Recommended for Writers: Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum

The finest dystopian fiction of this century, books such as 1984, We, and Darkness At Noon, were written by authors who had glimpsed a broken world in the mirror. They had lived it. Once–and this was perhaps the true horror–they had believed in it. The Twentieth Century was the Century of Dystopia Triumphant…. of Fascist and Communist empires that heralded themselves as earthly messiahs of a new Golden Age, while delivering mass murder, mass terror, mass famine and war.

The Nazi half of the horror that was the previous century is well known, but the scope of the Communist nightmare is still little felt, at a visceral level, in the same way. This is one reason that the work of authors like Anne Applebaum are so crucial. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, is an amazing and sobering portrayal of totalitarianism triumphant.

Anne Applebaum writes nonfiction more grippingly than many lesser writers manage to write fiction. She writes and argues history as all history should be (but seldom is) written and argued. Her reasoning is logical, her organization is lucid, her prose is luminous. She salts the meaty heaps of evidence with personal vignettes that bring the tragedies, absurdities and ambiguities of the period alive. The history of genocide and conquest must always be in danger of fading to gray under the immensity of its own statistical weight. And as Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Applebaum returns human faces to the cynical mass murdering oligarchs who crushed Eastern Europe, whether as conquering foreigners or collaborating locals, as amoral psychopaths or feverish true believers.

Dystopia has become a hot genre lately, but not every dystopia is portrayed as convincingly as Panem. Likewise, many near future or far future science fiction or paranormal/contemporary fantasy novels set out to portray the conquest of nations by a hostile, dystopian human or alien force, but many end up falling flat because the authors haven’t read any actual history.

How does a nation that arrives not only as a conqueror, but as a liberator, impose its rule…and its ideology? Force is present, but not always naked; what clothes does force wear? Here is a real history of how several different nations all learned to march in step to the same tune, and how that was accomplished.

But while we’re on the subject of historically real dystopias, I must also recommend Anne Applebaum’s other books on Communism, especially Gulag and Gulag Voices (an anthology of first hand accounts which she curated).

 

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