Iron Curtain Quotes

“Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“Totalitarian regimes, they declared, all had at least five things in common: a dominant ideology, a single ruling party, a secret police force prepared to use terror, a monopoly on information, and a planned economy. By those criteria, the Soviet and Nazi regimes were not the only totalitarian states. Others—Mao’s China, for example—qualified too.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“Although the definition of an 'enemy of the state' changed over time, the mechanisms to deal with these enemies were put in place right at the very beginning.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“the Polish Institute of National Memory estimates that there were some 5.5 million wartime deaths in the country, of which about 3 million were Jews. In total, some 20 percent of the Polish population, one in five people, did not survive.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“The loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, justice, the good of the people … Lies, by their very nature partial and ephemeral, are revealed as lies when confronted with language’s striving for truth. But here all the means of disclosure had been permanently confiscated by the police. —Aleksander Wat, My Century”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“But in every country occupied by the Red Army, the definition of “fascist” eventually grew broader, expanding to include not only Nazi collaborators but anybody whom the Soviet occupiers and their local allies disliked. In time, the word “fascist,” in true Orwellian fashion, was eventually used to describe antifascists who also happened to be anticommunists. And every time the definition was expanded, arrests followed.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“early development of the region’s secret police. Through both reading and conversations, I sought to understand how ordinary people learned to cope with the new regimes; how they collaborated, willingly or reluctantly; how and why they joined the party and other state institutions; how they resisted, actively or passively; how they came to make terrible choices that most of us in the West, nowadays, never have to face.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”3 Strictly defined, a totalitarian regime is one that bans all institutions apart from those it has officially approved. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.” —Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“Arendt’s “totalitarian personality,” the “completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“The East is also where the Nazis had most vigorously pursued the Holocaust, where they set up the vast majority of ghettoes, concentration camps, and killing fields. Snyder notes that Jews accounted for less than 1 percent of the German population when Hitler came to power in 1933, and many of those managed to flee. Hitler’s vision of a “Jew-free” Europe could only be realized when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic States, and eventually Hungary and the Balkans, which is where most of the Jews of Europe actually lived. Of the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the vast majority were from Eastern Europe. Most of the rest were taken to the region to be murdered. The scorn the Nazis held for all Eastern Europeans was closely related to their decision to take the Jews from all over Europe to the East for execution. There, in a land of subhumans, it was possible to do inhuman things.16”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“If the immediate postwar period had been characterized by violent attacks on the existing institutions of civil society, after 1948 the regimes [of Eastern Europe] began instead to create a new system of state-controlled schools and mass organizations which would envelop their citizens from the moment of birth. Once inside this totalitarian system, it was assumed, the citizens of of the communist states would never want or be able to leave it. They were meant to become, in the sarcastic phrasing of an old Soviet dissident, members of the species Homo sovieticus, Soviet man. Not only would Homo Sovieticus never oppose communism; he could never even conceive of opposing communism.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“were many reserve officers who had worked in civilian life”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“The glories of central planning were meanwhile conveyed through books such as Six Year Old Bronek and the Six Year Plan.10 The evils of capitalism were transmitted though tales like the story of Mister Twister, an American who visits Leningrad and is shocked to find a black man staying in his hotel – or through poems about American plans for war:    In crazy America    They dream of war    And the front lines are painted    On maps with human blood11”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“The incident illustrates the distinct absence of a communist sense of humor.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of Imperialist warmongers.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“To be successful, Soviet secret policemen thought that show trials needed a complex story line, a conspiracy involving many actors, and so Soviet advisers pushed their Eastern European colleagues to link the traitors of Prague, Budapest, Berlin, and Warsaw into one story. In order to do so, they needed a central figure, someone who had known some of the protagonists and who could plausibly, or semi-plausibly, be accused of recruiting all of them. Eventually they hit on a man who fit these requirements: a mildly eccentric Harvard graduate and American State Department official named Noel Field.