Anne Applebaum, Author, "Iron Curtain"

this week on Q&A Pulitzer Prize winning author and Applebaum discusses her newest historical narrative titled Iron Curtain the crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 to 1956 and Appelbaum why do you open up with a quote from Winston Churchill I open with a quote from Churchill because Churchill defined this era with that I'm writing about probably without even meaning to he coined the expression the Iron Curtain and it was such a motive in such a and such a evocative description of what had happened between 1944 and 1946 when he gave the speech that that the quote comes from that I thought it I thought it was important to put that in the beginning of the book did you ever find out why he called the Iron Curtain there is actually a long and complicated story to it it's actually a theatrical term there was an Iron Curtain that theaters used to use they would put down the curtain to prevent an Iron Curtain to prevent fires in the theater so it was it was a term that kind of was kicking around in Victorian England as an Iron Curtain and actually was used by other people but it was it was Churchill who used it first in private communication with with his American counterparts and then later in that speech do you know why he was speaking in Fulton Missouri because it was it was doing doing a favor to Harry Truman who was who was that's where Truman was from well let's watch the just a slice of that speech so we can get a feeling for what it was like 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 yeah so why did you want to write about this I was in a way inspired by my first book this is in no way or my it wasn't my first book but my previous book which was a history of the gulag system and although this is in no way a sequel it it it represents a continuation of a set of thoughts I had after writing that book one of the things that I got interested in when writing about the gulag was the question of why people went along with it in other why do people go along with totalitarian regimes what's the mentality what are the institutional pressures why do camp guards do what they're told to do why why does it happen and I decided to write about this period which is the period right after World War two because it's the time when the Soviet Union was then at its it reached a kind of height there was a sort of apotheosis of Stalinism so Stalinism had was created throughout the 1920s and 30s and by it by night and that it was reinforced by the experience of the war and by 1945 it was a fully developed system with a political theory and an economic theory and a clear ideology and it was exactly at this moment when the Red Army marched into Central Europe and began imposing that system on the Central European states so you can see how from scratch what did what did the Soviets think their system was what did they think was important to do first and how did they try and carry it out where did they get the rights to march into Eastern Europe well they were they were the victors in the war Hitler had invaded Germany in 1941 and they were they fought back against the Germans and then they kept going to Berlin so defined Stalinism defined Stalinism Stalinism was a developed system as I say it was and it was a system of complete control that the Stalinist state believed that it could control everything it could control not only politics and not only economics but it could control social life it could control civic life it could control sports clubs and chess clubs in the Stalinist system there was no there were no no independent institutions of any and no no independent voices of any kind were allowed to speak all of the economy was under state control and all of society was a-there then there was a cultural aspect of Stalinism to the arts were were were under Stalinist control and there was also a cult of Stalin himself so the Stalin's portrait hung everywhere all of society was organized around his name and his and his image I have today I grew up in the small town in Indiana and one of the main streets in my neighborhood was Kossuth Street I know that's I learned sense and it's not the way you pronounce it but you talk about radio Kossuth in here we never knew what Kossuth was he was a Hungarian hero of 1848 actually of an ear of an earlier period and much later on radio Kossuth is is it's a this is this is a later part of my story was in 1956 was there free Hungarian radio and they adopted the name of a previous Hungarian liberating hero and they they applied it to that radio and that was that was the night in 1956 that was I would have to call it the anti-stalinist radio so in 1956 what was what were the suppose the circumstance Howry 56 is the is the end of the Stalinist period by 1956 Stalin has already dead he dies in 53 and after 53 people begin to want to reform his system and in 56 you had what the revival of what I've just described so if Stalinism was when Stalinist was brought into Eastern Europe if it was a attempt to put everything under state control 56 was really the Revenge of civil society when people began reorganizing themselves and reorganizing social life independently and spontaneously and among other things creating independent radio stations I you say in your book it took you six years to do this at least yes depends how you count with what what I really want you to do and take a little time back up and tell us what you went through where you went and what you were trying to find out and how you did this book well as I say my inspiration was the idea I wanted to explain how to Pellatt Arianism happens you know we we do know the story of the Cold War we we know that the documents we've seen the the archives that described relationships between first Roosevelt in Stalin and Churchill and then Truman we know the main events from our point of view we've read them we've written them what I wanted to do was show from a different angle from the ground up what did it feel like to be one of the people who who were subjected to this system and how did how did people make choices in that system and how did they react and how did they behave and so I started very systematically I went through archives in Warsaw in Berlin in Budapest I looked government archives I looked at party archives I looked at secret police archives all of which are now open some are easier to use than others and some countries give you better or worse access and some archives closed at irritating times and so on but basically these in this part of the world the archives are open and you can read them and I looked at specific institutions so I looked at I looked at the Hungarian film industry how did the Hungarian film industry which was one of the biggest and most powerful film industries in Europe before the war of the 1930s as we know because