards of each other in the German capital, Berlin: the storming of the Reichstag by Soviet troops in April 1945 and the scaling of the Berlin Wall by East Germans 44 years later. We sense that the two are related — Soviet troops brought the communism that East Germans toppled in 1989 — but the years between those events are a vacuum in the minds of most Americans.Even a quarter-century after the opening of Eastern Europe’s archives, we know virtually nothing about how people lived behind the Iron Curtain, though billions of U.S. tax dollars were spent to keep that kind of life from being exported further west. How was it that Eastern Europe — a mostly agricultural region, deeply conservative and religious, historically hostile to Russia — was made by 1949 to look much like Stalin’s heavily industrial and atheist Soviet Union? Surely the outcome had much to do with the Red Army. Yet after Iraq, most will agree that occupation troops do not create political regimes.
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And when they gazed toward the East, they witnessed a self-confident power that had borne the brunt of defeating Hitler and claimed to be on the cutting edge of history. They may not have liked the despotic face of this regime, but it seemed forward-moving, the unquestionable verdict of history.
Still, for many the new faith was hard to swallow. History for socialists turned out to be as inscrutable as divine will seems to many religious believers. In the stories Applebaum recounts, young cadres received party orders that made no sense (they were routinely slotted for positions for which they had no experience) or witnessed arrests of comrades known to be loyal. At the same time, their new party lenses made the society that surrounded them inscrutable: They knew that the enemies who plotted against them wore masks to seem the opposite of their true selves.
What kind of organization was this — uncomprehending and incomprehensible, blind to its surroundings, yet essentially invisible to the societies it purported to rule? Historian Jan Gross called the Stalinist regime a “spoiler state,” capable of destroying but not generating real power.
Within weeks of Stalin’s death in March 1953, workers took to the streets of Czechoslovakia and East Germany to demand free elections; three years later, their counterparts in Poland and Hungary followed suit, accompanied by intellectuals. In Budapest ironworkers set their torches to the base of an immense Stalin statue, and the dictator tumbled to Earth. The world has perhaps never seen a more compelling international workers’ solidarity — aimed against the regimes that claimed to rule in their names. Before an invasion by Soviet armored columns in November 1956, Hungarians controlled their own destiny for a few short weeks.
How did Eastern Europe’s communist regimes recover and continue to 1989?"
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