Captives of the Cold War

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When Stalin’s armies liberated eastern Europe in 1944-45, the Soviet dictator realised that he would be able to impose his system on the countries he occupied. At the Yalta conference in early 1945, the Western allies, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, were merely being realistic when they recognised that short of starting a new war against the Soviets, there was little they could do to stop the Stalinisation of half of Europe. Churchill famously called this the descent of an Iron Curtain. Stalin promoted the idea of “Two Camps”, and the Cold War froze the frontiers for almost half a century. Some of the great nations and most cosmopolitan capitals of Europe were lost under the gruelling severity of Soviet tyranny for decades.

For years, this process was barely studied beyond the traditional Right-wing narrative that FDR had betrayed Europe at Yalta and the countries concerned were simply described together as “the Eastern bloc” without differentiating between the very different stories, cultures and experiences of countries with nothing in common beyond their miserable experience at the hands of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, perhaps the two most dystopic, brutal and murderous regimes ever to rule in human history.

But since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989-91, historians have approached this differently, aided by the re-emergence of these countries with their own special cultures, the opening of archives there and in the USSR, and the freeing of attitudes after the end of the bipolar world view of the Cold War. The result has been a rich new, more realistic approach to the war — Sir Ian Kershaw’s biographies of Hitler reveal much more about how power in Nazi Germany worked, while such outstanding works as Tim Snyder’s Bloodlands and Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire reveal the real tragedy of Mitteleuropa and the war.

Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag was part of that process and now she has written a complementary volume: Iron Curtain is a superb, revisionistic, brilliantly perceptive, often witty, totally gripping history, filled with colourful character sketches of Stalinist monsters, based on Soviet and local archives, on hundreds of interviews with survivors, and on the widest reading, that tells the dramatic, unknown and terrifying story of the Stalinisation of eastern Europe. She concentrates on Poland (where her husband Radek Sikorski is foreign minister), Hungary and East Germany. The book is full of things I didn’t know — but should have.

Stalin’s legions arrived in Budapest, Warsaw and ultimately Berlin like a Mongol horde on the rampage: their own country was ruined, their own people slaughtered in a ferocious total war of systems and races, so they had much to be furious about, but nonetheless their descent brought mass rape and looting on a huge scale. Applebaum recounts the appalling stories of women raped to death and quotes the Soviet writers and witnesses brave enough to record the horrors that they saw. The looting has its funny side too — the Soviet soldiers were obsessed with wrist-watches, which they had never seen: they often wore five on each arm.

As soon the Soviets arrived, Stalin sent in his local stooges. Trained in Moscow, the “little Stalins” became the local dictators and were in effect Stalin’s viceroys. All of them were in their own way monstrous, humourless and brutal tyrants, their names often forgotten over here but hated in their own lands: Beirut of Poland, Gottwald of Czechoslovakia, Rakosi of Hungary, Dmitrov of Bulgaria, Hoxha of Albania, Dej in Romania and Tito of Yugoslavia.

Hoxha was more Stalinist than Stalin; Tito was the only one who had liberated his own country so he possessed a legitimacy and popularity singular to Yugoslavia. The others were puppets flown in to take control and they were often almost unknown in their own countries: they arrived with a Soviet grandee, such as Marshal Voroshilov in Hungary, who was in real control. At first there was a façade of co-operation with other parties and the communists often shared power in coalitions. But Applebaum tells how they won elections by falsifying the votes and founded their own secret police even before they ran the governments. They were advised closely and supervised in detail by Stalin’s officials and by special teams of MGB (the predecessor of the KGB) officers. The communists, backed by these new mini-MGBs, gradually took control, whether by stealth or by coup d’état (the Czech foreign minister was thrown to his death from the castle in Prague).

By the end of 1948, the system of People’s Democracies was emerging: Applebaum, reaching back to her Gulag research, shows how these mini-tyrants fostered mini-cults of personality like Stalin; how Soviet advisers from the Siberian gulags created equally vile prison camps for political dissidents; how thousands of innocent middle-class people were arrested, deported; and shot; how education was Sovietised; how independent organisations were crushed or colonised; how media were monopolised — how a dictatorship was set up.

By the late Forties and early Fifties, Stalin’s control was so tight that he imposed a new terror on all these countries, just like his own Great Terror of 1937-8, complete with show trials of top communist officials, but this time there was an added poison: anti-Semitism. The communist leaders who were tried confessed their crimes and were then shot.

On Stalin’s death, rebellions broke out in Berlin, and then Warsaw and Budapest erupted in full-scale revolt in 1956: Berlin and Budapest were crushed with Soviet tanks. The tyranny lasted right up until the Nineties.

Applebaum shows how Stalin effectively created a template for tyranny that was copied in today’s Syria, Kim’s North Korea and Saddam’s Iraq, so that it remains scarily relevant. As for those countries behind the Iron Curtain, they remained damaged by their experience and the road to rebuilding civil society can only be found by examining honestly the ghosts of the past — in books as important as this.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is author of Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar

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