“Do not save me,” read the note that the Polish poet Aleksander Wat left by his Paris bedside in 1967, after taking the overdose of sleeping pills that would kill him. The twentieth century was unkind to Wat. As a Jew, and as the onetime editor of the Marxist Literary Monthly, he was unlikely to flee westward when Nazi armies and their Soviet allies converged on his country in 1939. But he found no welcome either when he fled eastward to Lwów. He was arrested by the secret police and exiled with his family to Kazakhstan. Wat was a man of conscience. Although among the twentieth century’s victims, he would be racked with guilt over the part he had played as a perpetrator—as one who had made the intellectual world safe for Stalinism.

Wat had a sense of what made totalitarian ideologies hard to see through. This sense inspires historians even after the ideologies themselves have withered. A passage from his autobiography—“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”—serves Anne Applebaum as an epigraph for her new history of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Marci Shore has written much on Wat and his circle, and in her new book she describes being among the last to interview some of Wat’s contemporaries—and among the first to read that chilling suicide note, which was removed from Wat’s bedside and ordered sealed until the twenty-first century.

Applebaum and Shore are among the historians who have shown that there is much to know about communism in this century that was not obvious to everyone in the last. They are both polyglot and well- traveled writers of regional history, and both have been especially captivated by the variety, the indomitability, and the energy of Polish (and, in Shore’s case, of Polish-Jewish) culture. Both regard Soviet communism as more intertwined with the history of Nazism than most historians did before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Applebaum’s book is social history rather than narrative history. It does not survey Eastern Europe from the heights of the State Department, citing cables and monographs, and judging whether it was Roosevelt or Churchill who sold Poland out at Yalta or whether it was Truman or Stalin who started the cold war. Instead Applebaum provides us with an intimate and claustrophobic impression of how Stalinism functioned on the ground in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.

Stalin’s project to reshape Eastern Europe by force began in collaboration with Hitler. After signing a pact to divide up the region between them, both dictators invaded Poland in September 1939. Stalin’s defenders claim that he was cannily playing for time against a German invasion of the Soviet Union that he knew to be inevitable. Applebaum does not buy it. Had Stalin really suspected a double cross, he would not have sent so many German communists back to Hitler, prison, and death. In this period, the Soviets committed Nazi-style mass murders, most infamously the Katyń Forest massacre, which saw 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners of war executed in half a dozen far-flung spots. “The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were, for twenty-two months, real allies,” Applebaum writes. That period ended when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.