Iron Curtain The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 [Paperback]

National Book Award Finalist
TIMEMagazine's #1 Nonfiction Book of 2012
ANew York TimesNotable Book
AWashington PostTop Ten Book of 2012
Best Nonfiction of 2012:The Wall Street Journal,The Plain Dealer

In the much-anticipated follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winningGulag, 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.Iron Curtaindescribes how, spurred by Stalin and his secret police, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. Drawing on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time, Applebaum portrays in chilling 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. As a result the Soviet Bloc became a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in these electrifying pages.

Praise for Anne Applebaum'sIron Curtain

“Applebaum shines light into forgotten worlds of human hope, suffering and dignity. . . . One of the most compelling but also serious works on Europe’s past to appear in recent memory. . . . With extraordinary gifts for bringing distant, often exotic worlds to life, Applebaum tells us that Sovietization was never simply about political institutions or social structures.”
—The Washington Post
 
“Remarkable . . . a book that reanimates a world that was largely hidden from Western eyes, and that many people who lived and suffered in it would prefer to forget.”
—The New Yorker
 
“Epic but intimate history . . . [Applebaum] ell³&