Iron Curtain
The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956
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Iron Curtain
Acheter pour 29,14 $
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Narrateur(s):
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Cassandra Campbell
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Auteur(s):
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Anne Applebaum
À propos de cet audio
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 AudioCe que les critiques en disent
Brilliant and Informative
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Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union dictated the programs and strategies that the Communist Party in each of the Eastern European countries followed to undermine and then try to control these societies. Everything goes back to Stalin, his implacable will, his paranoia, and the absurd, sometimes naive and mostly self-serving commitment of Party leaders to ideas and a political and economic system that in the long term did not, and could not, work.
The book details the corruption, degradation, suppression, and destruction of social institutions and civil society, in autocratic attempts to control all aspects of political, economic, social, and intellectual life in order to remake people and build new societies. The suffocating, relentless, inescapable, and tirelessly dull propaganda programs and ideological indoctrination that everyone, especially young people, were subjected to. The political purges and the hunt for scapegoats and saboteurs to explain the continuing failures of Communist economic programs, and to prove loyalty to Stalin.
Daily life became more and more unbearable. Constant psychological and economic pressures, surveillance, repression and censorship with arbitrarily enforced invisible lines, forced people to continuously make personal and moral compromises, to become reluctant collaborators, leading double lives of self-censorshop and self-silencing.
The damage that these societies suffered, and are still dealing with today, was considerable. And the lessons for what is happening today in the US, and in parts of Europe, including Hungary (and possibly Poland and Germany again in the near future), are obvious.
Applebaum knows this history, and this part of the world. Her historical analysis is excellent, and generally easy to follow, although some of the individual example narrativescan run on a bit too long.
A comprehensive critical history of the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.
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