They invested much hope in education, believing they could indoctrinate an entire generation. Applebaum also explores the tactics employed to keep people in line: fear and intimidation, of course, but also a massive propaganda industry that sought to convince everyone that things were better than they were, but not nearly as good as they would be in five years or so. Internment camps and prisons became the true growth industries. Applebaum shows how the communists gained political control of individual countries (they were sometimes surprised in “elections” how unpopular they were), then charts how-in the service of their iron ideology-they systematically destroyed economies, organizations, the arts, education, the press, the judiciary, the church, the entertainment industries and every other social institution. While many of the Allies were thinking of home, the Soviets had grander and grimmer ideas. The Russians were plowing through Eastern Europe on their way to Berlin. Realizing she could not tell the whole story in one volume, Washington Post and Slate columnist Applebaum ( Gulag: A History, 2003, etc.) focuses on Poland, East Germany and Hungary and shows how their stories were representative. A Pulitzer Prize–winning author returns with the story of those dark decades in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union slammed the prison doors on people, cultures and countries.
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