so many of its leaders ended up in this country during the war it was how did it become a social realist film industry it had a completely different background I looked at German painters Germany had a very vibrant expression and abstract abstract art movement in the 1920s and 30s which was destroyed by Hitler many painters had left the country they went abroad they came back to Berlin thinking they would be able to finally be able to paint as they wanted many of them were communist and many of them were on the Left and then discovered to their horror that actually they weren't going to be allowed to so how did they react what did they do some of them taught themselves to paint again they tried to paint in a in a social realist in a Stalinist way I looked at some economic questions in particular I was interested in small shops and retailing this is in some ways the hardest part of the economy to control traders and so I looked at the files of the Ministry of economics in in Germany and in Poland I looked at the secret police documents because I was looking for the origins of the secret place how was it created what who were the people who were the original secret police and where did they come from how were they trained I I went through all this I in addition to that I used Soviet documents some which had been published or had been made available in the 90s and weren't available anymore there's a wonderful collection in Warsaw and in in about 1991 or 92 the Polish military archive sent a researcher and a couple of Xerox machines to Moscow and they xeroxed all of the archives that have anything to do with the Red Army's liberation of Poland in 1944 and 45 and in particular it's in first encounters with the Polish resistance movement so it's all xeroxed you can read it in Warsaw and when III don't even know if those documents are accessible anymore in Moscow but you don't have to go and see them there so what so there was a there is a tremendous amount of material available in a way my problem was what not to use and what is it because in addition to the archives I spoke to people as well where do you live now I now live in Warsaw although I spend a lot of time in London as well how old are your kids my kids are 15 and 12 where do they live they live also some of the time and worse on some of the time in London and what does your husband do now my husband is the Polish foreign minister how did that happen well he wasn't the foreign minister when I met him he was a journalist which is what I was in 1989 which is when I met him he came to report on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe I met him then and we drove to Berlin on the on the November night when the Wall fell and spent the evening sitting on the wall chipping at it with a chisel I got married to him but a year later what did that mean at that time what did it feel like when you were the two of you were sitting there as that wall came down what was in November the 9th 1989 1989 um first of all well people have forgotten how much fun it was it was a really it was very exhilarating time in history but they've also forgotten how how nervous people were I remember sitting on the wall and we were there it was about 4 o'clock in the morning and everybody was awakened Berlin everything was open and we but there were a lot many thunders of people sitting on top of the Berlin Wall and the East German guards were still there because there was a wall and then there was no man's land on the eds and there was actually a second wall and they were standing in between the two walls and very nervous wearing riot gear and at 4 o'clock in the morning everybody's jumped drunk champagne and they've already sung the national anthem what do you do next so they started to rather drunkenly tease the guards so people started to jump off the wall from the west into the east and then the guards would rush over and throw people back over the wall and it wasn't entirely a satisfying moment I mean it was it was and I discovered many years later that actually as we were sitting there the East German Politburo was trying to decide what to do about these people who were sitting on the wall and should they start shooting so it could have all ended differently I'm gonna run some video of your husband who appeared on our Colin show when he was with the American Enterprise Institute his name is Radek Sikorski here he is Radek Sikorski has been defense minister for how long six weeks six weeks and prior to that you've been living in the States correct I was a scholar the American Enterprise Institute here in Washington for several years for three years I've Union the defense ministry before I was a deputy minister in the early 90s and I was Deputy Foreign Minister later on and here in Washington you're known as mr. and Appelbaum who is of course he are dead right earth but I'm proud to be married Island the op-ed writer first seven years ago uh-huh he looks so young it's does he look that young today after before men at work no it looks wonderful of course buddy so what does it mean that he's now the foreign minister of Poland what how does that figure end it all your interests here I it doesn't figure indirectly I mean he it's it's you know he I have a background of knowledge and sympathy for that region of course that I wouldn't have I don't think it's he doesn't influence me in a direct way he's not sitting with me and the archives while I'm looking up the you know the what happened to the Hungarian film directors in 1947 and he's not he doesn't he would be too busy to even help me write my books but I think knowing that region and having lived in it and having this now 20 year long connection with it gives me some empathy or some interest in what happened there what are the residuals from world war 2 and the Iron Curtain period today in Europe and Eastern Europe anything well it's interesting one of the things that's happened since 1989 is the region that we used to call Eastern Europe has become very differentiated it's no longer these countries no longer even have much in common with one another except for the common memory of communist occupation you know Poland is as different from Bulgaria and Albania as Greece is from Finland I mean they're they're they're Europe is now really divided in different ways it's changed quite a lot I would say there are few elements though of the of the Communist past that you can see in post-communist countries there's very sometimes there's a paranoid element in politics that comes from just the legacy of people being spied on and people having lived in an oppressive system they they're they're more paranoid about secret deals being done behind their backs and so on because secret deals were done behind their backs in a way that's understandable and there's a there's an anxiety about being left behind