After the Second World War, millions of Eastern Europeans found themselves under Soviet rule. Their story is told in Iron Curtain, Pulitzer prize-winning author Anne Applebaum’s landmark study of the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism. Weaving together archival evidence and first-hand testimony, she shows how the communists extinguished democracy in Poland, Hungary and East Germany – crushing dissent, liquidating opponents and assuming an iron grip of the media, schools, police, justice system and every other part of civil society. Applebaum’s story is rooted in everyday life: how people learned to cope with the capricious cruelty of the authorities, and ways in which they collaborated, complied or resisted.