When Germany invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, the date that W. H. Auden used for his famous poem—“I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”—Poland had commitments in hand from France and Britain to come to its aid if its independence was threatened. In Warsaw, in the first week of September, enthusiastic crowds gathered outside the French and British Embassies. They expected that Berlin would be bombed and that British and French forces would attack Germany from the west.
But the British and the French did neither of those things, and the war did not take long. On September 27th, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans. Meanwhile, on September 17th, pursuant to an agreement between Stalin and Hitler, Poland was invaded from the east by the Red Army. That campaign lasted less than a month. By October, Poland was in the hands of its two ancient enemies.
For the next five years, those enemies did their best to destroy it. And then, for forty-five years after that, Poland found itself locked in a totalitarian cage whose key was kept in Moscow. No one had come to the rescue of Poland in 1939, and no one came to its rescue after 1945. In the end, Poland had to rescue itself.
The Polish story is the heart of Anne Applebaum’s remarkable book, “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe” (Doubleday), a book that reanimates a world that was largely hidden from Western eyes, and that many people who lived and suffered in it would prefer to forget.
Although eastern Poland was one of the most impoverished areas in Central Europe, it was better off than the Soviet Union. As soon as the Soviets gained control of it, in 1939, they looted whatever they could get their hands on. Representatives of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (also known as the N.K.V.D., predecessor of the K.G.B.) carried out an extermination program targeting the Polish élite.
In the most notorious case, almost fifteen thousand Polish officers, most of them professionals in the reserve corps, were arrested and deported. More than four thousand were shot and buried in a forest outside Katyn, in western Russia. The rest went to special camps. Fewer than five hundred were ever heard of again. In all, 1.2 million Poles were deported to the U.S.S.R. by the Soviets from their half of Poland, an area with a population of thirteen million. Half of them died in captivity.
In the west, Hitler embarked on his plans to Germanize the country by ridding it of Jews, driving out the Slavic population, and resettling the land with Volksdeutsche. All the major Nazi death camps were situated in annexed or German-occupied Poland. Of the estimated 5.7 million European Jews killed in the Holocaust, some three million were Polish—ninety per cent of all the Jews in Poland. Although the British and the Americans knew of the extermination camps, they refused to bomb the railroad tracks used to transport the victims.
To Stalin’s astonishment, in June, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the start of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, which trapped Poland and the other nations of Eastern Europe in the middle of what Hitler planned as a Vernichtungskrieg—a war of extermination, a war without rules, total war.
After nearly losing Moscow, the Red Army turned the tide and pushed the Germans back through the lands they had conquered: Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Poland, countries that were thus invaded twice in five years. As the Red Army “liberated,” it plundered, or disassembled and sent to the Soviet Union, virtually everything of value, from wristwatches to steel factories. The N.K.V.D. mopped up by deporting or executing “anti-Soviet elements”—those among the local partisans and nationalist political groups who had managed to survive the similar extermination policies of the Einsatzgruppen.
When the Red Army reached Poland, in the summer of 1944, it waited on the banks of the Vistula, just outside Warsaw, while the S.S., under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, killed fifteen thousand Polish partisans, who had staged an armed uprising, and more than two hundred thousand civilians. At the end of the fighting, half a million Poles were sent to camps, and the rest were deported as slave laborers to Germany. On Hitler’s orders, the city was razed. When the Red Army finally entered Warsaw, in January, 1945, the streets were filled with dead bodies. No one living remained.
Except in Bulgaria, which has cultural ties to Russia, Soviet soldiers not only looted but raped, almost systematically, in the countries they passed through. In eastern Germany alone, up to two million women are believed to have been raped by Soviet soldiers. But, apart from complaining about Stalin’s refusal to come to the aid of the Warsaw Poles, Britain and the United States did nothing to stop the pillage of Eastern Europe.
Before the war in Europe ended, in May, 1945, the Soviets had already begun to establish “people’s democracies” in the countries of Eastern Europe. When Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech, in March, 1946, it was clear that Stalin had no intention of withdrawing from Eastern Europe, or of allowing regimes unfriendly to the Soviet Union to install themselves there. A year later, President Truman delivered the speech that announced the Cold War. In a world divided between democratic and totalitarian states, he told a joint session of Congress, it would be the policy of the United States “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
This warning had no effect on the countries of Eastern Europe. For the next six years, the Soviets, using tactics of intimidation, imprisonment, execution, assassination, election rigging, and show trials, eliminated all political opposition. It turned those nations into one-party states and installed puppet regimes. This was not done with any great subtlety. Eleven months after Truman’s speech, in February, 1948, Czech Communists staged a coup and threw the Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, out a window of the Czernin Palace.* The United States did not intervene.
