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Bettie's Books
A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956
![Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 [Hardcover] [2012] (Author) Anne Applebaum -](http://booklikes.com/photo/max/200/300/upload/books/51/34/9933fc7492aad7c1d1a48b73a785fb6c.jpg)
bookshelves: fraudio, lifestyles-deathstyles, nonfiction, spring-2014, published-2012, cold-war, slavic, tbr-busting-2014, totalitarian, military-maneuvers, newtome-author, history, bullies, casual-violence, gangsters, recreational-homicide, rid-the-world-of-tyrants
Read from March 02 to 04, 2014
rosado mp3Description: At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.
Cassandra Campbell reads
I encounter this as a salute to Ukraine. 
"Just as I head into chp 2, this news bulletin comes in: The Russian military has given Ukrainian forces in Crimea until 03:00 GMT to surrender or "face storm", Ukraine defence sources have said. 16:56 3rd March 2014"“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”― Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays
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