Paperback. Pub Date :2012-10-04 Language: English Publisher: Penguin Books From Anne Applebaum. the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag. comes a major new work of historical and moral reckoning: the story of life behind the Iron Curtain. Once the Nazis were defeated in 1945. the people of Central and Eastern Europe expected to recover the lives they had led before 1939. Instead. they found themselves subjected to a tyranny that was in many ways as inhuman as the one which they had just escaped . This book explains how Communism was imposed on these previously free societies in the decade after the end of the Second World War. Applebaum describes. in calm but devastating detail. how political parties. the church. the media. young peoples organisations - the institutions of civil society on every level - were all quickly eviscerated. Ranging widely across new archival mater...