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Summary
Summary
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 .
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
According to this disturbing but fascinating history, the U.S.S.R.'s 1944-1950 subjugation of Eastern Europe was a brutal process. With other priorities in the forefront at Yalta and other wartime Allied summits, FDR gave Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe short shrift, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Applebaum (Gulag). In this account of the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe during and after WWII, Applebaum concentrates on events in Poland, Hungary, and what became East Germany, all of which unroll with depressing sameness. The Soviet army arrived in 1944-1945 with enormous destruction. There followed an orgy of arrests, trials, executions, and deportation of "fascists," a broad category that included noncommunist anti-Nazi resistance groups. Expulsions of ethnic Germans was also carried out on a mass scale. Faithful Marxists, the Soviet leaders knew that the masses would prefer communism, so they initially allowed political parties, churches, newspapers, and even elections, assuming the people would naturally vote for a proletarian state. When that didn't happen, democracy was quickly shut down. Applebaum delivers a gripping if unremittingly painful account of the period during which Communists, astonished at losing every election, steadily suppressed civil society, whereupon darkness descended for 40 years. With precision in her narration and penetrating analysis, Applebaum has written another masterful account of the brutality of Soviet rule. Illus., maps. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Applebaum's Gulag received a 2004 Pulitzer Prize, an accolade that accords prominence on her new, groundbreaking investigation of the history of communism. Examining Stalin's imposition of totalitarian regimes on Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet zone of Germany, Applebaum depicts Communist parties that were remorselessly successful in destroying opposition but that failed to win widespread popular support. An interesting motif in Applebaum's history is the awareness by Communist leaders of civil society's rejection of Stalinist socialism, demonstrated by the communists' losses in somewhat unfettered postwar elections. After redressing that problem with rigged polls and mini gulags, the regimes strove to improve communist ideology's attractiveness through propaganda, mass demonstrations, socialist realism in art, and model communist cities. Some people became convinced supporters, but most did not and survived through personal compromises with communism. The latter's individual stories, drawn from interviews and research into those suppressed by state security, infuse Applebaum's account with perplexing human interest. What made for a collaborator, a true believer, a dissident? A masterful chronicle and analysis, Applebaum's work is a history-shelf necessity.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HAVING brilliantly documented the horror of Stalin's Soviet terror machine in her Pulitzer Prize-winning "Gulag," Anne Applebaum now offers a bulky sequel, "Iron Curtain," about the brutal effort of that same machine to crush and colonize Eastern Europe in the first decade after World War II. Her evidence, once again drawn from archival research and some survivor interviews, is overwhelming and convincing. But the heart of her story is hardly news. That Soviet tanks carried Moscowtrained agents into Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany was known in the West at the time and has been well documented since. When those agents set out to produce not only a friendly sphere of Soviet influence but also a cordon of dictatorships reliably responsive to Russian orders, Winston Churchill was moved to warn, just days after the Nazis' surrender in 1945, that an Iron Curtain was being drawn through the heart of Europe. (He coined the metaphor in a message to President Truman a full year before he used it in public in Fulton, Mo.) And Matyas Rakosi, the "little Stalin" of Hungary, was well known for another apt metaphor, describing how the region's political, economic, cultural and social oppositions were to be destroyed by "cutting them off like slices of salami." Applebaum tracks the salami slicing as typically practiced in Poland, Hungary and Germany, and serves up not only the beef but also the fat, vinegar and garlic in exhausting detail. She shows how the knives were sharpened before the war's end in Soviet training camps for East European Communists, so that trusted agents could create and control secret police forces in each of the "liberated" nations. She shows how reliable operatives then took charge of all radio broadcasting, the era's most powerful mass medium. And she demonstrates how the Soviet stooges could then, with surprising speed, harass, persecute and finally ban all independent institutions, from youth groups and welfare agencies to schools, churches and rival political parties. Along the way, millions of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and Hungarians were ruthlessly driven from their historic homes to satisfy Soviet territorial ambitions. Millions more were deemed opponents and beaten, imprisoned or hauled off to hard labor in Siberia. In Stalin's paranoid sphere, not even