Anne Applebaum's 'Iron Curtain' is a masterful history of control and defiance in post-war Eastern Europe
By Keith Lowe, 05.11.2012
The communist regimes that took over Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War were among the most humourless administrations ever created – a forgivable fault, perhaps, had the unbearable earnestness of their political project not been so ripe for satire. These were people who wrote books for toddlers with titles likeSix-Year-Old Bronek and the Six-Year Plan. Their posters bore such immortal slogans as “every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to capitalist imperialism”, and their idea of civic art was to commission paintings depicting “the technology and organisation of cattle slaughter”
As Anne Applebaum shows in her impressive new history of the period, anyone who made fun of such absurdities could pay a high price: she tells of one East German cabaret troupe who satirised communist officialdom and was jailed for nine months. Trying to avoid party propaganda was not an option either. The only pre-war civic institutions that were allowed to reopen were those that already had communism at their core: everything else – charities, scout groups, even chess clubs – was either shut down or assimilated. Jazz music was also made illegal in East Germany, partly because it was so much fun: communist bureaucrats could not bear the idea that young people might enjoy something that had not sprung from their own ideology.
By the time Stalin died in 1953, the Communist Party had an official line on everything – how people should work, how they should shop, how they should relax, even what clothes they should wear. Too late, Eastern Europeans realised the enormity of the revolution being thrust upon them: Soviet puppets did not merely want control of their governments, they wanted total control. They wanted to create a world full of perfect socialists – a breed of man that dissidents sarcastically named Homo sovieticus – who not only accepted their subservience but embraced it, and who were so steeped in ideology that any alternative was quite literally unthinkable.
It is the pursuit of this monochrome vision of society that lies at the heart of Applebaum’s book. She begins by describing the sophisticated but often brutal way in which Soviet-trained communists took over the public sphere – starting with police forces and radio stations, and ending with their usurping of national governments. The sheer speed of this transformation was astonishing: between 1945 and 1948, the communist parties of Eastern Europe dismantled and replaced social systems that had existed for centuries.
The second half of the book describes the logical conclusion of this quest for control, the attempt to invade the private sphere. This was less successful: indeed, as the author points out, it was doomed to fail. In a world where everything was considered political, every act – even something trifling, like wearing an unusual pair of socks – could be interpreted as an act of defiance. The reason why the system was so humourless was not only because such fanatically earnest people are never much fun, but also because, as George Orwell said, every joke was by its very nature “a tiny revolution”.
Applebaum’s description of this remarkable time is everything a good history book should be: brilliantly and comprehensively researched, beautifully and shockingly told, encyclopedic in scope, meticulous in detail. I have only one or two small criticisms. First, it is not a history of Eastern Europe, as the subtitle suggests, but of three countries – Poland, Hungary and East Germany: anyone expecting to read about how similar events were in Romania, or how different they were in Yugoslavia, will be disappointed. Secondly, it is a book which describes a mostly urban experience – there is little here that describes the equally devastating events in rural areas, such as the forced collectivisation of land. The epilogue is also weaker than the rest of the book, and feels like a bit of an afterthought.
But such quibbles seem petty when stacked up against the book’s achievements. First and foremost of these is Applebaum’s ability to take a dense and complex subject, replete with communist acronyms and impenetrable jargon, and make it not only informative but enjoyable – and even occasionally witty. In that respect alone, it is a true masterpiece.
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