Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956, which discusses the effects of Communism on Eastern Europe after the descent of the “Iron Curtain” after WWII, was written by Anne Applebaum, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and published in 2012. Iron Curtain is a descriptive, powerful look at how totalitarianism affects societies and the individuals whom the societies are composed of, and it helps illuminate the history of Europe in the 20th century.
Applebaum begins Iron Curtain by discussing the origins of the word “totalitarian.” Although she acknowledges that Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union are the most common recipients of the word, it should be remembered that the term was adopted “with enthusiasm by Benito Mussolini, and in one of his speeches he offered what is still the best definition of the term: ‘Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state’” (xxi). Applebaum then discusses how the Soviet Union lived up to the term “totalitarian,” and she says that in the early 1950s, many once-prominent cities were in ruins or were severely damaged, and were “patrolled by the same kinds of unsmiling policemen, designed by the same socialist realist architects, and draped with the same kind of propaganda posters” (xxv). Applebaum then describes that the progression of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state was nothing short of terrifying, as it had taken only “two decades, and it had proceeded in fits and starts. The Bolsheviks did not begin with a blueprint … they pursued a zigzag course” (xxv). Applebaum soon ironically describes how the Soviet Union destroyed their own followers throughout much of their history, including the 1930s, as embodied in the Great Terror of 1937, which was only one instance of mass arrests. After WWII ended, “despite mass deaths and vast destruction, victory bolstered the legitimacy of the system and its leader,” which made Stalin into a god, seeing that the “near-religious cult of Stalin reached new heights” (xxvi). Furthermore, the Soviet Union made it a common habit in whatever region they conquered to set up puppet states and to only place communists into high positions of power - “Although it was possible, in most of Eastern Europe, to publish non-communist newspapers or magazines in the initial months after the war, and although noncommunists were allowed to run other state monopolies, the national radio stations, which could reach everyone from illiterate peasants to sophisticated intellectuals, were kept under firm communist party control” (xxix). The Soviet Union also made it a habit to persecute groups which aren’t communist, including organizations that make up civil society, including the Boy and Girl Scouts. Even more concerningly, the Soviet Union was very skilled in conducting massive policies of ethnic cleansing, which led to millions being displaced and traumatized. Ironically, even though the Soviet Union was a communist state, some elements of capitalism still existed to some degree, as private business was never completely banned, and even when the legislature demanded its removal, a black market would exist to deal with the shortages of basic consumer goods. Applebaum also speaks about fanaticism when she describes that the communists really did believe in what they were doing, and many of them believed a utopia could actually be reached. Applebaum then speaks about the strength of the human spirit and bravery, as “Despite intimidation, despite propaganda, and despite even the real attraction communism held for some people devastated by the war, communist parties lost early elections in Germany, Austria, and Hungary by large margins” (xxxi). Applebaum ends her introduction by describing the purpose of the book: “I sought to gain an understanding of real totalitarianism - not totalitarianism in theory but totalitarianism in practice - and how it shaped the lives of millions of Europeans in the twentieth century” (xxxvi).
Applebaum separates her book into two sections - “False Dawn” and “High Stalinism.” In “False Dawn” Applebaum describes the situation immediately after WWII and the Soviet Union’s efforts to enforce conformity and obedience, while in “High Stalinism,” Applebaum focuses on the long-term tactics of the Soviet Union and their many imaginary enemies. She begins “False Dawn” by describing “Zero Hour,” which describes the first hour of the end of WWII. Applebaum describes how WWII laid waste to many of Europe’s cities, as bombs and fires have reduced prominent cities to rubble, as well as the terrible casualties which faced Europe: 360,000 were killed in Britain and 590,000 in France. Aside from the death toll, the economies of many areas were terribly damaged as well. For example, in Germany, many factories which survived destruction “were simply abandoned, left ownerless” (12). At the end of WWII, the situation became so bad that once heinous crimes, such as murder, were viewed as being mundane, and thievery became common, as it was needed to ensure survival. When the Soviets entered Germany, they were gripped with a sense of hatred and revenge towards the Germans, as the Soviet Union suffered from the highest death toll in WWII. The Soviets then proceeded to rape millions of women to enact their revenge, and they also murdered and robbed civilians. After the initial bloodshed, the Soviet Union proceeded to attempt to convert the regions to communism, and to root out potential dissidents, they would use their infamous secret police, the NKVD. NKVD officers, like the Gestapo, saw violence as being a routine, not occasional, event. Applebaum takes a brief amount of time to describe why being in the NKVD was an objectively “good” job which most people would take, especially in turbulent times: some NKVD officers, “Along with relatively high salaries … were provided with furnished apartments; travel expenses; free sports facilities; including a swimming pool, chess, dominoes, and Ping-Pong table; and domestic staff” (77). The NKVD infiltrated many of the countries which would soon come under the Iron Curtain, and almost immediately began using violence to get results: “the NKVD arrested some 35,000 to 45,000 people in the former eastern territories of Poland between 1944 and 1947” (95). Despite the notoriety the NKVD possessed, some groups opposed the Soviet Union, despite knowing their cause was a lost one and that they were walking corpses. For instance, one group was under the leadership of a man named “Mewa,” and the 300 members of his gang were composed of people belonging to the former Home Army and deserters from the polish division of the Red Army. In May 1945, “they held an outdoor mass and pledged allegiance to the Polish government in exile in London - a government that was no longer recognized as legitimate by its allies or by anyone else, as all of those present knew perfectly well” (103). In the next few months, many of the people in Mewa’s group deserted, many for their families and others for their lives. Those who stayed survived by stealing from the local Ukrainian population, and in 1945 “they attacked a factory director, a Polish communist, and stole 100 zlotys of Polish currency,” and they did sporadic attacks for the next few months, as seen in July, when they “killed a Ukrainian peasant and threw his body into the river” (103). All in all, despite the efforts of the local police to destroy the group, Mewa’s group “carried out 205 attacks and murdered many local communist officials” until Mewa was captured and sentenced to death in July 1947. As shown above, many resisted, but in vain, for the Soviet Union had a massive population of potential soldiers and NKVD officers. Applebaum then states that the NKVD calculated itself that in 1945, “between January and April alone it had arrested some 215,540 people in Poland … 138,000 were Germans … 38,000 Poles were also arrested … all were sent to camps in the USSR” (104). Aside from that, 5,000 of those arrested died “‘in the course of the operation and investigation,’” which can be interpreted that they were tortured to death or secretly executed by the NKVD. Not long after WWII’s end, most of the resistance groups had been defeated, marking the beginning of the Iron Curtain.
As stated before, the Soviet Union mainly relied on violence to achieve their aims, and this is seen very well in their Gulags (forced labor camps) in which they would dump all those who were arrested by the NKVD. Applebaum states that Gulags were different from Nazi concentration camps in that they weren’t death camps, as the prisoners were supposed to be worked to death over long periods of time. For instance, “Of some 150,000 people who were incarcerated in NKVD camps in eastern Germany between 1945 and 1953 - of which 120,000 were Germans and 30,000 were Soviet citizens - about a third died from starvation and illness,” which, sadly, wasn’t surprising, considering that their only sustenance was “wet, black bread and cabbage soup so bad that” it could hardly be ingested (107). To summarize, when it came to the Gulags established to manage East Europeans, “prisoners did not die because they were murdered but because they were neglected, ignored, and sometimes literally forgotten” (108). Aside from the labor camps, the