total control of economic and cultural life was sufficient. To complete the terror, he purged even the Communist leaders of each satellite regime, accusing them of treason and parading them as they made humiliating confessions. It is good to be reminded of these sordid events, now that more archives are accessible and some witnesses remain alive to recall the horror. Still, why should we be consuming such a mass of detail more than half a century later? In her introduction Applebaum says it is important to remember that "historically, there were regimes that aspired to total control," not only of the organs of state but also of human nature itself. We should be studying how totalitarianism worked, she maintains, because "we can't be certain that mobile phones, the Internet and satellite photographs won't eventually become tools of control" in other places. Well, Vladimir Putin may yet make her a prophet, but so far this century, technology has become a welcome defense against tyranny. More relevant to contemporary discussion are some themes Applebaum evokes along the way but never develops. She begins her tale by insisting that the United States and Britain, having promised the East Europeans a democratic future, quickly abandoned them to Soviet domination. True enough. Yet what were the West's alternatives? The door to Europe was left open for Stalin in 1945 because the Americans were rapidly redeploying to fight Japan and eager to enlist Stalin in the Pacific war. Applebaum does not speculate about how Soviet colonization might have been forestalled or what methods of intervention for freedom we should be applying now in Cuba or North Korea, Syria or China. Similarly, she barely touches on the contrary claims of some historians that it was not the West's appeasement but rather hostility against the Soviet Union that provoked Stalin's aggressive responses. These scholars accuse the United States of having triggered the cold war, thus baiting Stalin into taking crude defensive countermeasures. Applebaum's evidence provides a telling rebuttal to those "revisionist" theories, but she never really engages them. Most conspicuously missing is any sustained examination of Soviet motives for the rape of Eastern Europe. What did the Russians want? Revenge against Germany and its allies? Compensation for their enormous loss of life and suffering in the war and the spoils due a victor? Was the domination of neighboring states a wildly arrogant policy of defense so that no conqueror could ever again follow Napoleon and Hitler to Moscow? Or was it a revival of Russia's imperial desire to annex at least half of Poland, to secure a rebellious Ukraine and to incorporate the Baltic States and various adjacent Balkan lands? Applebaum's overriding interest is in Stalin's deranged tyranny, which aggravated the postwar horror inside the Soviet Union at the same time that it was being slavishly imitated by his East European henchmen until his death in 1953. Yet Stalin's successors were just as intent on preserving their dominion. Why? Applebaum contends that Stalin, having once postponed the Soviet dream of igniting an international Communist revolution, "was preparing to relaunch it" in 1944 as the Red Army rolled westward. But that passing comment - and debatable premise - is all she offers to explain Soviet policy. While her documentation of the Soviet takeover is impressive, at this late date fewer facts and more analysis would have been welcome. The seeds of the Communists' ultimate failure in East Europe are strewed throughout her book, but with little explanation. She shows how poorly the Communist regimes provided for their consumers and how they alienated the workers in whose name they governed. Why? And does not this subject require lengthy discussion of how Communism collided with the deeply rooted nationalisms of the region? Applebaum incisively demonstrates the moral confusion that haunted Roman Catholic leaders and other opponents of the Communist regimes, some openly hostile, some reluctantly cooperative, many simply passive. But how should we evaluate their choices? "Iron Curtain" is not a full history of the Iron Curtain because of Applebaum's decision to end her history in 1956, just as Poles and Hungarians openly rebelled against Soviet control. There then followed a 30-year effort in the Kremlin to stabilize and reform all Communist societies, but the East Europeans remained restive, held captive only by Soviet armed might. The colonization became a huge burden on the Soviet economy, and the lures of Western democracy and economic achievement produced corrosive holes in that curtain. Finally, when Mikhail Gorbachev refused to shoot to preserve his costly empire, the curtain collapsed altogether and dragged down the Soviet center as well. Applebaum rightly concludes, long before that climax, that the totalitarian spell could never be sustained for long. But she declines to generalize about the reasons or the defenses we all may need against other totalitarian threats. Instead, what she has given us is a concrete and sad record that honors the memory of the millions who were slaughtered, tortured and suppressed in the mad pursuit of totality. Uprising in Hungary: Soviet tanks in Budapest, 1956. Applebaum shows how Soviet stooges, with surprising speed, banned all independent institutions. Max Frankel, former executive editor of The Times, reported for many years from Moscow and Eastern Europe.