or left out by the West and there boy who is keen to be inside the Western camp so there's there's some there's some the memory the past continues to play out but it's but it but in truth these countries are more different from one another than they are similar you chose three of how many eight countries are behind the anchor sort of depends how you count but yes but and what were the three I chose Poland Hungary and East Germany and why those three I chosen because they were different because they had both different historical backgrounds they had belonged to different empires in the 19th century they had different political traditions and because they mostly because they had very very different experiences of the war Germany was of course Nazi Germany Poland had resisted very strongly the nots has had one of the largest resistances resistance movements in Europe and the Hungarians were somewhere in between they were reluctant collaborators with the Nazis at some points but they also had some elements of resistance so I was interested in having had the very different experiences of the previous five years how did they now react to the to the Soviet invasion and to the subsequent process of Soviet ization how would you define the situation in each of those countries today their lifestyle the economy the openness the democracy all that well all three of them are democracies East Germany is of course not East Germany anymore it doesn't exist it's part of Germany and so it's indistinguishable now in its legal system and in its economic system from West Germany East Germany is still much poorer than West Germany in some ways poorer than Poland which has as a country has more recovered more vigorously than the eastern part of Germany Poland is a very vibrant democracy maybe even too vibrant annoyingly vibrant but it's and it has a very it now plays a very important and central role in in Europe it's a member of the EU it's a member of NATO it's really the lits the largest of the former East European countries and so it has a perhaps a larger role in that region than than anybody else hungry is also still a democracy and it's also a liberal capitalist state it's a less happy place it's been very badly governed in the last 20 years extraordinarily badly governed actually and it's still in many ways hat there are many Hungarian institutions that haven't been reformed very much since since 1989 and it now has there's a there's a unattractive far-right in Hungary there's a there's an unattractive left as well it's not a it's it's it's a less happy and less stable state but as I say it's still a democracy and it's still a it's still a very open society at what point in your research did you say I I didn't know that Oh constantly I was constantly running into it I wanted one of the things that happens when you read archives and when you read Communist Party are you discover that behind closed doors that the communist officials are much more open than they are in public so they're always saying things very surprising things to one another they actually understand their societies fairly well they're driven by ideology and they believe in their ideology which is an important point we often now tend to dismiss that oh they were just mouthing these slogans no they weren't mouthing then they believed the proletarian revolution was coming and that you know if we just do the right things and press the right buttons we will be able to create it and they're and they're constantly surprised by what goes wrong you know it's supposed to be happening this way the peasants and workers are supposed to be supporting us and they should vote for us in these elections but they don't why what's wrong well they argue about it we need more ideology or we need more of this or we need more of that and they discover that the factories aren't producing as much as they're supposed to be why not well you know maybe we needed differences and they're there they're always looking for ways in it but they have the statistics they have the evidence they know what's gone wrong and they can't ever figure out how to fix it and this happens over and over and over again and that's in a way the most surprising thing how did the leaders live in those three countries compared to the proletariat the leaders lived they lived in very isolated communities they lived in villas they were cut off from the rest of society in this period in particular they had access to privileges that may not seem so extraordinary now to us but at that time were they had they had indoor plumbing and they had access to all kinds of food but at a time when there were great shortages so the leaders were very isolated very protected often surrounded by servants maids and chauffeurs who were employees of the state who were employees of the of the interior ministry so they were they were protected at all sides and all times and they were often very nervous they were nervous about making public appearances they had a lot of bodyguards they were they were anxious how did that track with their idea that everybody should be equal it's an interesting question I mean you know all the pigs are equal and some are more equal than others there was this is this is one of the things that developed in the course of the revolution I mean they thought it says we are working hard on best if they were to jazz to justify it they would have said we are working hard on behalf of the state we are the avant-garde of the proletariat we will lead the proletariat into a full state of communism we aren't there yet and until we've reached the full stage of communism we have to have these temporary inequalities that that would have been the the justification I mean that and that's what they would have said what actually went through their heads one one doesn't really know how'd you do with translation how much of you did you do yourself I speak polish and read polish fluently and I speak and read Russian fluently so that I had those two languages with German I have some extremely weak German that I with both German and Hungarian I had translators in both cases people who were more than translators both of the more journalists there were people who had worked and both had worked in archives before and had had done try a lot of different kinds of translation and I literally physically went round with them so we would go with my translator to the Bundestag he which is the main German federal archive sit in the back open the dog documents and she would start whispering in my ear and everybody in the Bundestag would turn her go we would have to be try and be even quieter but we I simply talked my way through through some of these things we read books together we spent a lot of time together me and these two translators and they of course translated interviews for me and so on but I thought