Despite occasional talk of “liberation” and “rollback,” non-intervention remained American policy toward Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War. Strikes and protests in East Germany in 1953 and Poland in 1956 were violently suppressed, and, although the strikers had hoped otherwise, the United States did not get involved.
Protests in Hungary in 1956 turned into a full-scale revolution, and the Soviet-backed government was overthrown. The Red Army invaded. More than two thousand Hungarians were killed, two hundred thousand fled the country, and the leader of the new government, the reform-minded Communist Imre Nagy, was arrested, tried in secret, and hanged, as an example to other deviationists. These revolutionaries, too, had expected help from the West, but help never came. The American government assured the Kremlin that it had no national interest at stake in Hungary. When some people complained that Radio Free Europe had been urging Hungarians to resist Soviet domination for years, Eisenhower pointed out that the United States had never advocated violent resistance.
The United States did nothing to stop construction of the wall that encircled West Berlin in 1961, except to compel the Soviets to agree that, in principle, Western movements anywhere inside the city would not be impeded. That principle was never tested. In August, 1968, five hundred thousand Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and, a few months later, overthrew the reformist government of Alexander Dubcek. (Auden used the date of the invasion as the title of another poem, which begins, “The Ogre does what ogres can, / Deeds quite impossible for Man, / But one prize is beyond his reach: / The Ogre cannot master Speech.”) No Western power interfered.
Nor did the United States or any other democratic nation play a significant role, beyond cheerleading, in the Velvet Revolution, in 1989, which led to the overthrow of Communism and the collapse of the Soviet empire. For forty-five years, the Soviets were allowed to have their way in Eastern Europe, a state of affairs that was generally officially ignored, and sometimes even officially denied. In 1976, President Gerald Ford, who had been in Washington for twenty-seven years, claimed, in a debate with Jimmy Carter, that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” (He later clarified this by saying that Eastern Europeans did not feel dominated.)
This grant of immunity gave the Soviet Union a free hand to carry out one of the most radical experiments in social engineering in history. Between 1945 and 1953, the year that Stalin died, the societies of Eastern Europe were remade from top to bottom. The goal was not to force people to serve a new political system. The goal was to produce a new kind of human being, a human being who would not need to be forced to serve the system. The creation of that new human being was the end that justified every means, and those means are the subject of Applebaum’s book: how the Soviets and their local apparatchiks attempted to build the perfect socialist world.
Applebaum’s previous book was “Gulag: A History,” published in 2003. It gave names and faces to a numbing statistic. Between 1929, when Stalin had firmly consolidated his position as Lenin’s heir, and 1953, eighteen million people were sent to labor camps in the Soviet Union. More than two million died there. Applebaum used memoirs and oral testimony to give a picture of how the Gulag worked—what it was like to be caught in the insatiable maw of Stalinist purgation, to be arrested, transported, incarcerated, abused, and, for the lucky, after many years, released. She helped to humanize an inhumanity.
The new book is a re-creation of life on the streets and in the prisons of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and East Germany in the years of Stalinization. “Iron Curtain” gives us some idea of what it was like to be trapped in the Soviet experiment, to be a witness to the demolition and reconstruction of one’s environment. Applebaum wants to give flesh to a concept. “I sought to gain an understanding of real totalitarianism, not totalitarianism in theory, but totalitarianism in practice,” she says.
The term originated in Italy. According to Abbott Gleason, in his standard history of the concept, “Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War” (1995), it was first used, in 1923, by an opponent of Benito Mussolini, who referred critically to the Fascist government as a “sistema totalitaria.” Mussolini didn’t mind at all. By 1925, he was referring proudly to “la nostra feroce volontà totalitaria”—“our fierce totalitarian will.” By “totalitarian,” he meant a politics that aimed at the total transformation of society.
In Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, the agent of this transformation was not the state. It was the party. The state, especially the judiciary, was simply the party’s bureaucratic dummy. This was because the purpose of totalitarian transformation was not mere efficiency—“making the trains run on time,” as people used to say of Fascist Italy. Nor was it the enjoyment of power for power’s sake, as many representations of totalitarian regimes, such as George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-four,” suggested. The purpose was the realization of a law of historical development, the correct understanding of which was a monopoly of the party. In Hitler’s Germany, life was transformed in the name of a single goal: racial purity. (“The state is only a vessel,” Hitler wrote, in “Mein Kampf,” “and the race is what it contains.”) In the Soviet Union, it was done in the name of the classless society and the workers’ state.
The authority of these chiliastic ideologies is what made totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia different from traditional dictatorships, and what made them terrifying. They were not just static systems of hyper-control. They were dynamic and dangerously unstable. They regarded the present as a temporary stage in history’s unfolding, and the fantastic unrealizability of what was to be—pure Germanness, or the classless society—made what merely was something only to be destroyed or overcome. Everything was expendable.
People were jailed or deported or executed in totalitarian states not for being threats to the regime but for being threats to the future, a much broader jurisdiction. Applebaum tells of a Polish man who was executed for possession of an unlicensed radio, of a printer who was sentenced to five years for a typographical error in an obituary of Stalin, of teen-agers who were sent to camps or prison for making faces during a lecture on Stalin. By 1954, six million people in Poland were registered as criminal or suspicious elements. That was almost a quarter of the population.
But the main target of totalitarian remaking was not the individual dissident or nonconformist. It was civil society itself. Any organization that operated outside the purview of the Party was eliminated or nationalized. In East Germany, all hiking clubs and chess clubs were banned. Almost every restaurant in Budapest became a “people’s cafeteria” or a state-owned workers’ pub. In Poland, the Y.M.C.A. was denounced as a “tool of bourgeois-fascism.” All youth organizations were subsumed into a single Communist-run agency. Universities were purged. Psychoanalysis, “the product of decaying capitalism and anti-state ideology,” was banned.
Most important for countries like Poland, the Party tried to neutralize the influence of the Catholic Church. Church schools were nationalized; monasteries and seminaries were shut down; Catholic hospitals, nursing homes, and charities were closed. Church leaders were blackmailed, persecuted, and harassed. Priests were recruited as informants on other priests: by 1953, a thousand Polish priests were in jail.
In one area, repressive policies met their match: popular entertainment. Before the war, Hungary had the third-largest film industry in Europe. Following the rise of Hitler, many of its directors and cinematographers emigrated to Hollywood (where they helped to create American film noir). After 1945, under Communist rule, Eastern European filmmakers were obliged to produce works of socialist realism, anthems to the workers’ state. But the system of close political monitoring was relatively ineffective, and did not last. It’s easy enough to censor dialogue in a script, much harder to censor images, or metaphorical expressions. Against significant odds, there was an Eastern European cinema of some distinction during the Cold War.
The Party also struggled with the effects of popular music. Kids in Poland and East Germany proved to be little different from kids in San Francisco or Liverpool. The more the Party cracked down on jazz and rock and roll, the more giddily defiant the music’s youthful consumers became. As in the West, adult disapproval grounded the otherwise free-floating notion that there is something rebellious and world-changing about the rock-and-roll beat. If people were trying to silence it, it must be threatening to someone.
“The Wild One,” “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rock Around the Clock” caused youth riots in both East and West Germany in 1955 and 1956. In the notorious “cultural Cold War,” during which the C.I.A. covertly supported—and the State Department and American museums and foundations overtly funded—the dissemination of American art, books, literary and intellectual journalism, dance, theatre, and music, the one product that can plausibly be argued to have made a difference in the eventual overthrow of Communism was rock and roll. Bill Haley and Frank Zappa likely did more to inspire the dissidents in Eastern Europe than Jackson Pollock or the writers at Partisan Review.
The Soviet Union controlled its colonies through a network of local élites, who ceded ultimate authority to the Kremlin in exchange for what they imagined would be personal privileges and a reasonable degree of job security. The members of most of these élites were Moscow-trained Communists, men whom Stalin could (provisionally, for totalitarianism is a paranoid system) trust. As Charles Maier explained in “Among Empires” (2006), this is how empires traditionally work: local élites are created that ape the manners and values of the metropole—the imperial center—whether it is Moscow or Washington, London or Rome.
