Iron Curtain

The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

By: Anne Applebaum

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

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.

©2012 Anne Applebaum (P)2012 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"So much effort is spent trying to understand democratization these days, and so little is spent trying to understand the opposite processes. Anne Applebaum corrects that imbalance, explaining how and why societies succumb to totalitarian rule. Iron Curtain is a deeply researched and eloquent description of events which took place not long ago and in places not far away - events which contain many lessons for the present." (Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World)

" Iron Curtain is an exceptionally important book which effectively challenges many of the myths of the origins of the Cold War. It is wise, perceptive, remarkably objective and brilliantly researched." (Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad and The Second World War)

"This dramatic book gives us, for the first time, the testimony of dozens of men and women who found themselves in the middle of one of the most traumatic periods of European history. Anne Applebaum conveys the impact of politics and ideology on individual lives with extraordinary immediacy." (Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War)

Long, but definitely organized well

Great history. Scratches the surface a our the void left by the Nazi's. Stalin was a huge jerk and should have been dealt with early.

the tragedy of Eastern Europe

Ms. Applebaum has written an excellent book, again. The research is thorough, the story engrossing, and the style reads well. The political history background comes to life through extensive use of memoirs to add human experiences.

Obviously, this book will be most interesting to people who are intrigued by this region: Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, and to a lesser degree Bulgaria and Romania.

The author dreams that people will read her book and understand that Western apologists were wrong to paint rosy pictures of the Eastern socialist countries. However, the sad reality is most people disregard facts and stubbornly cling to bad ideas.

John Christmas, author of "Democracy Society"

Iron Curtain

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Author of Gulag, same meticulous scholarship of how Central and Eastern Europe were sold into ideological slavery from 1945-1989, what happens when well meaning democracies do not stand in the way of evil.

Applebaum is a National Treasure

I'm so thankful for Anne Applebaum. She is writing about the topics very few others will even touch. In a time when Russian despotism is on the march and American schoolchildren are taught what a great place the Soviet Union was, Applebaum (no conservative she) is such an important voice. I've read her Red Famine (absolutely amazing - should be required reading in schools) and look forward to cracking open her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag next (I'm going chronologically in reverse). Iron Curtain is a bit more technical than the more narrative-based Red Famine, but it was still excellent and I highly recommend it.

How to Devalue Human Beings – A Handbook

Excellent book about a terrible era! When horrors are so pervasive as to become commonplace….what happens to our compass? One Audible review says that the book was confusing, which it wasn’t. The reviewer incorrectly summarizes that the book is about Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. But it’s about Poland, Hungary and EAST GERMANY, which is almost impossible to get wrong if he actually read this book.

I recommend digging into this one…dial back the clock to 1945-1956 and bear witness to goings on behind the Iron Curtain. Socialist societies do not die at the onset of failure…they live on, they limp forward, unable by ideology to see how deformed they have become. Most of our understanding about communism and socialism is waning as The 20th Century drifts into history, along with all its hard fought lessons. We may be forgetting why our free market system is superior to the brutal alternatives.

The book shows us that to ‘free’ humanity, you must first eliminate the enslavers. To eliminate the enslavers, you must have control of the society. To control society, you must have power. To maintain power, you must control the political system. To control the political system, you must control public opinion. To control public opinion, you must control what people think. In order to control what people think, you must control humanity. Such is the paradox of idealism and reality.

But ‘Iron Curtain’ does not discuss this philosophically. (Thank you!). Anne gives us her best effort here…she painstakingly illustrates with documentation, interviews, quotes, facts, figures, raw data, and real stories just what the human experience behind the Iron Curtain was like. Her details come at us like the planes of the Berlin airlift….one after the other in an unbroken chain. She reminds us that Poland, Hungary, and East Germany were once rich and vibrant cultures, as unique and flowering as France and Italy…yet these eastern counterparts have been somehow erased from our thoughts; they are simply ‘Eastern Bloc’ countries or ‘former Soviet satellites.’ Poland, Hungary, and East Germany seem blank and sterile, almost clones of anonymous nations. Not true. They were made that way. Clicking play will show you how, and remember....this all actually happened.

Back to the glorious fifties!

Where does Iron Curtain rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

and to the 1940s too. One of the more interesting books that this former student of political science has read (listened to) in recent memory.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Iron Curtain?

Seeing examples of how some people made it through this period relatively intact (most didn't).

Which character – as performed by Cassandra Campbell – was your favorite?

I was most interested by the people of East Germany -- because I speak German -- but the events in Hungary and Poland were also of interest to me.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, it was too long for that.

Any additional comments?

I learned that I have a lot to learn about eastern European life behind the Iron Curtain.

Too long to really enjoy

I am a great fan of history and thought this one would be a good listen after hearing the author interviewed on NPR. Unfortunately for me there are just too many details and it starts getting boring after awhile. I found myself skipping through because I wanted it to be done.

Lots of NE Europe, not much about SE

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The title, subtitle, and publisher's notes give the impression that the book covers all of Eastern Europe. Not far into the book, I came to realize that the Balkans, my particular area of interest, are barely covered. Had I known this, I probably would not have purchased the book. It is primarily a book about Poland and East Germany, not Eastern Europe.

I agree with other reviewers that the author goes into much detail but gives almost no analysis or synthesis. A downside of listening to rather than reading this book is that it is difficult to keep all of the different individuals straight. I don't think of myself particularly as a visual learner, but I found it difficult to remember who was who.

Was Iron Curtain worth the listening time?

Definitely for those with an interest in postwar Germany and Poland. For myself--no sure.

Perhaps too much detail

The book gave me a much better understanding, in a very concrete way, of life under the Communist system in the Eastern bloc. The writer clearly did a great deal of research and cared about her subject, but it was a bit of an exhausting read.

The tingle pride for what Eastern Europe overcame

This book does a fantastic job explaining the atrocities Slavic culture overcame. With such amazing imagery and information, I couldn’t help finishing this book with a sense of pride for what these countries went through. Thank you for your AMAZING book.