that was how I dealt with with with that problem I felt it was important to do these countries even though I didn't have all the languages because one of the reasons there are so few books like mine is because historians feel awkward about using translators and so you don't ever get regional portraits and there are many wonderful books about Poland in this period Hungary in this period East Germany in this period written both in those languages and in English but there are very few that try and do a wider range and I felt what I wanted to do is establish patterns what was happening at in different countries at different times and I felt that I could only do that but I do in several countries you mentioned earlier about the Russian archives being only open for a short time why did they open the archives and who shot him the archives were opened in the 90s in a period when the Russians were in the wake of glass no stand in the wake of the end of the Soviet Union there was a there was a move a movement in Russia really to make to end secrecy and to discuss the past openly and this was actually an authentic movement it came from the ground up and people at the top supported it and and sympathized with it and the archives began to open in the 90s and were in some ways extraordinarily accessible and archivists began working with Western scholars are there many instances of that I did begin to have the impression I worked a lot in Russia towards the end of the 90s and I began to have the impression that the one of the other reasons why they were open was because the Russians were so preoccupied with other things at that time that they didn't really care and people often said to me how is a young American could you youngish American how could American woman how could you be wandering around those archives did anybody stopping as was no yeah I think the attitude was she wants to go and look at some old documents you know so what we're busy performing our economy and coping with massive change what happened in 2000 Boutin became president of russia and he had a much more instrumental idea of what history was and what it was for and he repo luta sized history and he began to become much more conscious over what history was told and how it was being told and he and and this is what this always trickles down became more wary of what archives were open and who had access to what information I should add that they aren't totally closed and you can still work in them it's some particular ones have become difficult particularly the military archives what what's the difference I mean you know what George W Bush came in the presidency he made it more difficult to get the archives pushed off time when you could get access to his father's and others Bill Clinton's archives and all that what's the difference between that attitude and what you have over in these countries is it a matter of degree or do we really have a differen attitude about I mean we you know we we believe that in principle it should all be open and then we argue around the edges about what's still classified and how long for it should it be classified and when will historians have access to it the Soviet Union until you know until 1991 assumed that all of it was closed and nobody would ever have access and what one worries about Putin is that we're returning to that kind of attitude so not just you know let's wait a little bit longer until everybody's dead and then then you can talk about it but nobody is ever going to have access to this it's a secret you know history is a secret and and the truth doesn't ever get out why do we even keep it then why I mean why do they even keep it if they're never gonna let it out because they find it interesting they I mean the number of you know the KGB writes its own books it writes its own histories and it and it or Road I should say it's not the KGB anymore but wrote its own histories and its own descriptions and kept them and published them and kept them inside their building they're interested in their own history how do we do in the world with openness when it comes to archives the the u.s. is actually good at mini us is better than many European countries and generally speaking US archives are easy to use I mean the CIA archives are harder to use and I would actually argue they could be more open particularly older ones okay you don't want to show from the last 20 years but I know people who've had trouble having access to CIA acquires for people who for stories from the 40s and 50s and why you know I think that that could all be done but the u.s. the the National Archive is a is easy I actually haven't worked in it I've never worked in American archives but from friends who've worked there I know that it's not hard to use go back to where you started this book in 1944 and goes to 1956 how did the Soviets take over Eastern Europe but what was there but what did they use you mentioned a lot of stuff earlier but give us some examples specifically there were really three or four depending how you count it institutions that they considered important so if you if you look at the world 1945 Stalin did not have a plan he did not have a 10-point plan we're going to do this this and this and then these will be Soviet satellites he was an opportunist and a tactician and what he had was a conviction that sooner or later these will be communist countries because Marx marxist-leninist ideology says so it says that there will be international revolutions and the Soviet Union will bring the International Revolution to these countries and so he had a conviction that it would happen but not a lot of certainty about when and he was still nervous of how the West might react but what he did to make sure that he had enough influence in these credit was that he set up it I would let's all choose three institutions in particular that he thought were important number one was the secret police he created in all of these countries that the Red Army in conjunction with the NKVD which is what the KGB was called then created secret police forces speaking the local languages sometimes from people coming from the Soviet Union sometimes from natives and began training them in NKVD methods and they began doing that right away in Poland they do it they begin in 1939 which is when they've invaded eastern Poland in 1939 and they begin creating a Polish secret police force then and they import those people back into the country in 1944 when they when they begin fighting the Germans beating chasing the Germans out of Poland that's number one in actions before and that institution is then used in turn to target people so the Soviet Union does not use mass violence in this period you don't see mass murder actually you what they begin to do is they look for potential opponents and this can be church leaders can be resistance