Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

In the summer of 1945, Soviet forces occupied large parts of Eastern Europe. Within a decade, every country in the region had been transformed into a communist satellite state. How did it happen? How was a free press replaced overnight? How were churches suppressed, youth organisations captured, civil society dismantled? How do you take a country where most people do not want communism and turn it into one that cannot resist it?

Anne Applebaum answers these questions in meticulous, devastating detail. Drawing on newly opened archives from Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, and on the testimonies of hundreds of people who lived through the transformation, Iron Curtain reconstructs the full machinery of Soviet-style takeover: the specific techniques, the specific actors, the specific sequence of events that converted free societies into totalitarian ones.

The follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and equally essential. An indispensable account of one of the twentieth century’s defining catastrophes — and a warning that retains every ounce of its urgency. Published by Penguin.