WHEN THE IRON CURTAIN FELL
“FROM STETTIN IN THE BALTIC to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”
– Winston Churchill, March 5, 1946
Most people associate the phrase “iron curtain” with Winston Churchill’s famous 1946 speech in Fulton, Mo., where the former British prime minister warned of the rise of totalitarianism in Soviet-controlled Central and Eastern Europe.
But Churchill actually coined the phrase almost a year earlier, in a telegram to thenU.S. president Harry Truman at the close of the Second World War in Europe. Referring to the zone occupied by the Soviet Red Army, Churchill wrote: “an iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind.”
In fact, notes Anne Applebaum in her magisterial history of eastern Europe from 1944 to 1956, Churchill knew full well what was going on under Soviet occupation: rape, pillage and the systematic destruction of democratic institutions.
How the Soviet Union crushed eastern Europe under its heel while the world stood by is the subject of this meticulously researched, masterfully recounted book. Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag, A History (Doubleday, 2003), focuses primarily on Poland, East Germany and Hungary in this account of the early Cold War from a European perspective. A columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, she is married to Polish Foreign Affairs Minister Radek Sikorski and divides her time between Washington and Poland.
Nothing in the history or culture of central Europe predestined it to become part of the Soviet orbit, Applebaum writes. The countries that would become known as the Eastern Bloc had deep economic and cultural ties to Western Europe, well-established civil and religious institutions, and lively journalistic traditions. When elections were held across the region at the end of the war, Communists lost by a wide margin. Yet none of that stopped Stalin’s Soviet Union from establishing so-called People’s Democracies that maintained an iron grip on power for nearly half a century.
Despite the striking disparities between the countries of eastern Europe, the Communist takeover followed the same pattern everywhere, Applebaum writes. The Soviets set up secret police forces to spy on, arrest and murder perceived enemies. They put Communists in control of radio stations. They harassed or banned community organizations like church groups and the Boy Scouts.
It didn’t take much to run afoul of the authorities. In 1945, 15-year-old Gisela Gneist of Wittenberg was arrested with two dozen other teenagers for starting a “political party” to discuss democracy. She was tortured and sentenced to Sachsenhausen, one of several former Nazi concentration camps revived by the Soviets. In 1947, the Communists shut down the Warsaw YMCA, branded a “tool of bourgeois-fascism” for distributing free clothes, books and food and offering activities for youth.
As “little Stalins” like Bolesław Beirut in Poland, Walter Ulbricht in the German Democratic Republic and Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary consolidated their power, an ever-growing portion of the population came under scrutiny. By 1954, the Polish secret police had a register of six million suspected enemies of the state — one in three adults.
Totalitarianism — defined by Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini as “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” — depended on the destruction of civil society, Applebaum writes. “The devastation of the war, the exhaustion of its victims, the carefully targeted terror and ethnic cleansing” all facilitated the establishment of repressive regimes, she notes.
The “extraordinary achievement of Soviet communism,” according to Applebaum, “was the system’s ability to get so many apolitical people in so many countries to play along without much protest.”
Five-year economic plans and show trials of purported traitors could not conceal lack of freedom, or chronic shortages of food, consumer goods and housing. But while conditions improved after Stalin’s death in 1953, dissidence was not an option. In 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush a nationwide uprising. In 1968, the Prague Spring also resulted in a brutal crackdown.
Yet the system contained its own seeds of destruction. “By trying to control every aspect of society, the regimes had turned every aspect of society into a potential form of protest,” Applebaum writes. When 10 million Poles joined the Solidarity trade union in 1980, the end was in sight. Nine years later, Berlin residents dismantled the wall dividing East from West as Communist regimes crumbled across the region.
But the human cost was incalculable. “If nothing else,” Applebaum writes, “the history of postwar Stalinization proves just how fragile civilization can turn out to be.”