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Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 is an historical account of the institution of the communist regimes in Europe under the machinations of Stalin and his secret police. Anne Applebaum’s book charts out the events and discusses how Eastern Europe came under the reign of Communism. Summary of the Book After the Second World War, most of Eastern Europe came under the control of an unlikely force: the Soviet Union. An iron curtain descended upon the continent, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, it shrouded everything. Stalin found a large area of the continent under his purview, and communist influence was at an all-time high. 1945 signifies many things to the world at large. It signifies the extraordinary population movements in Europe, large groups of people were stranded after the fall of the Third Reich and the dissipation of the concentration camps. Roads, footpaths, trains and train tracks were constantly witnessing an unrecorded amount of footfalls. The population movement led to a disastrous realization: even the fall of Germany and Hitler hadn’t improved anything. People were still in the same state that they were ten years before. However, the sheer tenacity these people displayed led to another unexpected event. Women organized themselves, building a political league which stood atop the only political principle that they could embrace in their situation: communism. Stalin’s principles reached out to the masses and the Soviet Union had achieved what the Nazis had tried to and failed. They had achieved a victory of principles. The iron curtain didn’t merely descend on them, they needed it, and they drew it around themselves, allowing it to descend. In this book, Anne Applebaum discusses how these and other related events unfolded, and what led to the widespread popularity of communism in Eastern Europe. About Anne Applebaum Anne Applebaum is an American-Polish journalist and writer. She is known for her writing related to communism, the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe and for her books: Gulag: A History and Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe. Applebaum worked as an editor at The Spectator and was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. She won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for Gulag: A History. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 was chosen for the 2013 Cundill Prize and was one of the finalists for the 2012 National Book Award for Nonfiction.