In Eastern Europe, these leaders became what Applebaum calls “little Stalins”: Klement Gottwald, in Czechoslovakia; Georgi Dimitrov, in Bulgaria; Walter Ulbricht, in East Germany; Mátyás Rákosi, in Hungary—men who had spent part or all of the war years in Moscow. They were permitted to act as though they were the heads of independent states (which seems to have fooled Gerald Ford, at least), and to play, cautiously, on nationalist and ethnic sentiments, particularly anti-Semitism. But their fealty was to Moscow. Two areas were too important to be left even to puppets, Applebaum says: radio and the secret police. The Soviets controlled both from the moment their troops arrived.
The complicated psychology of the artist or intellectual who is forced to adapt to a totalitarian regime became well known in the West through books such as Czeslaw Milosz’s “The Captive Mind” (1953), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle” (1968), and Milan Kundera’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1979). The value of “Iron Curtain” is that it is concerned with the careers of political and religious figures whom few people in the West have heard of, with the fates of local traditions and small-scale organizations, and with the experiences of the average citizen.
“Iron Curtain” is a post-Cold War book. It is not a call to arms, or a warning about hidden dangers in our own society. It is history, an effort to understand and bring to life a vanished world. Applebaum hardly views the Soviet Union and its Eastern European experiment with equanimity, but she is principally interested in how the totalitarian experiment was implemented and how it played out. She can take most readers’ disapproval for granted, something that was not always true when the Cold War was on. Soviet-style Communism is no longer a phenomenon about which there are two views. People do not look at the Gulag and say, “Well, they had to break some eggs.”
Applebaum’s work is post-Cold War in another respect, too. It was made possible by the opening, after 1989, of archives in Russia and former countries in the Eastern Bloc. This is where much of her material comes from, though she also had interviews with survivors of those years. Not everything is open to historians, of course, and probably much has been or will be destroyed before it can be examined. But enough has been learned to revise our understanding of the origins and conduct of the Cold War.
Two discoveries are especially striking. The first is that Stalin had no plans for an invasion of Western Europe. A war with the United States seems to have been something he dreaded. The Soviet Union was extraordinarily weak in 1945. In addition to the loss of infrastructure—Chris Bellamy reports, in his history of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, “Absolute War” (2007), that seventeen hundred towns, seventy thousand villages, twenty-five thousand schools, thirty-two thousand industrial plants, and sixty-five thousand kilometres of railroad track were destroyed—Soviet military and civilian deaths in the Great Patriotic War exceeded twenty-six million, almost fifteen per cent of the population.
The Soviet Union did climb back (as did the nations of Western Europe, whose infrastructures had in many cases been devastated almost as severely). But its leaders did not imagine overwhelming the West by force. The Soviet military threat was regularly exaggerated in the United States, sometimes by people who knew better. The Iron Curtain was not invisible: there was a posted and heavily patrolled strip running down the center of the continent. One did not wander into, or out of, the Eastern Bloc by accident. The whole point was to define a border: this is our side; that is your side. Maintaining a colonial population of some ninety million people was enough to keep the Soviet military and the Soviet economy fully occupied. In the end, in fact, it was too much.
The other revelation from the archives is that, as the historian Vojtech Mastny has put it, there was no double bookkeeping. Marxism-Leninism was not a cover story or an ideological fig leaf for a bunch of power-mad gangsters (though gangsters they were). It was the Soviet leadership’s world view—what they really believed.
That world view is one reason that there were no immediate plans to attack Western Europe. Soviet Marxism—that is, Marxist theory as it was interpreted and dogmatized by Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin—held that capitalist states will always go to war with one another, and these wars will be a danger to socialist states like the Soviet Union. This was exactly how Stalin understood the Second World War—as a fight between capitalists.
Stalin required a security buffer on his western borders and a large military, armed with nuclear weapons, because he believed that when the capitalist countries went to war again, as the theory said they would, they would attack the Soviet Union. He also believed, as taught by the theory, that a world revolution leading to universal socialism was inevitable: it was the direction in which history was headed. The Soviet Union should be opportunistic while it awaited this great consummation; but, sooner or later, history would do the work.
