First, the expression "Eastern Europe" is used, as the author explains, in its "political sense", i.e. to encompass those countries of Central and Eastern Europe which fell under Soviet sway in the postwar period. It does not include countries we would now define as Eastern European, but which were in Applebaum's reference period part of the USSR (Ukraine, the Baltic States, Belarus and co.). Second, in reality, even with this clarification, the title is a bit misleading, as, for reasons which are again explained, the book concerns almost exclusively Poland, the Former GDR and Hungary, though doubtless many of their experiences were shared elsewhere.
The latter point disappointed me somewhat as I embarked on this book, which is why I mention it here, but in fact turned out to be less troublesome than I thought it might be. Given the extreme detail into which Applebaum goes, based self-evidently on vast amounts of research in doubtless difficult archives, the restriction on her scope seems fair enough. Indeed, after a while, it even crossed my mind that this might even have been a better book if she had focused on the one country where she feels most at home, Poland.
A little biographical detail sheds some light here. Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist is also the wife of Radek Sikorsky, former exile, now Foreign Minister of his country (and recent bearer of home truths to his old eurosceptic mates in the UK). It takes nothing away from Applebaum's achievement with this book to suggest that the inside knowledge gained through marital association clearly enriches (and perhaps somewhat flavours) the parts on Poland.
In any case, this is a book which goes into great and perceptive detail on the experience of three countries in the immediate post war period, beginning with unsparing accounts of the brutal realities of conquest and "liberation" by the Red Army, working through to the period of "High Stalinism" in the early 1950s and concluding with the unsuccessful revolts in East German (1953) and Hungary (1956).
This is a heavily-reviewed book, and one which has received huge amounts of deserved praise. Though there is no doubting the author's own point of view - she is scathing about the projects of the Eastern European communists from the outset - she acknowledges the fact that many of them were at least sincere in the belief that they would be popular in the immediate postwar period (though no such concessions are made in respect of their Soviet masters), albeit far less sincere in the methods they used to induce populations to accept their rule. However, it is very rapidly clear that regular Poles, East Germans and Hungarians will remain stubborn in their refusal to conform to the communists' expectations of them, for example in their insistence on forming (or re-forming) independent civil society organisations and that the methods to force them into line will necessarily become ever more coercive, underhand and violent.
The basic tale of this book is the progressive imposition of stalinist methods and ideology on what were naturally free and independent-minded societies, that is to say the crushing of the subtitle. It is a well-told tale, but one which also makes a point which seems to have been little remarked upon in the reviews I have read. That point is about the basic failure of stalinism to achieve its ends, to the surprise not only of the stalinists themselves, but also of Western observers. The stalinists set out explicitly to create "soviet man", a new kind of person who would simply not be able to conceive of life outside a totalitarian system and whose assumptions would be entirely those of the system. It was generally assumed that, once the communists had had the opportunity to work on a generation or two of young people, processed through an educational system designed to leave them in no doubt as to the merits of scientific socialism, and once a generation of workers had been indoctrinated to be the heroic stakhanovites of ubiquitous propaganda, living in purpose-built socialist cities, populations would become slavish, unthinking servants of the regime. Experience, albeit admittedly brief in relative terms, is shown by Applebaum to demonstrate the exact opposite. For all that the population is indeed browbeaten into grudging acceptance, and for all the many small accommodations with the system which most ordinary individuals were obliged to make, never can it be said that any of the societies described became what their rulers hoped - once even believed - they would become: the soviet future. Of course, there were too many inherent contradictions and failures for that ever to happen, but one optimistic message of this book is that not even brute force, propaganda and relentless indoctrination can provide a stable substitute for the real thing.
Recommendation? A masterly history, providing real added value (at least for a Western readership), well worth the read if this extraordinary period interests you at all.
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