Choice Review
Focusing mainly on Poland, East Germany, and Hungary, journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Applebaum details the transition to communism in Eastern Europe in the early post-WWII years. Her in-depth, captivating study illustrates how the Soviet government managed this transformation by destroying civil society and building new state-controlled institutions. Soviet administrators used local collaborators, international communists trained in the USSR, the Red Army, and the Soviet and local secret police to enact deportations, ethnic cleansing, terror, purges, and mass fear to ensure the restructuring of East European societies, cultures, and economies. Picking up where Timothy Snyder left off in his Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010), which focuses on the war years, Applebaum's description of the violence and tragedy that befell this region in the early postwar period is similarly haunting and distressing. In the book's last chapters, Applebaum explains how communism in Eastern Europe endured through her discussion of the ways in which many people reluctantly accepted it, passively resisted it, but ultimately allowed it to continue. This thought-provoking, well-written work will be appreciated by a wide audience. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. M. Chakars Saint Joseph's University
Guardian Review
A Russian woman who visited East Germany in 1986 on a Soviet school trip described to me recently how their East German official hosts explained the Berlin wall as a necessary defence against the hordes of West Germans who wished to storm into East Germany to escape West German economic misery and join in East Germany's success. And she and her 13-year-old Soviet friends had at the time no reason to doubt this, never in their lives having been told anything different. The eventual complete collapse of communism in eastern Europe has naturally tended to focus subsequent attention on its shambolic and incompetent aspects; but its effectiveness as a system of thought control should not be underestimated. Today, no one under 23 was even alive while communist rule in eastern Europe still existed. No one under 30 or so has any meaningful memories of it. The internet has made complete censorship of the old kind unimaginable to younger people today. As the four decades of the cold war fade into history and mythology, it is important to go on reminding people of the nature of communism in eastern Europe, and why West Germans and other Europeans were not, in fact, desperate to exchange the austere rigours of western capitalist democracy for the fleshpots and freedoms of communist rule. In Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56, Anne Applebaum does an excellent job of explaining this for the Stalinist and immediate post-Stalinist period in Poland, East Germany and Hungary. Her book is a masterly synthesis in English of recent research by scholars in these countries, and of the range of memoirs by participants and survivors. Applebaum's book has a political as well as a scholarly purpose, though on this occasion her political agenda does not detract significantly from her scholarship. As a rightwing cold warrior and director of political studies at the neoconservative Legatum Institute, she is clearly anxious to drive another nail into the coffin of the old European and American left, with their residual tendency to find excuses for Soviet communism. Thus her book begins with a strong argument against the revisionist belief that the Soviet imposition of communism in eastern Europe after 1945 was a response to hostile US moves at the start of the cold war, rather than a result of communist revolutionary ideology. She agrees that "there is no evidence that Stalin expected to create a communist 'bloc' very quickly", but on the other hand "the Soviet Union did import certain key elements of the Soviet system into every nation occupied by the Red Army, from the very beginning" starting with the creation by the NKVD of local communist secret police forces. Here I tend to agree with Applebaum though since she addresses this question directly only in her introduction, she does not have the space to rebut the revisionist arguments in detail, or to take account of issues such as the effect on Soviet thinking of the complete end to US aid to the Soviet Union as soon as the war ended, at a time when the USSR was coping with colossal wartime destruction and impending famine. She is right that the template for a communist takeover was already well established since the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in 1940, and most of Moscow's own local communist allies clearly expected full Soviet support for their seizure of power. As Applebaum brings out, many also genuinely believed for a time that they would receive enough mass support to win national elections. As far as Poland was concerned, it was evident from the entry of Soviet troops into Polish territory in the summer of 1944 that Stalin was not going to permit the creation of an independent Polish government that would demand Soviet withdrawal from the eastern territories seized from Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. Most of Applebaum's book, however, is not about the reasons for the communist takeover, but the nature of that takeover and of the system that the communists sought to introduce in East Germany, Poland and Hungary. It is an excellent account of the stages by which the communists seized power. It tells the story not only of the ferocity of communist repression, but also of the endless series of petty and not-so-petty compromises by which the mass of the population was persuaded to acquiesce in communist rule. I would differ somewhat with Applebaum on certain questions of emphasis. In addressing the willingness of many progressive intellectuals to go along for a time with communist rule, she does not perhaps give quite enough importance to widespread belief in the bankruptcy of the pre-1939 political orders; something that emerges clearly from the works of, for example, Polish writers such as Czeslaw Milosz and Tadeusz Konwicki. Iron Curtain contains some very vivid descriptions of the creation of new industrial towns in parts of central Europe, and how these were intended as models for the socialist society of the future. She pays due attention to the degree to which for a while many ordinary people from impoverished backgrounds also shared in this dream. In describing the actual grim realities of life in towns such as Nowa Huta, however, she fails to set this in the context of early industrialisation or indeed post-industrialism in the world at large. Ideology aside, her picture of alcoholism, violence and prostitution amid urban deserts does not differ significantly from that in many parts of the capitalist world in the past and today. The choice of 1944 to 1956 as a period to study is legitimate, spanning as it does the communist seizure of power, the period of Stalinism and the changes after Stalin's death, culminating in the critically important but very different outcomes in Poland and Hungary. In Hungary, this period ended with a violent anti-communist revolt which was crushed by the Soviet army, thereby doing catastrophic damage to the image of communism in many parts of the world. In Poland, it ended with Soviet acquiescence in the coming to power of national communists who ushered in a much milder form of communist rule. Nonetheless, by taking the area and the period that she does, Applebaum makes her political case a good deal easier. Had she extended her study to cover the entire period of communist rule in eastern Europe, she would have had to examine how in Poland and Hungary communist rule remained authoritarian but ceased to be totalitarian, and how contrary to the predictions of western rightwingers communism eventually collapsed remarkably peacefully, above all because of changes in the Soviet Union itself. Moreover, by 1989, the most savagely totalitarian large communist country in eastern Europe Romania was no longer under Soviet geopolitical domination, and the repulsive Ceaucescu regime was being wooed by western countries as part of their anti-Soviet strategy. Elsewhere in the world, the balance of morality between the west and the Soviet Union became even more complicated as the cold war continued. In Europe, however, the contrast between the horrors of Stalinist communism and the benefits of democratic capitalism became clear enough in these years, and younger European readers today need to be reminded of this though not perhaps for entirely the reasons that Applebaum thinks. For communism to collapse in eastern Europe spiritually in the late 50s, politically in the late 80s ordinary people had to see that western democratic capitalism really did work better for them. This was not necessarily apparent in 1945. By the mid-50s, it was incontrovertible. This has a lesson for the present. It is not enough to assert as an article of faith the superiority of liberal capitalist democracy. If our system is to win and retain mass support as against other systems, it has to be seen to be superior. And the system which in the 50s showed itself to be superior to communism was not the "turbo-charged" free market capitalism of the Washington Consensus that led us into the crash of 2008. It was free-market democratic capitalism, yes, but it was also social-market capitalism, above all in West Germany, the frontline of cold war competition. It was to join this kind of system that millions of East Germans fled to West Germany and not the other way round. Once they became aware of social-market capitalism's benefits, millions of Russians also eventually decided to end communist rule. The problem is that in the 90s Russians did not get this kind of social market system, but something much closer to the feral capitalism of communist propaganda, with pseudo-democracy as a veil for the looting of the state by the new elites. The contrast between communist dreams and capitalist reality in western and central Europe explains the failure of communism. The contrast between democratic dreams and capitalist reality in Russia explains Vladimir Putin.