The rapid recovery of Western Europe after the war, the fact that the American economy did not collapse, and the general prosperity of the non-socialist developed world was a scandal to this world view. Stalin himself disliked travel; he rarely travelled inside the Soviet Union, and the first time he ever took a plane was when he flew to Iran, in 1943, to attend the Tehran Conference, with Roosevelt and Churchill. He regarded with suspicion any Soviet citizen who had been abroad, including as a prisoner of war. Many former prisoners of war were sent to the Gulag; thousands were executed. A major purpose of the Iron Curtain was therefore to prevent people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries from literally seeing what the standard of living in the West really was.
Applebaum’s account confirms something that has always seemed slightly incredible about Soviet propaganda and ideological indoctrination, which is how crude it all was. “Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of Imperialist warmongers” is the kind of slogan she reports. All regimes generate a certain amount of boosterish dogma like that, but, under Stalin, it was all like that.
As Applebaum points out, the Party tried to get rid of intellectuals and the professional classes, and always recruited among the undereducated and the underprivileged. There was less in their heads to be scrubbed away, less capacity for skepticism and dissent, and they were motivated by the perception that submission to Party doctrine offered them an upward path. “A glance at the sociological backgrounds of the Eastern European communist leadership in the nineteen-eighties reveals that many activists from modest backgrounds did eventually climb to the very top,” Applebaum says.
Still, many educated people submitted without promise of reward. “In a certain sense, this was the genius of Soviet totalitarianism,” Applebaum says. “The system created large groups of people who disliked the regime and knew the propaganda was false, but who felt nevertheless compelled by circumstances to go along with it.” Of course, “circumstances” included the prospect of a knock on the door. Imagining that knock was probably enough for most people to find the path of least resistance. Applebaum reports a story about two Hungarian sisters who lived in the same house. Each came, independently, to doubt the truth of what the regime was saying, but, thinking the other was still loyal, continued to repeat Stalinist slogans to her sister.
Applebaum concludes, from her research, that the power of Soviet propaganda to remake, or brainwash, people was overrated, and that the number of people who genuinely supported the system was consequently overestimated. The “new man”—Homo Sovieticus, as he was satirically known—proved elusive. “Human beings do not acquire ‘totalitarian personalities’ with such ease,” Applebaum says.
In this respect, maybe the concept of totalitarianism shouldn’t be revived, after all. Most of the early writers on totalitarianism, from Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt to Orwell and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., believed that totalitarianism had something to do with human nature, and that it rose out of the social and psychological conditions of modern life. “There is a Hitler, a Stalin in every breast,” Schlesinger wrote in “The Vital Center” (1949), and many writers echoed the thought. They worried that totalitarianism had history behind it, and that it might simply be the social organization of the future.
Schlesinger changed his mind. When “The Vital Center” was reprinted, in 1987, he said that he had abandoned “the mystical theory of totalitarianism popularized by George Orwell and Hannah Arendt. . . . Totalitarian states, far from representing, as I thought in 1949, a change of phase in social organization, are hardly more than Tartar courts equipped with modern technology.” “Iron Curtain” supports this revised interpretation. Eastern Europe was not fated to go Stalinist, any more than Germany was fated to become fascist. Nazism and Stalinism were dangerous but irrational, inefficient, and, finally, self-destructive political and economic systems. It’s not that they were “unnatural”; human beings are capable of being socialized in many ways. It’s that they were absurd. From a certain point of view, Stalinism boiled down to an attempt to make people become better Communists by locking up or killing the ones who wouldn’t. When the reign of terror finally lifted, life regressed toward the traditional mean.
One writer who resisted “the mystical theory of totalitarianism” in the early years of the Cold War was the sociologist David Riesman. He argued, against Arendt, whom he knew well, and others, that human beings are not so readily transformed as the theory of totalitarianism assumed. “The most striking conclusion to be drawn from the state of Germany today, from the stories of the refugees from behind the Iron Curtain, even from the present behavior of former concentration camp inmates,” he wrote in 1954, “is precisely how hard it is permanently to destroy most people psychologically.”
Riesman thought that even within successful totalitarian states there were forms of resistance practiced daily—not the heroic resistance of dissidents but the less noble modes of apathy, corruption, and crime. If Applebaum were to add one more chapter to this admirable and clearheaded book, it might be on bribery, nonfeasance, and the black market. Those were things that everyone knew about, and their mere existence was proof of the fallacies of the ideology and the failures of the system.
