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2014 Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane H-Diplo Labrosse Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii H-Diplo Roundtable Review h-diplo.org/roundtables Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux Volume XVI, No. 8 (2014) 23 October 2014 Introduction by Norman Naimark Anne Applebaum. The Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern Europe. New York: Doubleday, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-385-51569-6 (hardcover, $35.00); 978-1-4000-9593-3 (paperback, $17.95). URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XVI-8 or http://h-diplo.org/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XVI-8.pdf Contents Introduction by Norman Naimark, Stanford University ........................................................... 2 Review by Mary Fulbrook, University College London ............................................................. 6 Review by Peter Kenez, University of California, Santa Cruz ................................................. 11 Review by Molly Pucci, Stanford University ........................................................................... 15 Author’s Response by Anne Applebaum, Legatum Institute in London, Washington Post, Slate ........................................................................................................................................ 19 © 2014 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 8 (2014) Introduction by Norman Naimark, Stanford University ne after another, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell like a row of dominos in 1989. Then the seemingly impossible happened: the superpower, which O had created, molded, and nurtured these regimes in the first place, the Soviet Union, itself collapsed in 1991 almost as easily as did the others. The speed and seeming ease with which these events took place should not diminish in any way the long and hard struggle carried out by opponents and dissidents in all these countries, the Soviet Union included. The quick dissolution of the communist regimes should also not obscure the fact that the Soviet bloc was a powerful combination of military prowess and authoritarian force that was successful in frustrating western ambitions in Europe and the world for nearly four decades after the end of the Second World War. Many of the countries of Eastern Europe have emerged from the long, hard period of communism to flourish as democracies. Poland has overcome severe economic instability and internal political warring to become a reliable and economically dynamic leader of the European Union, symbolized by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s recent election as President of the European Council. The Federal Republic of Germany incorporated the German Democratic Republic and made the once divided Berlin its capital, putting an end to an inherently unstable geopolitical arrangement in the center of Europe. The former Yugoslavia broke into warring parts. But the violence of the 1990s has receded while Croatia, following Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania, has joined the European Union. Despite occasional nostalgia for the (often imagined) generous social system under ‘real existing socialism,’ communism is a bad memory for most adult citizens of Eastern Europe, something they would just as soon forget. But, as Anne Applebaum reminds us in Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956, the history of the Soviet bloc provides the contemporary reader in and outside the region with an important lesson of how societies can be undermined and taken over by sometimes quite brutal non-democratic forces. Applebaum’s book comes at a particularly appropriate time. The archives of many countries in Eastern Europe are now available for research. The last ‘veterans’ of the Stalinist period are still alive and ready to talk. There has been a notable development of the historiography in each of the individual countries, though cross-regional and comparative studies are regrettably few and far between. Not only is the timing right for Applebaum’s study, but the author is a perfect candidate for writing a widely accessible book that encapsulates the experience of the Soviet occupation and the communist takeover, as well as the coercion, indoctrination, manipulation, and adaptation that followed. A Pulitzer-Prize winner for her masterful history of the Soviet Union’s Gulag system of prison forced labor camps,1 Applebaum is a brilliant writer and sharp analyst of both Soviet and East European history. She lives in Poland part of the time, and she knows the region and a number of its languages. She works as a journalist and knows how to find 1 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003). H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 8 (2014) little-known material and seek out and interview relevant informants. Almost all of her reviewers, even the critical ones, praise Applebaum for her ability to enliven history with gripping stories of the historical struggles for Eastern Europe. At the same time, Applebaum operates within the historiographical framework that has developed over the past half century to understand the evolution of Eastern Europe after the war. The questions about Soviet intentions and actions, which are at the heart of any investigation of the period, are not easy to answer. Did Stalin intend from the very beginning to Sovietize the territory under his occupation at the end of the war? Was the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany fated to become a communized country of its own? Was it possible for the East Central European states, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, all with ostensibly democratic systems at the beginning of the peace, to exist as multi-party parliamentary states with free elections, as called for in Allied agreements? Was Moscow going to allow cultural and political heterogeneity within its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe? Related to that, did Stalin take seriously the early Soviet propaganda about ‘national roads to socialism,’ which would allow for the countries of Eastern Europe to combine their own individual national traditions with general ideas about socialism? Was he going to stick to his repeated statements that they did not historically require a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ as did the Soviet Union? Was there any chance that they would be allowed to evolve differently, as implied by the ‘national roads’ template? Applebaum’s insertion into the historiography -- and her answers to these questions – are unambiguous. Stalin and the Soviets beat, terrorized, tortured, swindled, and cajoled the East Europeans into compliance from the very beginning. Moscow forced on the East Europeans a totalitarian system, a foreign ideology, and alien political leaders, who were little known to the peoples involved and often were as Soviet in their outlooks as they were Polish, Hungarian, or German. There could not be any real ‘national roads to socialism.’ This was all a smokescreen for the Stalinization of society and politics in the region. Real civil society was destroyed and an artificial Sovietized one was erected in its place. The way this worked in reality was frequently physically savage, but also could be devastating as a psychological process, as demonstrated by Czeslaw Milosz’s classic study, Captive Mind, and more recently, Marci Shore’s Caviar and Ashes.2 The reviewers generally think that Applebaum does well as far as she goes, but that she needs to push her analysis further. Comparing the development of the secret police in the region, Molly Pucci suggests that the East European revolutions need to be thought of as taking place in different stages, which again brings up the question of Soviet intentionality. Pucci also poses another issue that pervades the historiography of postwar Eastern Europe and that is how much of this history was determined by Soviet leaders and agents, and how much by the East European communists themselves. In his foundational study of universities under Stalinism, John Connelly talked about the “self-Sovietization” of East 2 Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonka (New York: Vintage, 1990); Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: a Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 3 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XVI, No. 8 (2014) Central Europe.3 To what extent did East Europeans talk and work themselves into a Soviet system, as argued with respect to the Czechs by Bradley Abrams?4 Peter Kenez focuses on the historiographical issue, mentioned earlier, of whether Stalin “knew in May 1945 how Europe would look in May 1948.” He believes only Poland should be considered a fait accompli. Otherwise, the ‘history’ of East Central Europe was pretty much up for grabs. But he is right to state that there are any number of accomplished historians and commentators who agree with Applebaum. Kenez, like Pucci, believes the period Applebaum deals with, 1945-1956, has several distinct sub-periods within it that cannot be collapsed into one. From the very beginning of the historiography of East Central Europe after the war, with the work of Hugh Seton-Watson and Zbigniew Brzezinski, this issue of how one should periodize the history of the Soviet bloc has been crucial.5 Mary Fulbrook’s criticism of Applebaum’s rendition of “popular history” needs to be evaluated as a problem of genre rather than historiography. But Fulbrook adds the important issue of how much influence the West, especially the United States,