Soviet Union was also against religious toleration, as seen in their hatred of most religions. This is encapsulated very well in the execution of Father Kiss, a priest who was convicted on dubious and ridiculous evidence of the murder of a Soviet. Some of the evidence is described as follows: Father Kiss “‘showed us the business cards of influential persons who would bring us weapons’” and stated that killing Russians wasn’t sinful. Father Kiss himself defended his innocence, but was executed anyways. In Chapter 6, “Ethnic Cleansing,” Applebaum discusses how millions of people were displaced by the Soviet Union in their policies of ethnic cleansing. The three Allied leaders who met at Potsdam in July 1945 all agreed that the mass movement of populations back to their original homelands was needed to ensure peace, and the Soviet Union proceeded to do its part without fail. When it came to its occupation of Czechoslovakia, their rule was tolerable, but still bad, as they destroyed a large part of the country’s heritage and identity, as well as murdering leaders who weren’t sympathetic to Communism. As a whole, when it came to moving the German population, the entire act “was an extraordinary mass movement, probably unequaled in European history,” seeing how by the end of 1947, 7.6 million people classified as “Germans” had left Poland for Germany, with 400,000 dying on the way back because of starvation, disease, and military conflict (123). Aside from Germany, 2.5 million were expelled from Czechoslovakia and 200,000 from Hungary. In total, “some 12 million Germans left Eastern Europe in the postwar period and resettled in both East and West Germany” (124). When it came to who were to blame for this disaster, Applebaum states that many governments are to be held responsible - if WWII never happened, the forced relocation of people to their native lands would never have happened. Applebaum eventually comes to discuss a man named Saolomon Morel, who represented the “most shattered part of Europe in the worst decades of the twentieth century,” as he was “a Holocaust victim, a communist criminal, a man who lost his entire family to the Nazis, and a man consumed by a sadistic fury against Germans and Poles - a fury that may or may not have originated from his victimhood, and may or may not have been connected to his communism” (147).
When it came to the youth, the Soviet Union viewed the young people of Germany as having been brainwashed by Hitler’s ideas (which was true to a large extent), which led them to believe the situation lay in brainwashing them with Communism. The Soviets also believed seriously in “Homo Sovieticus,” a human being who is the stereotypical Communist. The Soviet Union began many Communist organizations for young people and banned most of the previous organizations to centralize people’s time and attention to those which it deemed as appropriate. In one instance of Soviet oppression of civil society, near the end of 1945 some Scouts were marching past “the local secret police headquarters during a parade,” and were met with two shots from the window (167). Two Scouts in the parade died, and the murderer/s were never punished. If Soviet youth organizations are to be described in one sentence, it is as follows: “The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition whatsoever for their citizens’ passions, talents, and free time” (173). This, mentioned by Applebaum in the sentence that preceded the previous quote, included the Polish Scouts, the Hugarian People’s Colleges, the German Christian Democratic youth, shooting clubs, fencing teams, folk-dance troupes, and Catholic charities. Totalitarian states want a monopoly on education, as Adolf Hitler once said: “He who controls the youth, controls the future.”
Another example of the Soviet Union’s attempt at controlling Eastern Europe was their use of radio. Radio for many years was the quickest way a message could reach the people, and it was very effective when it came to propaganda because it was only one-way: one can only hear from a radio, not talk back or argue with the voice on the other end. Like the Nazis, the Soviets relied heavily on the radio to indoctrinate large amounts of the population, and the Soviets soon appointed a man named Gyula Ortutay to head the radio. Ortutay mandated that the radio would be meant only for Soviet purposes, including “land reform, the Hungarian-Soviet friendship society, the founding of new trade unions, the war crimes trials, and the history of the communist partisans” (189). When it came to the politics of the Soviet Union, they were pressured after WWII to hold free elections, but they obviously refused to a large part, especially when relations broke down between it and the rest of the Allied Powers, including America, which precipitated the Cold War. Stalin, though agreeing to the Yalta conferences, didn't want free elections, but he agreed to allow for a few free elections, as being a Communist, he believed in Marx’s teachings that the average worker wants Communism to succeed, which will lead them to vote for the Communist Party. Ulbricht, a Communist official, spoke to the Communist party in early 1946 that the Soviet Union will allow elections in Eastern Europe, and that they will “‘organize them in such a manner to ensure