Kirkus Review
A Pulitzer Prizewinning author returns with the story of those dark decades in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union slammed the prison doors on people, cultures and countries. Realizing she could not tell the whole story in one volume, Washington Post and Slate columnist Applebaum (Gulag: A History, 2003, etc.) focuses on Poland, East Germany and Hungary and shows how their stories were representative. She begins as World War II was ending. The Russians were plowing through Eastern Europe on their way to Berlin. While many of the Allies were thinking of home, the Soviets had grander and grimmer ideas. Applebaum shows how the communists gained political control of individual countries (they were sometimes surprised in "elections" how unpopular they were), then charts how--in the service of their iron ideology--they systematically destroyed economies, organizations, the arts, education, the press, the judiciary, the church, the entertainment industries and every other social institution. Internment camps and prisons became the true growth industries. Applebaum also explores the tactics employed to keep people in line: fear and intimidation, of course, but also a massive propaganda industry that sought to convince everyone that things were better than they were, but not nearly as good as they would be in five years or so. They invested much hope in education, believing they could indoctrinate an entire generation. It didn't work. Periodically, the author chronicles what was happening in the West (the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift). Beginning with the death of Stalin, Applebaum shows how and why things slowly began to change. The emerging youth culture, the resurgence of religious belief, the rise of a new generation of writers and artists--these were among the factors that energized the 1956 uprisings, which, of course, the Soviets temporarily crushed. A dark but hopeful chronicle that shows how even humanity's worst can fracture and fall.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When World War II came to an end in Europe in May 1945, the armies of the Soviet Union occupied all of Eastern Europe-and for the next 45 years that would be the case. Stalin and his henchmen aggressively took control of all aspects of life in the occupied nations, shutting down all independent agencies, governments, newspapers, etc., throughout the region. Within a decade, all pretense of freedom was gone for millions of citizens. Pulitzer Prizer winner Applebaum (director of political studies, Legatum Inst., London; Gulag: A History) has applied her immense knowledge-and impressive language skills-to a thorough investigation of how the Soviets under Stalin and his successors systematically established nearly totalitarian control of Eastern Europe and, in so doing, laid waste to cultures and societies that had been built over centuries. Verdict This is a powerful and sobering book, by far the best treatment to yet appear on the topic. There have been earlier studies treating individual nations (e.g., Laszlo Borhi's Hungary in the Cold War, 1945-1956, and Andrzej Paczkowski's The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom, translated from Polish by Jane Cave), but no one has accomplished the synthesis of multiarchival sources that Applebaum presents here. An important and essential study of a neglected aspect of the Cold War era. [This book has been nominated for the 2012 National Book Award in nonfiction.-Ed.]-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Zero Hour The mad orgy of ruins, entangled wires, twisted corpses, dead horses, overturned parts of blown-up bridges, bloody hoofs which had been torn off horses, broken guns, scattered ammunition, chamber pots, rusted washbasins, pieces of straw and entrails of horses floating in muddy pools mixed with blood, cameras, wrecked cars and tank parts: They all bear witness to the awful suffering of a city . . . --Tamás Lossonczy, Budapest, 1945 How can one find words to convey truthfully and accurately the picture of a great capital destroyed almost beyond recognition; of a once almighty nation that ceased to exist; of a conquering people who were so brutally arrogant and so blindingly sure of their mission as a master race . . . whom you now see poking about their ruins, broken, dazed, shivering, hungry human beings without will or purpose or direction. --William Shirer, Berlin, 1945 It seemed to me that I was walking on corpses, that at any moment I would step into a pool of blood. --Janina Godycka-Cwirko, Warsaw, 1945 Explosions echoed throughout the night, and artillery fire could be heard throughout the day. Across Eastern Europe, the noise of falling bombs, rattling machine guns, rolling tanks, churning engines, and burning buildings heralded the approach of the Red Army. As the front line drew closer, the ground shook, the walls shivered, the children screamed. And then it stopped. The end of the war, wherever and whenever it came, brought with it an abrupt and eerie silence. "The night was far too quiet," wrote one anonymous chronicler of the war's end in Berlin. On the morning of April 27, 1945, she went out of her front door and saw no one: "Not a civilian in sight. The Russians have the streets entirely to themselves. But under every building people are whispering, quaking. Who could ever imagine such a world, hidden here, so frightened, right in the middle of the big city?" On the morning of February 12, 1945, the day the siege of the city came to an end, a Hungarian civil servant heard the same silence on the streets of Budapest. "I got to the Castle District, not a soul anywhere. I walked along Werbõczy Street. Nothing but bodies and ruins, supply carts, and drays . . . I got to Szentháromság Square and decided to look in at the Council in case I found somebody there. Deserted. Everything