leaders the the first encounter is between the Red Army and the Polish resistance army which is called the Home Army are are very violent in particular the Home Army expected to collaborate with the Red Army in the fight against fascism and instead what happened was the Red Army arrested them disarmed them and sent them east to labor camps and this is may sound paradoxical but it was because they they they they planned from the beginning to eliminate or or suppress the leadership of these countries potential leaders people who might be post-war leaders and this was of course the Home Army the second institution that's that's in a way they set up the repressive organization organization they were obsessed with was the radio and they were interested in radio as opposed to newspapers or other forms of media because they thought of the radio as the most effective means of reaching the masses you know reaching the peasants and reaching the workers reaching the proletariat no television at the time there were no television at the time not much television anywhere at the time in 1945 the television that they get later the television service eventually serves a similar function but in 1945 it's the radio and they it everywhere they go one of the first things they do is either takeover or create new radio stations in in in East Berlin and not East Berlin in the central Berlin they occupy the the Nazi radio station immediately on the first day as soon as they get there they protect it from harm and some of the very first East German communists who then who spent the war in Moscow and whoever then flown in to Berlin are sent to work on the radio station that's how important they consider it to be in Poland they create a radio from scratch all radio equipment has been destroyed in Poland during the war and they create it from scratch and the reason is they believe that they believe the other thing that shows is they believe in the efficacy of their own propaganda you know once we begin to explain to people what we're doing and what we want they will go along with us so the radio is going to be the means by which to do that so they they care enormous ly about about target this this the secret police organs the radio and the third element which is maybe surprising is the other thing they do very early before they do they sort of eliminate political opposition and before they fully nationalize the economy they begin to target what we would call organizations of civil society so youth groups youth groups in particular other kinds of self-organized women's groups women's charitable organizations charities church organizations these these are the groups they immediately want to put under state control they don't want any independent independent institutions or associations of any kind to come into existence let me ask you about the YMCA and Poland what did what happened to that YMCA they did have a building in Warsaw it was one of the few buildings just survived more or less some of the war and very soon after the war people began moving into it the ymc had some had some resources from it's an international organization it had resources from outside and was able to do things like bring in clothing but you know sent from the West and and to feed people to set up their soup kitchens and it also very quickly became because of a shipment of jazz records that arrived at the YMCA it became a kind of center of social life in Warsaw and it was the place you went to go to parties in 1947 1948 Warsaw I would you should imagine a city in which everything is rubble and there's practically nothing standing and the YMCA is a little island of jazz music and the YMCA and this this poses such a threat and such a problem to the at the very highest levels the communist leaders write to one another angry letters we must do something about the YMCA we must destroy the YMCA and actually eventually they do they shut it down they they they closed it up in a very tragic moment the communist youth group is sent in to smash the jazz records because it's seen as anything that's an island of self organized or spontaneous organization is seen as a potential threat to the regime at one point you mentioned John Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso but role did they play and who were they by the way in case somebody doesn't know Sartre was a you know probably the preeminent philosopher or French philosopher of the of the post-war period Pablo Picasso was one of the great modernist painters both of them were at one time or not for part of their lives were either communists or communist sympathizers they're communists because they were Communist Party members and both of them were seen and as a and as a kind of justification if if even people like Picasso and Sartre or communists then it's okay for intellectuals in Poland are hungry to be communists too they sort of they provided some intellectual ballast for the regime Picasso actually came to Warsaw he came to a kind of cultural Congress he painted a he was taken to see a new apartment block that was being built in the city this was kind of homes for the workers project which he was shown as a sign of communist progressive architecture and he painted a picture he did a kind of sketch on the wall of one of these new apartments and which later became a mini tourist attraction there was a there was a couple that was given that apartment to live in and they became annoyed by the number of people who would knock on their door and say they would like to see the picasso sketch on the wall so they painted it over if you were going to send people to a number of places today over in Eastern Europe that would somehow reflect what happened in those years where would you send them I probably I would certainly send them to Warsaw if you if you walk around Warsaw you have you can walk around Warsaw and you can do a kind of visual archaeology you can see what was built when and there are a number of very prominent Stalinist buildings in the center of Warsaw including something called the Palace of Culture which is a sort of kind of ziggurats skyscraper built in the kind of high Stalinist architectural style and you get a very good idea there of what that period was like or at least aesthetically what it was like he's speaking of earlier and we've talked about it before in the gulag and all the Jews of Europe how many Jews have moved back in to either eastern Germany or Poland or hungry I am NOT going to remember off the top of my head the numbers you probably have them somewhere right there in the book actually don't but but my reason I ask that is it whether or not anybody any of the Jews have moved back in yes many many thousands move back many thousands have survived remember that many people were in hiding they were in disguise they survived the war more survived in