that there is a working-class majority in all towns and villages’” (195). To the surprise of the Soviet Union, and to Ulbricht, who “never entertained the possibility that elections might not eventually lead to a working-class majority,” in places where free elections were allowed, most people didn't want the Communist party to remain in power (195). Upon learning of the news, the Soviet authorities would commonly say that enemies of the Revolution have sabotaged the voting and have entered bogus ballots, and that most people favored the Soviet Union. For instance, in Hungary, “the Hungarian communist party was absolutely confident of its success in the first postwar national elections, the first truly free and fair pole in Hungarian history … Six parties put up candidates, each on a separate list” (206). When it came to the results, “the Smallholders had received more than 50 percent of the vote,” causing a major Communist official to become silent upon learning of the news (207). In the next national election on November 4, the Communist party was still very unpopular, and in the end, the Smallholders won, having acquired 57% of the vote, while the socialists came second with 17.4%. The communists, laughably, got only 16.9% of the vote, showing their overall failure at acquiring the people’s favor. When the Soviet authorities in Budapest learned of the defeat, they established single-party rule of the Communist party once again, destroying the Smallholders’ Party in the process. They described the process as “‘salami tactics,’” since they slowly “whittled away” the Smallholders’ Party (210). In the end, “The Hungarian communist party ruled alone,” illustrating the totalitarian nature of East Europe (212). In Bulgaria, Bulgarian communists eliminated all noncommunist parties when the Communist party lost in a public election to the “left-wing Bulgarian Fatherland Front coalition,” and Stalin was so enraged that he told Dimitrov, the residing Communist official, that “‘the elections are over and your opposition can go to hell’” (222). Later, Nikola Petkov, “their only real opponent,” who had “overcome terror and electoral fraud to win a third of the votes in the Bulgarian elections of 1946,” was then executed by the Bulgarian communists (222).
When it came to the economy of Eastern Europe, the Soviets, like Lenin, were against capitalism and the ownership of even small businesses. The businesses which existed in Eastern Europe were mostly nationalized by the Communist governments, and when it came to individual workers, the Soviet Union tried to motivate them through public speeches and ceremonies. Despite their efforts to make a utopia, they were met with failure, as people reacted to the loss of whatever private property they once had poorly. The Soviet Union then introduced Five-year plans for individual workers, and each worker, if they wanted to keep their job, would be expected to do their part in production. Although most workers disliked their jobs (since they couldn’t get a job they wanted, seeing that this is a totalitarian economy in a totalitarian state), some workers (who were commonly disliked by the others) earned the name of “shock workers” due to how much they produced. For instance, a man named Ignac Pioker, who was a Hungarian factory work, “achieved 1,470 percent of his production quota (and completed his personal five-year plan four years ahead of schedule.” When it came to the economic plans on a national level, many were failures. For instance, in Poland, one of the main focuses of the Six-Year Plan was the rebuilding of Warsaw. Unfortunately, the Six-Year Plan “stuttered to a halt after Stalin’s death in 1953, and much of what had been planned was never finished … many of the buildings in the Warsaw albums were never built” (246).
In Part 2 of Iron Curtain, “High Stalinism,” Applebaum begins by talking about the Soviet Union’s real and imagined enemies. She describes first how the Soviet Union acquired much of its paranoia after WWII, as in 1948 they were shocked when America tried to work against Communism by beginning the Marshall Plan, and they were also very concerned when it came to the Berlin blockade. A third reason for their concern was that the Communist party in Yugoslavia, headed by Josip Broz Tito, left the Communist coalition, the Cominform, as Tito, “Having led his anti-Nazi resistance, and having created his own loyal army and secret police … had no need of Soviet military support in order to stay in power” (254). When it came to reactionary enemies, one of the main focuses of the Soviet Union was on religion, as they wanted people to derive their moral authority from the Communist party, not from the religious sect they belonged to. Efforts were made to limit the often imagined power of priests, as Stalin himself said in October 1949: “‘It is necessary that we isolate the Catholic hierarchy and drive a wedge between the Vatican and the believers … Governments should order priests to take the citizen’s oath, communist parties should force priests to spread the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin through religious classes and sermons, and whenever they have direct contacts with their believers … churches should be under our full control by December 1949” (269). As illustrated in the previous