Applebaum notes with vivid clarity how the military occupation gave the Kremlin the ability to install loyalists, many of whom had fled their own countries to live in the Soviet Union before and during the war. Focusing primarily on Poland, Hungary and East Germany, Ms. How was the Soviet Union able to impose its system on other nations? To answer that question, historian Anne Applebaum has put together an important and highly readable book on the history of the first decade of the Cold War. The Iron Curtain, marking the Soviet sphere of influence, stood for more than four decades. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sophia in what I must call the Soviet sphere,” Churchill said. Wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill would note in a speech in Fulton, Mo., in 1946 that an Iron Curtain stretched from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic across the European Continent.”Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. He saw the occupied lands as a buffer in a future war and an opportunity to set up puppet governments. Iron Curtain is a brilliant history of a brutal period in European history, but also a reminder of how fragile free societies are, and how vulnerable they can be to the predations of determined and unscrupulous enemies.In that long and bloody slog, the Red Army took a priceless piece of real estate that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had no intention of giving up. Within a remarkably short period after the end of the war, Eastern Europe had been ruthlessly Stalinised. She also chronicles individual lives to show the rapid choices people had to make - to fight, to flee, or to collaborate. Ranging widely across new archival material and many sources unknown in English, she follows the communists' tactics as they bullied, threatened and murdered their way to power. Applebaum describes, in calm but devastating detail, how political parties, the church, the media, young people's organisations - the institutions of civil society on every level - were all quickly eviscerated. This book explains how Communism was imposed on these previously free societies in the decade after the end of the Second World War. Instead, they found themselves subjected to a tyranny that was in many ways as inhuman as the one which they had just escaped.

Once the Nazis were defeated in 1945, the people of Central and Eastern Europe expected to recover the lives they had led before 1939.

From Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag, comes a major new work of historical and moral reckoning: the story of life behind the Iron Curtain.

Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum