So they were very interested in self-organized groups. From the earliest days of the Soviet Union, Soviet representatives in the region were very interested in what we now call civil society. You also learn about some of their obsessions, some of the things they were concerned about. They believed very much in propaganda, in the power of propaganda and they believed that if they just could reach the masses by what was then the most efficient means possible, namely the radio, then they would be able to convince them and then they would be able to take and hold power. For example, everywhere that the Red Army went, one of the first things they did was take over the radio station. You also see which kind of institutions the Soviet Union was most interested in. Of course we've always known that he prepared and recruited, and organized communist parties from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution onwards. Most notably in Poland he begins recruiting policemen from the year 1939. He had for example prepared police forces, secret police forces for each of the countries before he arrived in those countries.
One is how well prepared Stalin was before he got there. What can be learned from the history of the Soviet influence in Eastern Europe? What you learn from studying the period is several things. In the preface, you state that one of the purposes of the book it is to study the history of totalitarian countries and the methods employed by dictators to suppress populations. Germany obviously was Nazi Germany, Hungary had been a country somewhat in-between, a sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy ally of Hitler, and of course Poland was an ally and very actively So therefore there were three countries with different recent histories and what interested me was the fact that despite those cultural differences, despite the linguistic differences, despite the recent political history, by about the year 1950 if you'd looked in at this region from the outside, they would have all appeared very similar. What made you choose them in particular?I chose those three precisely because they are so different and they just had extremely different experiences of war. Your book concentrates on three countries - East Germany, Hungary, and Poland. In a long-awaited history due to be published this week, journalist and author Anne Applebaum draws on firsthand accounts and previously unpublished archival material to describe how the Kremlin established its hegemony over Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. The book, titled Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56, explores the gutting of local institutions and the murders, terror campaigns, and tactical maneuvering that allowed Moscow to establish a system of control that would last for decades to come. I spoke with, Applebaum, whose previous book, a history of the Soviet Gulag, won the Pulitzer Prize. Soviet-built tanks wheel into action in a smoke-filled Budapest street during Hungary's rebellion against communist satellite government in October of 1956.