From 1945 to 1953, the Soviet Union radically transformed an entire region, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, from the heart of the European continent to its southern and eastern periphery. However, in this book, I will focus on Central Europe. I will of course mention Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, but I will particularly focus on Hungary, Poland, and East Germany. I chose these three countries not because they were similar to each other, but because they were so different.

"Iron Curtain" describes how the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created, with the impetus of Stalin and his secret police, and how everyday life was shaped from the moment they were established. Drawing from recently opened Eastern European archives, interviews, and personal narratives translated for the first time, Anne Applebaum describes with chilling detail the dilemmas faced by millions of people trying to adapt to a way of life that challenged everything they believed in and took away everything they had acquired. The Soviet bloc ended up being a lost civilization, whose harshness, paranoia, peculiar ethics, and idiosyncratic aesthetics permeate these electrifying pages.