Books - Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, is one of the year’s most important books, says Ben Wilson.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56

by Anne Applebaum

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56 - by Anne Applebaum - 656pp, Allen Lane, t £23

‘Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow into the face of Imperialist warmongers.” So read one of the countless mind-numbing slogans which assailed people in East Europe in the Fifties.

It was not a good time to be young. Children’s stories were rewritten to conform to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Schools, youth groups, sports clubs and the media were awash with propaganda and mundane slogans; you had to brainwash yourself to parrot them with enthusiasm even when you knew them to be false or, in the case of glorious advances in the state pork industry, laughably irrelevant.

Teenagers experimenting with Westernised fashions or who listened to jazz were accused of taking orders from the West. It was a drab, conformist world for everyone, particularly the young.

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