turned upside down and not a soul . . ." Even Warsaw, a city already destroyed by the time the war ended--the Nazi occupiers had razed it to the ground following the uprising in the autumn--grew silent when the German army finally retreated on January 16, 1945. W³adys³aw Szpilman, one of a tiny handful of people hiding in the ruins of the city, heard the change. "Silence fell," he wrote in his memoir, The Pianist, "a silence such as even Warsaw, a dead city for the last three months, had not known before. I could not even hear the steps of the guards outside the building. I couldn't understand it." The following morning, the silence was broken by a "loud and resonant noise, the last sound I expected": the Red Army had arrived, and loudspeakers were broadcasting, in Polish, the news of the liberation of the city. This was the moment sometimes called zero hour, Stunde Null: the end of the war, the retreat of Germany, the arrival of the Soviet Union, the moment the fighting ended and life started up again. Most histories of the communist takeover of Eastern Europe begin at precisely this moment, and logically so. To those who lived through this change of power, zero hour felt like a turning point: something very concrete came to an end, and something very new began. From now on, many people said to themselves, everything would be different. And it was. Yet although it is logical to begin any history of the communist takeover in Eastern Europe with the end of the war, it is in some ways deeply misleading. The people of the region were not faced with a blank slate in 1944 or 1945, after all, and they were not themselves starting from scratch. Nor did they emerge from nowhere, with no previous experiences, ready to start afresh. Instead, they climbed out of the basements of their destroyed homes, or walked out of the forests where they had been living as partisans, or slipped away from the labor camp where they had been imprisoned, if they were healthy enough, and embarked upon long, complicated journeys back to their homelands. Not all of them even stopped fighting when the Germans surrendered. As they crawled out of the ruins, they saw not virgin territory but destruction. "The war ended the way a passage through a tunnel ends," wrote the Czech memoirist Heda Kovály. "From far away you could see the light ahead, a gleam that kept growing, and its brilliance seemed ever more dazzling to you huddled there in the dark the longer it took to reach it. But when at last the train burst out in the glorious sunshine, all you saw was a wasteland full of weeds and stones, and a heap of garbage." Photographs from across Eastern Europe at that time show scenes from an apocalypse. Flattened cities, acres of rubble, burned villages, and smoking, charred ruins where houses used to be. Tangles of barbed wire, the remains of concentration camps, labor camps, POW camps; barren fields, pockmarked by tank tracks, with no sign of farming, husbandry, or life of any kind. In the recently destroyed cities, the air was suffused with the smell of corpses. "The descriptions I've read always use the phrase 'sweetish odour,' but that's far too vague, completely inadequate," wrote one German survivor. "The fumes are not so much an odour as something firmer, something thicker, a soupy vapor that collects in front of your face and nostrils, too mouldy and thick to breathe. It beats you back as if with fists." Provisional burial sites were everywhere, and people walked through the streets gingerly, as if traversing a cemetery. In due course exhumations began, as bodies were removed from courtyards and city parks to mass graves. Funerals and reburial ceremonies were frequent, though in Warsaw one was famously interrupted. In the summer of 1945, a funeral march was slowly wending its way through Warsaw when the black-clad mourners saw an extraordinary sight: "A living, red Warsaw tram," the first to run through the city since the war's end. "The pedestrians on the sidewalks stopped, others ran alongside the tram clapping and cheering loudly. Extraordinarily, the funeral march stopped too, the mourners accompanying the dead, captivated by the general mood, turned to the tram and began to clap too." This too was typical. At times a weird euphoria seemed to grip the survivors. It was a relief to be alive; sorrow was mixed with joy, and commerce, trade, and reconstruction began immediately, spontaneously. Warsaw in the summer of 1945 was a bustling hive of activity, Stefan Kisielewski wrote: "In the ruins of the streets, there's commotion like never before. Trade--buzzing. Work--booming. Humor--everywhere. The mob, teeming life, flows through the streets, nobody would think that these are all victims of a massive disaster, people who have scarcely recovered from a catastrophe, or that they are living in extreme, inhuman conditions . . ." Sándor Márai described Budapest in one of his novels at this same period: Whatever remained of the city, of society, sprang to life with such passion, fury, and sheer willpower, with such strength and stamina and cunning, it seemed as if nothing had happened . . . out on the boulevard there were suddenly stalls in gateways, selling all kinds of nice food and luxury items: clothes, shoes, everything you could imagine, not to mention gold napoleons, morphine, and pork lard. The Jews who remained staggered from their yellow star houses and within a week or two you could see them bargaining, surrounded as they were by the corpses of men and horses . . . People were quibbling over prices for warm British cloth, French perfumes, Dutch brandy, and Swiss watches among the rubble . . . This enthusiasm for work and renewal would last for many years. The British sociologist Arthur Marwick once speculated that the experience of national failure might have given the West Germans an incentive to rebuild, to regain a sense of national pride. The very scale of the national collapse, he argued, might have helped contribute to the postwar boom: having experienced economic and personal catastrophe, Germans readily threw themselves into reconstruction.14 But Germany, both East and West, was not alone in this drive to recover and to become "normal" again. Over and over, Poles and Hungarians in memoirs and conversations about the postwar period 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. By 1945, most of the territory between Poznañ in the west and Smolensk in the east had been occupied not once but twice, or even three times. Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, Hitler had invaded the region from the west, occupying western Poland. Stalin had invaded from the east, occupying eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and Bessarabia. In 1941, Hitler once again invaded these same territories from the west. In 1943, the tide turned again and the Red Army marched back through the same region once more, coming from the east. By 1945, in other words, 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. Eastern Europe, along with Ukraine and the Baltic States, was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe. "Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow," writes Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands, the definitive history of the mass killing of this period, "but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between."15 Stalin and Hitler shared contempt for the very notion of national sovereignty for any of the nations of Eastern Europe, and they jointly strove to eliminate their elites. 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. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, considered its western neighbors to be capitalist and anti-Soviet strongholds whose very existence posed a challenge to the USSR. 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: social democrats, antifascists, businessmen, bankers, and merchants--often the same people targeted by the Nazis. Although there were civilian casualties in Western Europe, as well as incidents of theft, misbehavior, and abuse perpetrated by the British and American armies, for the most part the Anglo-Saxon troops were trying to kill Nazis, not potential leaders of the liberated nations. And, for the most part, they treated the resistance leaders with respect and not suspicion. The East is also where the Nazis had most vigorously pursued the Holocaust, where they set up the vast majority of ghettoes, concentration camps, and killing fields. Snyder notes that Jews accounted for less than 1 percent of the German population when Hitler came to power in 1933, and many of those managed to flee. Hitler's vision of a "Jew-free" Europe could only be realized when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic States, and eventually Hungary and the Balkans, which is where most of the Jews of Europe actually lived. Of the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the vast majority were from Eastern Europe. Most of the rest were taken to the region to be murdered. The scorn the Nazis held for all Eastern Europeans was closely related to their decision to take the Jews from all over Europe to the East for execution. There, in a land of subhumans, it was possible to do inhuman things. Above all, Eastern Europe is where Nazism and Soviet communism clashed. Although they began the war as allies, Hitler had always wanted to fight a war of destruction against the USSR, and after Hitler's invasion Stalin promised the same. The battles between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht were therefore fiercer and bloodier in the east than those that took place further west. German soldiers truly feared the Bolshevik "hordes," about whom they had heard many terrible stories, and toward the end of the war they fought them with particular desperation. Their scorn for civilians was especially profound, respect for local culture and infrastructure nonexistent. A German general defied Hitler's orders and left Paris standing out of sentimental respect for the city, but other German generals burned Warsaw to the ground and destroyed much of Budapest without thinking about it. Western air forces were not especially concerned about the ancient architecture of this region either: Allied bombers contributed to the toll of death and destruction too, conducting aerial bombardment not only of Berlin and Dresden but also of Danzig and Königsberg, Gdañsk and Kaliniñgrad--among many other places. As the eastern front moved into Germany itself, fighting only intensified. The Red Army focused on its drive to Berlin with something approaching obsession. From early on in the war, Soviet soldiers bade farewell to one another with the cry, "See you in Berlin." Stalin was desperate to reach the city before the other Allies got there. His commanders understood this, and so did their American counterparts. General Eisenhower, knowing full well that the Germans would fight to the death in Berlin, wanted to save American lives and decided to let Stalin take the city. Churchill argued against this policy: "If they [the Russians] . . . take Berlin, will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future?" But the American general's caution won out, and the Americans and British advanced slowly to the east--General George C. Marshall having once declared he would be "loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes," and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke arguing that "the advance into the country really had to coincide to a certain extent with what our final boundaries would be."18 Meanwhile, the Red Army charged directly toward the German capital, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Excerpted from Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