Could the United States have prevented the Stalinization of Eastern Europe? For more than fifty years, people who thought the answer was yes gave, as their reason, one word: Yalta. Yalta is where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held their final summit of the war, in February, 1945, and where, as two generations of critics have believed, Roosevelt handed Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe over to Stalin. Two excellent recent books on Yalta, using material from Soviet archives—S. M. Plokhy’s “Yalta: The Price of Peace” (Penguin) and Fraser J. Harbutt’s “Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads” (Cambridge)—make it clear that the issues at play in the negotiations were complicated, and that it was not simply Roosevelt’s naïveté and ill health (he died in April) that led to a divided Europe.
In any case, as Tony Judt succinctly put it in “Postwar” (2005), “Yalta actually mattered little.” Stalin had made it clear from the beginning of what Churchill called the Grand Alliance that he expected to be granted control over postwar Poland (and other areas named in his prewar agreement with Hitler), and by the time of Yalta his army was in possession of most of that country, with a handpicked group of Polish Communists installed in Warsaw. On the Western Front, in February, 1945, the Allies had just suffered terrible casualties in the Battle of the Bulge, and had not yet crossed the Rhine. The war in the Pacific (in which the Soviet Union was not yet involved) was still under way. Apart from withdrawing material and financial support for the Red Army, a risky move with uncertain consequences, the United States did not have much leverage. The Allied goal was, as it had always been, to destroy Nazi Germany, not to save Poland.
Roosevelt was primarily concerned at Yalta with securing the Soviet Union’s participation in the new United Nations, but he was enough of a realist to appreciate the Great Powers spheres-of-influence politics being practiced by Churchill and Stalin. When Great Powers divide up the world, they defer to each other’s national interests. Britain had an interest in restoring France to major-power status, in order to maintain a balance of power on the Continent; when Stalin, who despised the French because of their rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, conceded the British point, a free hand in Poland was, in effect, his compensation.
The United States had virtually no economic or strategic interest in Eastern Europe. Before the Second World War, two per cent of all United States exports went to Eastern Europe, 3.5 per cent of imports came from there, and 5.5 per cent of external American assets were situated there. The only serious pressure that Roosevelt felt had to do with the support of Polish-American voters, and, by the time of Yalta, the Presidential election was over.
What Churchill and Roosevelt did not foresee is what Applebaum has described: that the Soviet Union would not stop at installing friendly regimes in the countries on its borders but would embark on a totalitarian remake of the entire region, complete with ethnic cleansing. It’s not clear, though, that even Stalin foresaw the direction that events would take. All the evidence is that the Kremlin believed that the Communists would easily win open elections in the liberated countries. It was only when this proved to be a delusion that the Soviets began seriously to force the issue.
In any case, by 1945 there were not a lot of endgames possible. The time to make a stand for self-determination in Eastern Europe came and went much earlier, possibly even at the moment Britain entered into a military alliance with the Soviet Union, right after the German invasion. Without the Red Army, the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe by military means seemed virtually impossible, and, with the United States not yet in the war, the ultimate defeat of Britain seemed likely. Churchill, although he had always been a rabid anti-Bolshevik, felt that he had to treat Stalin as an equal and an ally. He knew what he was about. “If Hitler invaded Hell,” he said, “I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
But Stalin was in a bad place, too. He was unprepared for the invasion, having recently purged the Soviet military. If Britain and the United States, which began a generous program of lend-lease to keep the Red Army going, had made conditions about Eastern Europe, then, in 1941, when the Wehrmacht was bearing down on Moscow, the Iron Curtain might not have begun to descend four years later. But by 1945 it was too late, and the Devil came to Yalta, seeking his due.
Should the United States have intervened before 1989 to end the partition of Europe? In 1958, during a symposium held under the auspices of the C.I.A.-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom, in Paris, the French political theorist Raymond Aron argued that partition was a solution less dangerous than any other. What happened on one side of the wall stayed on that side of the wall. It had no effect on the other side. Few officials in the West really wanted to see the Iron Curtain lifted, as long as the Soviet Union existed. They did not want to go to war, in a nuclear age, on behalf of Polish strikers. At a minimum, the wall was a permanent advertisement for the carceral nature of Soviet Communism. It’s just that, as Applebaum has documented, the geopolitics, prudent and logical as they might have been, carried a human price. ♦
* Jan Masaryk was thrown out of a window of the Czernin Palace, not the Prague Castle, as originally stated.