Hungary than I think is generally known particularly in the city of Budapest because the attack on the Hungarian Jews happened late in the war when Hungary's government became with effectively the Nazis took over Hungary at the end and that that was when the Holocaust began in Hungary's and actually a large community of Jews survived in Budapest it's in the in a couple of hundred thousands which is a significant figure at that time given the population of the city in Poland they survived in all kinds of ways many people survived by going to the Soviet Union by coming abroad and many people come home and they come home to find what's left to see what what kind of lives they've made and it's one very sad and moving our Chi Ville document says many come home just to see the cemeteries and then leave because they don't want to live there anymore but Jews do come back some try and make new lives there some joined the communist parties the Communist Party has an attraction for actually not just Jews but for anybody who's anybody who experienced the devastation of the war and the shattering of all all ethics and all morality that that war brought many people did see in communism a kind of alternative you know maybe maybe this new system will work at a liberal democracy has failed the West did not come to our aid capitalism was a disaster maybe there is some alternative here and there was a period very brief period when some people they were listening to the radio station and they were attracted to it and it was particularly attractive for you know for Jews who really had nothing else and who'd been excluded from all kinds of politics not only during the war but in some cases before so they come back some make their way and some some immediately you know while some it's a it's a strange and it's a hard story to tell because some join the Communist Party and some immediately come into conflict with the Communist Party because a lot of them are small traders or small merchants and they're they're subject to the net zatia nand takeover of this period and they and and begin to leave and that their their then begin to be large groups begin to leave for israel right in the in the in the late 1940s some with the it's a complicated story but some leave with the aid of those countries and they're actually they're actually a couple of moments when both the poles and the hungarians help train jews who are going to go and fight for independence in palestine - the irritation of the british you write about at one point the word the two words mickey and mouse come up in your book what's that about because we have some i some entertainment here in a moment I was I was describing the origins of a famous song there's a song called the song of the party and it basically the lyrics go the party the party the party is always right that's more or less and I was described this and while I I went to look on the internet for somebody's singing this song so that I could hear it and I found a number of parodies including a Mickey Mouse parody Mickey Mouse singing it this is it this became a song that lay in later years in the last twenty years people have made fun of course what interested me about it is okay you can make fun of it now you can do Mickey Mouse parodies of it now but people were seeing it thirty years ago in Berlin or forty years ago in Berlin and I began to ask the question why were they singing it what did they think when they were singing it and this was it this was the introduction to my chapter on what I describe is reluctant collaborations people who go along with things without necessarily believing in them it's in German and here's some of the language here she gave us everything Sun and when always generous wherever she was there was life we are what we are because of her she never abandoned us even in a frozen world we were warmed the party the parties she is always right they really believe that it's hard to know what people believe they they some would like to believe it or would hope to believe it some people felt they had to believe it and and and some people thought it was okay to sing it if you didn't believe it because it was a minor sacrifice to make in exchange for keeping your job your house and and keeping your children in school we found this on YouTube it's not labeled very well so we don't know where it comes from but it it makes the point at it's sung by a man named Ernst Bush who was born in 1900 and died in 1980 at age 80 who is a German East German Sandra East German let's let's watch it's only a minute see Hans cholesky given some untoned could see guides penny cozy bar hard asleep and Vasquez ain't seen Pierre to see see Hans Nimal Tolleson for of debate moon suave are one should steam autonomous and one strike to make tiga are deeper dive deeper time Teja a Moorish look at no sense live and abide in their camp feel the space again I was leaning some guys fix install English waist-deep I keep anti people who are some of the people we saw besides besides Castro and Khrushchev and Gorbachev it was going fast but I saw hot Erich Honecker who was the last leader of East Germany who in the period I write about was the youth leader he was the head of the theater free was called the free German youth the Communist Youth movement I saw Walter Ulbricht who was the East German the sort of head of the party and who was the effect of the little Stalin of of East Germany in this period and he was standing next to William peak who was president of East Germany I saw Mao I saw Castro Stalin what what started to break up the control of the Soviets in Eastern Europe in a way the it's very important to look at this period when you ask that question because in a way the Soviet Union and the the Soviet system in Eastern Europe contained the seeds of its own destruction many of the problems that we saw at the end begin at the very beginning I spoke already about the attempt to control all institutions and control all parts of the economy and political life in social life one of the problem is that when you do that when you try to control everything then you create opposition and potential dissidents everywhere if you tell all artists they have to paint the same way and one artist says no I don't want to paint that way when I paint some way another way you have just made him into a political dissident is somebody who might otherwise have been a political if you tell Boy Scout troops that they're not allowed to be Boy Scouts anymore now they have to be Young Pioneers which is what happened in a number of countries and a young and one group decides they don't like that and so they form a secret underground Boy Scout Troop which which absolutely happened underground scouts were very important in Poland all through the calm his period you have just created another group of political opponents