example, one of the main ironies of Communism was that they were allegedly nonreligious, but they still were, in a sense - they just replaced the worship of a deity with the worship of a human being and the idea of Communism. When it came to internal enemies, the Soviet Union, after putting down most resistance movements, turned towards themselves: “As 1949 turned into 1950,” the Soviet Union became much more concerned with imaginary (for the most part) internal enemies than on external enemies, and “Hitherto loyal party members and decorated generals were ‘revealed’ to be traitors or spies. Among the communists with long records of loyalty who now fell into this category … Gabor Peter, the founder and leader of the [Hungarian] secret police” (281). It is often remarked that Communism leads to political megalomania, which is true in this case. As Applebaum noted before with the Soviet Union, “The spectacle of the revolution devouring its children was nothing new. Precisely the same set of obsessions had consumed the Soviet leadership in the late 1930s, the period of the Great Purge and Great Terror … Stalin’s mad drive for power knew no limits” (282). From 1949-1950, many loyal to the Communist case were arrested, tortured, and executed, including Germinder, a victim from Czechoslovakia, who said that: “‘My life is at an end and the only thing I can do is to embark on a road of truth and thus save the party … I am walking to the gallows with a heavy heart but relatively calm … the air is becoming purer and one obstacle along the victorious road to socialism is being removed. The party is always right …’” (291). As illustrated in the previous quote, humanity’s potential for self-delusion knows no bounds. This theme of Stockholm syndrome and delusion is seen in Orwell’s 1984, which was largely influenced by the history of the Soviet Union, including its relationship to Eastern Europe.
A major staple of the Soviet Union was “socialist realism,” in which the Soviet Union sponsored many writers and painters in Eastern Europe to create works that show the victory of Communism and the destruction of capitalism. Commissioned painters would create public murals that envision a socialist utopia while writers would write books that detail the victory of Communism. Socialist realism even pervaded the movies, as most of the movies which were not censored by the Soviet Union followed a simple plot: an honest, hardworking worker gets into trouble, is tempted to indulge in capitalism, but turns away and becomes successful under Communism. Applebaum notes that most Stalinist films were so unrealistic and so obviously biased that they “became embarassments to their directors, some of whom denounced or disavowed them after Stalin’s death in 1953. The crudest High Stalinist paintings, sculpture, poetry, fiction, and architecture met the same fate” (360). Socialist realism also translated into the attempted creation of “ideal cities,” which were supposed to show that great creations could be created with no selfish interests in mind. Embarrassingly, like socialist realism, this endeavor was a failure, as “There was a vast gap between daily life as it was actually lived and daily life as it was described in the newspapers, the newsreels, and the novels,” especially seeing that many “barrack cities with names like ‘Radar’ and South’” would commonly be “slums, with no running water, no indoor toilets, and no asphalt streets” (378). All in all, there were only three socialist towns, but they all impacted the histories of their respective countries greatly, due to the “immense amount of publicity and propaganda that had initially been focused on them” (384). Applebaum then states that totalitarianism had failed to create a socialist utopia in Poland due to “failed planning” and “failed architecture,” which led to “a failed utopian dream” (385).
Applebaum then discusses in Chapter 16, “Reluctant Collaborators,” about precisely that. Applebaum describes that even though most people in the modern day think the sentence “The state is always right!” to be laughable and ridiculous, people did take it very seriously in Stalinist Russia. Applebaum described that regular, everyday citizens decided to collaborate with the totalitarian regime to ensure their well-being, as “By the 1950s, most people in Eastern Europe worked in state jobs, lived in state-owned properties, and sent their children to state schools. They depended on the state for health care, and they bought food from state-owned shops. They were understandably cautious about defying the state except in dramatic circumstances. And much of the time, their circumstances were not dramatic, because in peacetime, most people’s circumstances are not dramatic” (393). Applebaum takes more of the chapter to show the banality of cooperating with a government that is built upon falsehoods and suspicion: a printer, for instance, would agree to print whatever the authorities wanted him to print, for if he did, he wouldn’t be harmed. If he didn't, on the other hand, he and his family could be punished, and someone else would have to print the desired texts anyways. Even the “passive opponents” of the regime would cooperate with it to some degree, as they would recognize the futility of resistance and agree to live on the Soviet’s terms.
Years after the descent of the Iron Curtain on Eastern Europe, it was acknowledged generally among Soviet leaders that they had failed. However, being fanatics, they refused to state that the failure was due to issues with the very idea of Communism. Instead, they stated that their attempts at creating a paradise had failed because the people in charge “had been too harsh, too arbitrary, too hasty, too incompetent” (437). Consequently, a “revolution” of liberalization and rehabilitation for political victims began - the party even apologized on the front of a newspaper for its previous errors, “calling for an end to collectivization and even for the rehabilitation of victims of political trials” (437). Though liberalization was allowed to some extent, it was still harshly controlled and repressed. Despite this, it did continue, as seen very well after Stalin’s death and Khruschev’s ascension. Khruschev, on February 24, 1956, put a ceiling on totalitarianism, as he told the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin’s cult of personality was toxic, seeing that he was human and therefore prone to error: “‘It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god … Such a belief about a man, and specifically about Stalin, was cultivated among us for many years’” (453). Some time later, Hungary, having had enough of Communism, started the Hungarian Revolution to break themselves free of Soviet control. This occurred in 1956, and Hungary suffered many losses - “Between December 1956 and the summer of 1961, 341 people were hanged, 26,000 people were put on trial, and 22,000 received sentences of five years or more. Tens of thousands more lost their jobs or their homes” (460). Though the Hungarian Revolution was technically unsuccessful, seeing that it was put down by the Soviets, it was successful when it came to altering public opinion, for many Communists in Western capitalist countries turned their backs on communism when they learned people were dissatisfied with it in large numbers. Applebaum describes how “After 1956, the French communist party fractured, the Italian communist party broke away from Moscow, and the British communist party lost two-thirds of its members” (460). Applebaum states that the Hungarian Revolution showed that totalitarianism could collapse unexpectedly, and was not guaranteed to last forever, for “even when it seems as if they are in full agreement with the most absurd propaganda - even if they are marching in parades, chanting slogans, singing that the party is always right - the spell can suddenly, unexpectedly, dramatically be broken” (461).
In the epilogue of her book, Applebaum discusses that the Iron Curtain did eventually come down with a powerful crash, as noted in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For more than thirty years, Applebaum states that communist leaders were genuinely confused as to why the communist economy produced such poor results. Applebaum answers that the repression of the regimes is largely to blame, as it is hard to prosper when citizens are living in fear. Furthermore, she stated that Communism and Marxist-Leninism “contained the seeds of their own destruction” since “Eastern European governments’ claim to legitimacy were based on promises of future prosperity and high living standards” (465). Of course, when Communism failed on an economic level, people became disillusioned, causing the regimes to fall. Today the only “real” Communist state is North Korea, which, like the Soviet Union and Maoist China, commits egregious human rights abuses (its record is the worst out of every country today), as noted in its concentration camps, its propaganda, its willingness to conduct brutal torture on their own citizens, the malnourished state of their people, and in the veneration of their leader as a deity. Applebaum states that totalitarian regimes are enormously destructive, as “In their drive for power, the Bolsheviks, their Eastern European acolytes, and their imitators farther afield attacked not only their political opponents but also peasants, priests, schoolteachers, traders, journalists, writers, small businessmen, students, and artists, along with the institutions such people had built and maintained over centuries” (467). Applebaum ends her book by describing the importance of history, as only when people understand the past do they truly know how to improve the future.
Personal thoughts:
Iron Curtain is a fantastic read about a very significant and troubling time of Europe’s history. While the book is detailed and somewhat long, the book flows due to Applebaum’s narrative, in which she tells the stories of a variety of people. It also helps that the book includes images that portray the situation, though I wish that there were pictures of the Soviet Union’s harsh policies to show the true extent of its crimes. I highly recommend Iron Curtain to anyone interested in European history, psychology, politics, and the role individuals have with their government.
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