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“But in every country occupied by the Red Army, the definition of 'fascist' eventually grew broader, expanding to include not only Nazi collaborators but anybody whom the Soviet occupiers and their local allies disliked. In time, the word 'fascist,' in true Orwellian fashion, was eventually used to describe antifascists who also happened to be anticommunists. And every time the definition was expanded, arrests followed. p.86”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“Some sang because they were afraid not to sing. But quite a few of them simply didn’t listen to the words or weren’t interested in them. Indeed, many of those who clapped at the leaders’ speeches, or who mouthed slogans at meetings, or who marched in May Day parades did so with a certain odd ambivalence.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“Since then, many have tried to describe what it feels like to endure the disintegration of one’s entire civilization, to watch the buildings and landscapes of one’s childhood collapse, to understand that the moral world of one’s parents and teachers no longer exists and that one’s respected national leaders have failed.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“In March 1947, he publicly condemned the abolition of religion in all schools, warning that, “promising freedom of religion while creating institutions of irreligiousness is the height of hypocrisy.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“From 1949 onward, any discussion of strike action was considered an “antidemocratic” crime against the state, and workers could be expelled from the party even for suggesting”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“This “success” had a political price, in Hungary as everywhere else. In practice, nationalization had very little effect on the daily lives of ordinary workers: they were paid the same wages, did the same work, had the same grievances. What difference did it make if their foremen worked for a capitalist or for the Ministry of Industry? Buoyed by consciousness of the rightness of his cause—he was an employee of “the people” after all—a state manager might even be more arrogant than a private owner. Instead of making the communist party more popular, nationalization often made workers more wary and even led in some places to strikes.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“Wolf’s answers rarely praised communism outright, and he didn’t use Marxist language. But almost all of them praised the Red Army or the Soviet system, both of which were favorably compared to their German counterparts. And all of them explicitly contained the promise that life, which had become unbearable under the Nazis and during the final days of the war, would now quickly improve.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“E Salomon Morel? No fim de contas, foi uma figura deste período apenas num sentido: como muita gente que atravessou os horrores da guerra e a confusão dos anos do pós-guerra, desempenhou diferentes papéis em diferentes narrativas nacionais em diferentes momentos. Foi uma vítima do holocausto, um criminoso comunista, um homem que perdeu toda a sua família às mãos dos nazis e um homem consumido por uma raiva sádica a alemães e polacos - uma raiva que pode ou não ter sido originada pela sua vitimização e pode ou não ter estado ligada ao seu comunismo.
Foi profundamente vingativo e profundamente violento. Foram-lhe atribuídas medalhas pelo Estado comunista polaco, foi processado pelo Estado polaco pós-comunista e toi detendido pelo Estado de Israel, embora não tivesse manifestado interesse em mudar-se para Israel senão meio século depois da guerra e mesmo isso só depois de ter começado a temer que o julgassem. A sua história, ao fim e ao cabo, nada prova sobre judeus ou polacos. Só prova como é difícil emitir juízos sobre as pessoas que viveram na parte mais estilhaçada da Europa durante as piores décadas do século XX.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“If they [the Russians] … take Berlin, will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future?”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

“Yet it is still not easy to understand for those who have not experienced it. Words like “vacuum” and “emptiness” when used about a national catastrophe such as an alien occupation are simply insufficient: they cannot convey the anger people felt at their prewar and wartime leaders, their failed political systems, their own “naïve” patriotism, and the wishful thinking of their parents and teachers. Widespread destruction—the loss of homes, families, schools—condemned millions of people to a kind of radical loneliness. Different parts of Eastern Europe experienced this collapse at different times and the experience was not everywhere identical. But whenever and however it came, national failure had profound effects, especially on young people, many of whom simply concluded that everything they had once thought true was false.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“Though the looting fever eventually subsided in Poland and elsewhere, it may well have helped build tolerance for the corruption and theft of public property that were so common later on.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956

“The scorn the Nazis held for all Eastern Europeans was closely related to their decision to take the Jews from all over Europe to the East for execution. There, in a land of subhumans, it was possible to do inhuman things.”
― Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956