from other why apolitical teenagers so the system created pockets of resistance and opposition all over that the other the other just as important the other element of the system you can see from the beginning is the the gap that begins to grow between the ideology and the reality you know so that the communist leaders continue to say this is what things are going to be like this is what it should be happening you know we've read Marxist doctrine this is how things will develop this is how the economy will grow and it doesn't happen that way or it happens sort of but not really or there is some growth but the West is growing much faster and the the fact that the the system is never able to fulfill its promises means that by the end by 1989 even the people leading it don't believe it anymore the the loss of faith in the system which begins in in the 40s and and simply grows worse and worse over time means that there's nobody left to defend it by 1989 not even the Soviet leadership at the very highest levels was was really able to defend the system you know once once Gorbachev in in the late 80s began the conversation about history what's really wrong how was our system set up as soon as people didn't have to collaborate anymore and they didn't feel obligated to go along with the with the with what the party wanted and to sing the song and to keep chanting the party is always right then they stopped and they stopped very fast after the wall came down we went over and did a 30 hour special in East Germany and I just remember interviewing a man I believe his last name was Zimmermann who is one of the leipzig six one of those it started the revolution the silent revolution there outside of the Opera House he turns out to have been a member of the Stasi and what the word is ratted on his own family hmm you know he ended up moving and I'm not sure he's alive today what what kind of mentality is it when you I mean here's a guy that helped a revolution began I would go back to freedom but he was a member of the secret police and in East Germany this question of collaboration is incredibly complicated and it's more complicated than we in the West like to think and people very often work one thing or another they weren't only a collaborator there were some stipulated there were some collaborators and there were some real heroes of resistance but many people zigzagged through their lives they collaborated at times or they marched in the May Day Parade and then at other times they even even used telling jokes behind the party's back or agreeing to help somebody who might be pretty hide somebody who might be imprisoned people often did that you know they tried to find a path which they felt was moral and they felt was right and in a period when the state controls everything in everything this is very difficult and I find it it often helps to think about if you have children you know would you be willing to say I won't March in the May Day Parade I won't salute Comrade Stalin I won't do all these things if you know that it means that your child will be expelled from school and won't be able to study and won't have a future and it won't be educated these were these were really dramatic and radical choices that people made they they they they had they had to give up things that it would never occur to us we would have to give up in order to make a political point I mean obviously it's more drastic to become police informal although even then there were degrees there were people who thought right I'm going to inform a little bit and I won't really say anything important and I'll do it so that I can protect my wife who's ill it needs to get medicine from the hospital and if I do this then I'll get medicine for her and she won't die you know so so even then sometimes the choices were much more gray and more complicated than we now imagine sitting here in you know in a free society what's even though you say we're a free society what's the difference between all the favoritism that was played back then to the people of the party and what goes on in this town when you're in power and we had earmarks or whatever you pick your pick your moment where we dish I mean the people in power here dish out favors to people based on whether or not you follow the party it's a difference is well I mean the difference is there's no threat of violence behind it that's one difference you know if you don't vote for the Republican Party or the Democratic Party you don't go to jail and you're not you're not going to be arrested and your child will not be expelled from school so there's a there's a there's really a dramatic difference between the consequences people kinds of consequences in that and the the radical nature of choices that people had to make the second difference is that our system is more or less open so we know this stuff goes on and we can have an argument about it and discuss it and then of course the communist system was entirely closed what the you know there was a high level of secrecy about all state affairs and all political affairs and you you didn't necessarily know what was going on are there any lessons in your book this may sound like a stretch for the people who live in China it's a communist government it's you know I don't know whether you call it a totalitarian system but certainly there's not the openness I mean what would you say to the leaders of China about their future well I would start by saying that the Chinese leaders have drawn lessons from this story the Chinese leaders know this this piece of history and of course there's a similar period in their own history in the the Maoist era in China and they also have studied very carefully the 80s and the the end of the Soviet Union and one of the decisions they've made based on studying this this piece of history is they have made contemporary China less totalitarian in the sense that there are they don't make people march in parades and they have abandoned ideology in the sense of making people repeat things they don't believe in and the pressures they put on people are in that sense less that it's it's a much more subtle system where you're allowed to say some things in some context but not others and you can put you can talk about corruption but you maybe can't criticize the party directly so there there are these unwritten rules of speech that that they've established it's a much more sophisticated than what I described in this book but I would say that what the Chinese will have to be careful of is the moment when the the basis of their legitimacy begins to deteriorate right now the regime argues that it has the right to stay in power because it's bringing fast growth and because it's a meritocratic system where the people at the top are all specially trained as people as growth Falls and as it becomes clear that some of