Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1945-1956, by Anne Applebaum

This was the perfect book to read after completing The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, telling, as it does, the rest of the story, of what happened after Hitler's death and the fall of Nazi Germany, to the Eastern European nations "liberated" by the Soviet Union.  The story of how the Soviet Union sought, from the years 1945, until the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956, to convert the citizens of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Ukraine into committed communists is absolutely fascinating, and highly disturbing.

They tried, at first, under the pretense of cooperating with the other WWII Allies, and perhaps even believing that their ideas deserved to be implemented on their own merits, to have the people of these nations "choose" communist leaders (somewhat) democratically, through elections which were only partially corrupt. When that proved a complete failure, and it became clear that the citizens of Eastern Europe didn't want what they were selling, the Communists quickly gave up all pretenses of democracy (though they still utilized the word, as well as many others) and banned opposition political parties, took over the control of all private organizations, starting with scouts and other youth organizations, formally banned the newspapers they had previously simply refused to provide with paper, and took over formal control of the radio, the remaining newspapers (utilized to editorialize about the evils of reactionary religion), previously private businesses, large and small, and implemented their command economy and totalitarian political system.  Soon, soon, soon, they told the cooperative people (the ones who weren't being arrested and sent to the Gulag or shot) prosperity will come.  It never did, while in Western Europe, the economies flourished.  And after 44 years, the Soviet Communists finally gave up and went home.

I have a relative who is a Marxist professor of Latin American studies at a University in the United States. He told me once that Marxism had never been tested or tried in its correct form, so there was no way to actually claim that its theories had been proven false.  The next time someone tells me that, I will use this book . . . to hit them repeatedly in the nose.

One positive thing must though be stated in favor of the Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe, which I learned from reading this book back to back with the Rise and Fall.  When they finally conceded the reality that their experiment was an unsustainable failure, and withdrew from the nations of Eastern Europe, the Soviets did at least leave behind living citizens, psychologically traumatized from the decades long effort to kill their souls, to be sure, but still alive, residing in nations that were at least sufficiently established to be withdrawn from.

Had the Nazis won WWII, and fully implemented the plans they had already begun to execute while the war was still waging in the early 1940s, there would be no Poland, no Hungary, no Czechoslovakia for anyone to have left in 1989, and no native populations of living Polish, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian or Ukrainian citizens to turn their countries back over to.  Hitler's plan was to leave the peoples of these nations completely destitute, and reduce the "inferior" slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia to absolute slavery.  The vast majority of them were to be slaughtered, or simply left to die in the inevitable post-War famines.  As for the rest, they were to be denied education.  They were to be denied religion.  And they were to be enslaved, either to farm their own prior lands for the benefit of Germany, or as imported slaves living within Germany. The Soviet Union at least pretended to be striving to build a better world for the people of these countries, and many Soviets may have actually believed in the propaganda. After all, communism was a powerful idea, which continues to deceive many otherwise intelligent people even today.

I've always been bothered that "victory" in WWII still left the peoples of Eastern Europe (including Poland, on whose behalf Britain had declared war against Germany in the first place) enslaved by a foreign dictatorial power.  So, understanding the difference between what was offered by the Nazis and what was offered by the Soviets does at least give me some comfort.  Communism was, at least, the lesser of the two evils.

Still, Communism has ultimately left behind even more corpses than Naziism did, if not all of them in Eastern Europe.  Its beliefs and ideology, and why they are false and why they fail, needs to be understood.  So too, how leftists seek to dominate the institutions of a society in order to propagate their ideology must also be understood.  For the cold war between atheist collectivists and religious believers in free enterprise never really ended.  It just became more subtle, and moved, geographically, from Berlin to the United States of America.  It's a war that will never be completely over, because it is, essentially and at its core, the same war described in the Book of Revelation and the Pearl of Great Price.  With the same competing ideologies.  As a wise man once said, in history, the sets and costumes may change, but the plot never does.  This book is an important contribution to our knowledge of left-wing totalitarianism and it deserves to be far more widely read than it will be, and to be promoted far more vigorously than it has been (by our own leftist-dominated educational, media, and similar institutions).  It is dedicated "to those Eastern Europeans who refused to live within a lie."  I greatly fear there will continue to be a great need for such people in the future.  If we can find them.