Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 by Anne Applebaum

Behind the Curtain: 

Stalin’s Plan Almost Worked

by Michael Zantovsky

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956

Anne Applebaum (New York: Doubleday, 2012)

History is not always written by victors, but much of it, especially recent history, is written by people with a stake in the events they describe. Even fifty or sixty years after the events, it can be hard to find the needed detachment that makes a dispassionate account possible. Needless to say, dispassionate does not necessarily mean an absence of judgment.

Anne Applebaum, an American writer and historian, though married to a rather prominent Pole, has had the distance, the erudition, and the talent to portray a sweeping panorama of one of the darker periods—there have been quite a few—of European history, the crushing of Eastern Europe from 1944 to 1956, which is also the subtitle of her new book, Iron Curtain. In more than one way she strives for the same exceedingly difficult feat her compatriot and contemporary Timothy Snyder achieved so brilliantly in Bloodlands when documenting an even darker history of the preceding decade.

Like Snyder, Applebaum strives for a picture that combines the political events and official documentation of “high” history with the personal recollections and preserved records of ordinary people who were its objects. Far from making the story seem subjective or fragmented, the anecdotal accounts add to and multiply the weight of the summary evidence, official records, and statistics.

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