![]() ![]() They genuinely believed they were there to free the working class from exploitation, and thought ordinary people would welcome them. At first, the Communist functionaries in the main do not come across as bad people. The Soviets opened the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and gave freedom to the few Jews who had survived the war.īut that is the most minor of flaws and it is alien to the spirit of the book, which allows the reader to judge the characters of the participants for themselves. Poles could speak Polish in public for the first time in years. On their arrival in Poland, they initially co-operated with the Home Army, the underground force that had battled the Germans since 1939. ![]() The tale is, by turns, upsetting, depressing and uplifting, as we see how humans reacted to the pressures put on them by forces completely outside their control.The distinction between whether the Soviet soldiers liberated or occupied the citizens of what became the Eastern bloc is a crucial one. Applebaum starts her story – which focuses on East Germany, Hungary and Poland – with the Red Army's arrival in Eastern Europe in 1944. But it takes the same theme – the destruction of society and imposition of Soviet dictatorship – and expands it to Eastern Europe. It is not a sequel chronologically speaking, since Gulag traced the impact of Joseph Stalin's camps to the present day. Iron Curtain deserves as much praise as its predecessor. ![]()
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