those people at the top are in fact the children of important people and maybe they're not they're not such they're not so such wonderful meritocrat then I think yes the the regime will have to find other ways to make itself legitimate if it's not to begin to incur the kind of public discontent and protests that we saw in 1989 now your husband's a foreign minister of Poland you live in Warsaw part of the time and I guess London the other point what's the difference of the life of people who are Polish and live in Poland and the people in the United States when we're talking about freedom and openness and democracy and all that not nothing of significance I mean people here people the United States are wealthier than people in Poland is general as a general rule but in terms of civic freedom and political freedom I don't think there's any significant difference what about the social Besant the word I'm looking for but the overall network social network the how well they take care of people in Poland versus how well we take care of people in the United States you're not comparing apples with apples I mean I had depends in United States or depends where and which state and with who you're talking about and what you mean by that Poland is much smaller in homogeneous society I would say that in this country civil society is far more developed and far richer and the you know the range of charities and you know institutions that we have here that have developed over 200 years is is greater than all that Poland in that for that region does have a very very developed civil society one of the most impressive things that happened in 1989 was pretty much the next day people started organizing private kindergartens because everybody wanted their you know there were people who are ready to do stuff right away and volunteer organizations were created right away so Poland does have some of that but the you don't have the depth of it that you have here you do have state health care in Poland as you do everywhere in Europe and it's it varies it does it work and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't depends how sick you are and what your problem is and what part of the country you live in about the cost of living cause of living is lower much is significantly lower but again you know the salaries are lower too in the back yoke under acknowledgments you go down a list of people that supported you in this project and I asked that how does this happen the National Endowment for Humanities scape foundation the Smith Richardson foundation Chris DeMuth you single out who used to be with the American Enterprise Institute now at the Hudson Institute Paul Gregory of the Hoover Institution on and on how do how do you get support for something like this I I write letter as an ask I mean there's been a secret where they want out of it I mean I don't the National Endowment for the Humanities has a formal application process you fill it out you you apply you get references and you you ask for grant and I'm one of many hundreds of grantees how much time does that take you to get this kind of support depends some to some sometimes it takes a lot of time the image I mean I've described you my intense relationship with my two translators I couldn't have paid for them in their time with if I didn't have some support from her mother from a range of institutions as you say who would who would read this and would make you the happiest I mean I I want I want people who you know people who are interested in the history of Europe but don't know in the history of the world but who don't know anything about this region and I would be most happiest people who read it who don't know anything about Poland or Beck or about Russia I mean people who are new to the subject if they read it if teenagers read it if people in their 20s read it then I'll be I'll be happy what's the difference between being a Marxist Leninist and being a Stalinist well Marxist Leninist M is a is describes a philosophy and it's it's and it's a very complex and deep philosophy and being being a Stalinist implies something more political that's the Stalinist this applies to this period really you know a follower of Stalin Marxist Leninist the broader term and maybe Stalinist is the narrower term abridge NIP was a Marxist Leninist and he's after Stalin what's Italian fascism versus German fascias well they have they have similar roots actually I mentioned Italian fascism in the book because the word totalitarian is comes from Italian and it was a word first used by Mussolini and it was Mussolini who coined some of the best definitions of the word everything within the state nothing outside the state and that this is that that comes from Mussolini so that that was why it it it appears in this book I was introduced the book by speaking about totalitarianism what was it how do we understand it where does the idea come from what what are the intellectual origins of the word so what's next Oh many things I would quite like to write a book about 1989 actually what facet of it why it all fell apart I would also like to write a book about the Ukrainian famine which is another piece of forgotten history in that region hello India and tend to live in Europe why there's no end date it's indefinite and how often do you still write for The Washington Post every other week and what's the mission which what's the what do they want you to do in that column they see this they seem to want me to do whatever I want to do and what I usually want to do is provide some perspective on international and even American affairs from from a different view you know I live outside the United States I might see foreign policy I might see American policy from a different angle and I think that's what I can do on that page that that others maybe can't and your kids are going to do what you figured out any I want to follow their mom it's hard to go into want to go into journalism now it's not a good moment I often have people ask me about it and it's it's it's difficult there I don't know they're both bilingual they're both interested in history one seems very interested in science so he may go a different way the name of the book is Iron Curtain 1944 to 1956 the crushing of Eastern Europe our guest is an Applebaum and we thank you very much thank you so much for a DVD copy of this program call one eight seven seven six six to seven seven to six for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at QA or QA programs are also available as c-span podcasts

Channel: C-SPAN

Views: 32,489

Rating: 4.3883495 out of 5

Keywords: applebaum, C-SPAN, Q&A, Pulitzer Prize, author Anne Applebaum, 1944-1956, communism, totalitarianism, East Germany, Poland and Hungary, Cold War

Id: fRX821kzXvw

Length: 57min 41sec (3461 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2012