Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956. By Anne Applebaum. Allen Lane; 614 pages; £25. Doubleday; $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN THE spring of 1945 the Polish city of Lodz was swamped with refugees. Local women organised themselves to help. Opening a shelter at the city railway station, they called themselves the Women’s League. Five years later the league had been transformed. It had a central office in Warsaw, which controlled its regional offices, and its goals were to “raise the level of women’s social consciousness” and to mobilise them “to the most complete realisation of the goals of the Six-Year Plan”. It had become, in other words, the women’s section of the Polish Communist Party. All over central Europe fledgling elements of civil society—clubs, associations, schools and churches—were thus co-opted into new, Soviet-occupied communist states. How did this happen, and why did the Soviet Union’s attempt to impose totalitarianism on its new empire ultimately fail? These are the questions that lie at the core of Anne Applebaum’s illuminating new book.

Though from the outset, central Europeans suffered arbitrary expropriations and arrests, initially the Soviet authorities sought to create the semblance of national independence and political pluralism. Local communist parties ruled in notional coalitions. National symbols were reinstated. In Berlin, the future spymaster Markus Wolf hosted a radio programme entitled “You Ask, We Answer”, which as well as praising Russian communism, answered listeners’ queries on vegetable supplies and the reopening of the Berlin zoo.

The mask dropped with the first post-war elections. These were held, Ms Applebaum stresses, because central Europe’s “little Stalins” sincerely believed they would win. In the event, in Hungary’s national elections of November 1945, the communists took just 17% of the vote, and in January 1947 the Polish Peasants’ Party, led by a former member of General Wladyslaw Sikorksi’s government-in-exile, won a parliamentary election so thoroughly, despite violent intimidation, that the results had brazenly to be falsified. Nowhere were the real victors allowed to take power, and opposition leaders were subsequently arrested or fled into exile.

The solution to this, Moscow believed, was not less communism but more. Central Europeans, like Russians, could be moulded into Homo sovieticus: conformist, optimistic, hard-working and socially conscious. Across the block, schoolchildren, like their Russian counterparts before them, started learning ditties in praise of Stalin. In factories, workers competed to become Stakhanovite “shockworkers”. Writers and artists, lured home by promises of fat commissions and vast print runs, found themselves turning out unreadable novels and Socialist Realist murals.

But Stalinism contained the seeds of its own destruction. In a system that seeks to control everything, Ms Applebaum points out, any sort of spontaneity or individuality, however apolitical, becomes a form of protest. And spontaneity there was. In newly built steel towns, anxious officials reported, workers failed to attend the theatre after work, haunting instead pubs and underground brothels. Young people began sporting drainpipe trousers, ducktail quiffs, kipper ties and makarturki, named for the style of sunglasses worn by General Douglas MacArthur. In Germany, hundreds of thousands crossed from East to West, despite ever-tightening Soviet border controls. Everywhere, people told bitterly satirical jokes.

The cracks widened dramatically with Stalin’s death in March 1953. Within months, strikes broke out in several German cities, demands for better pay being underlined by attacks on party headquarters and Russian-language bookshops. Walter Ulbricht and his puppet government holed up in the offices of the Soviet ambassador, and Russian tanks, not East German police, fired at the demonstrators. Three years later a second shock (Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the 20th party congress, denouncing Stalin’s purges and personality cult) sparked the Hungarian uprising. It was crushed, but so too was the totalitarian dream.

Human beings, as Ms Applebaum rousingly concludes, do not acquire “totalitarian personalities” with ease. Even when they seem bewitched by the cult of the leader or of the party, appearances can deceive, she writes. When it seems as if they buy into the most absurd propaganda—marching in parades, chanting slogans, singing that the party is always right—the spell can suddenly, unexpectedly, dramatically be broken.

Anne Applebaum will be discussing "Iron Curtain" as part of The Economist's "Books of the Year Festival" at Southbank Centre in London on December 8th 2012. Use the offer code ‘economist’ to get two tickets for the price of one.

